Digital hours are crowding out truly human interactions

Online and digital “reality” is rapidly crowding out the real deal.

The average teen spends roughly seven hours a day on screens — smartphones, tablets, computers, game consoles and TV. A similar scenario occurs with many adults in the workplace. It’s common for knowledge workers to spend the majority of their day face-to-screen rather than face-to-face.

The average office employee checks her or his email 30 times an hour. Among those with smartphones, most will use their device 1,500 times per week, consuming up to three hours of each day.

What we forfeit in exchange for digital interactions are “primary experiences.” These are happenings during which one’s entire sensory system engages directly with the real world — sight, sound, smell and touch are all in play.

When we sit with another person, are truly present and have a meaningful interaction, that’s a primary experience. Communicating on FaceTime, Skype or some other virtual conduit fails to replicate the impact of being face-to-face.

Online sharing is a more mechanical and impoverished form of communication. Absent the opportunity to be in the other person’s presence, it’s better than nothing but still well short of a primary experience.

The same holds true in our interactions with the natural world. When we hike in the woods, sit by the shore, walk in the rain or stare spellbound at a stunning sunset, we become fully engaged at a sensory level.

It is this engrossing and direct contact with nature and other human beings that helps form rich memories and creates the feeling of being fully alive. Why? Our species evolved through primary experiences, and that lineage spans hundreds of thousands of years. Screens have only been around a few decades.

Which means that, as a society, we are engaging in a massive and uncontrolled experiment, one that is altering our brains and behaviors in ways only now becoming apparent. So, let’s consider a few of those impacts.

Since 2000, the amount of non-screen playtime in children ages 8 to 17 has fallen almost 25%. For this same age group, time spent outside in unstructured play (as opposed to soccer, baseball, etc.) has shrunk markedly, averaging under five minutes a day.

What’s more, on weekdays less than a third of teens have a face-to-face conversation with a friend outside of school. Combined with a paucity of nature contact, these young people experience fewer real life interactions, which is where we learn empathy, social skills and the capacity to collaborate effectively.

And both teens and adults are suffering high rates of IT-induced attention deficit disorder. Multitasking is really multi-distracting.

There are clear benefits from information technology. Nonetheless, for many, it is rapidly becoming the organizing principle of their lives, rather than other people, real-time experiences and nature.

Humanistic psychologist Rollo May put it this way: “Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”

And by not experiencing it, we diminish the essence of what makes us human.