It may take a pandemic to end our addiction to ‘junk tech’
It will take more than a wake-up call to break our addiction to our smartphones. It will take a hurricane. New recognition of tech’s impact on our health may be such a storm.
Recent findings suggest that Britain is among the laziest nations in Europe as a result of its smartphone addiction. The news that more than half of us spend at least a third of our waking hours sitting down, with the average adult checking their phone 100 times a day, is especially troubling given the links between obesity and Covid-19.
In assessing Britain’s high obesity rate, much has been made of our taste for junk food, but we should pay far more attention to “junk tech”. I think of this as tech which has low intellectual and personal value and which is consumed like digital snacks and needs little or no preparation or cognitive effort. Smartphone games, social media apps, video sites – all are prime examples, and all contain features deliberately and cynically designed by developers to monopolise our attention. Their success has been a disaster for our minds and bodies.
One of the most significant impacts is on our sleep. Three years ago Netflix CEO Reed Hastings described sleep as his firm’s biggest competitor. As sinister as that is, the relationship between tech and slumber goes far deeper than Mr Hastings’s efforts to keep us watching all night. The artificial blue light pumped out by screens has been shown to interfere with our circadian rhythms, affect our sleep cycle and disrupt our hormones. This has been linked with diseases as serious as cancer, heart disease and obesity. An hour free of screen time before bed is not some “nice to have” extra, like a mug of Horlicks, it is vital for our well-being.
Another worry is over our posture. Craning our heads over a smartphone puts huge pressure on the neck and spine. One team of researchers last year found evidence in young people of horn-like growths of bone on the back of the skull normally seen in far older patients as a consequence of the slumping that comes with age. Slouching can cause not just pain in the neck and back but heartburn and other digestive problems. There are dangers when we walk and scroll as well. Numerous cities around the world have introduced “texting lanes” to keep people from bumping into each other.
Worse than walking into a lamppost is the effect that junk tech has had on our minds. The laziness derived from endless scrolling is mental as well as physical. Human beings are supposed to expend effort on cognitive function, not listlessly graze on rubbish.
Spending too long staring at our phones, and in particular the baleful impact of social media, has also been blamed for a torrent of mental health problems, particularly among young people. Interacting through screens does huge damage to our empathy, inhibiting our ability to read body language and wrecking our personal connections.
The tech giants know this. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates all limited their children’s access to screens. You wouldn’t eat a Big Mac if the CEO of Mcdonald’s revealed he wouldn’t feed one to his children, yet we do exactly that with junk tech. A global pandemic might be just what it takes for us to finally reevaluate our relationship with our phones.