Staring at the screen of a computer, smartphone, or tablet connected to the internet — you may be doing it right now — is the main activity of most people in the United States, especially the youth. And it’s not good for us.
Over the past 10 years, the consequences of life on the internet and connected devices have become so profound that we can’t really see the bottom.
The internet, which didn’t exist when most of us were born, “has already become the central organ of contemporary life,” writes Jia Tolentino, a millennial staff writer at the New Yorker. In her book, Trick Mirror, she writes that the internet “has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times.”
Seven out of 10 people use some sort of social media, according to Pew Research Center. As recently as 2005, that number was 5 out of 100.
We’ve become addicts, and like tobacco companies a few decades ago, Big Tech has become something of a villain over the past few years — profiting off of our unhealthy addictions.
So companies such as Apple and Instagram have taken steps to curb the technology addiction they helped fuel. If you have an iPhone, odds are you’ve seen your weekly screen time report. It pops up on Sunday mornings, cheerily informing you whether your screen time is up or down. Instagram threw around the idea of hiding the endorphin-inducing like count on photos, and it allows you to check how much time you’ve spent on the app.
Not content with the efforts of social media giants themselves, one Republican senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, introduced a bill to ban features meant to be addictive and implement other curbs on Big Tech.
It’s quite a predicament: The internet and our devices are indispensable, and we’re trying to protect ourselves from our usage of them. Commentary magazine senior writer Christine Rosen recently noted that despite the internet’s auspicious promises, it has become not only more ominous but more challenging to control.
“Despite claims about creating a digital ‘public square’ and connecting the world,” she wrote, “social-media platforms over the past decade have instead created an often toxic, liminal space that continues to defy cultural, political, and regulatory efforts to tame it — all while remaining wildly popular with the users who spend so much of their time within their confines.”
Humans engineered the internet and these devices. Now, these inventions seem to be engineering us.
