Are we too attached to our smartphones?

The streets are full of confused, staggering figures with glazed eyes and hunched bodies – and it’s all thanks to smartphones. No wonder a new book asks...

These days, walking along a busy street is a troublesome business, a bit like being trapped in a zombie movie. Human beings who, just 10 years ago, would have been strolling merrily along, looking where they were going, now totter about at half speed, oblivious to their surroundings, their heads hanging down, their bodies hunched, their eyes glazed.

Thankfully, my own brain is not plugged into a mobile phone, so I am immune to the virus. I don’t use a mobile; I don’t even own one. This means that I am off the leash, still able to move around the streets freely, thinking my own thoughts, beyond the control of emails, phone calls, games, Twitter, texts, Facebook and all the other occupying forces.

How long will I be permitted to remain mobile-free? Already, it is hard to book a plane seat or even a theatre ticket without declaring your mobile number, and there are parts of London where you’re not allowed to park a car unless you call from your mobile.

This alarming book offers a creepy portrait of those in the most advanced reaches of the WWZ, or World Wide Zombiedom. In China, internet addiction is now officially labelled as the number one health threat to the teenage population. There are an estimated 24 million Chinese internet addicts, and 400 treatment centres. According to author Adam Alter, some teenage boys have even taken to wearing nappies so they won’t have to interrupt their gaming with visits to the loo. One particular addict played an internet game non-stop for 300 days, breaking only to sleep.

America does not lag far behind in electronic addiction. A student called Isaac played World Of Warcraft 20 hours a day for five weeks before collapsing. By that time, he had put on 60lb and, adds the author, his clothes were filthy.

Adam Alter is himself no stranger to internet addiction. As a boy he played something called Sign Of The Zodiac for four years. ‘The game only ended when I had to eat or sleep or attend class in the morning. And sometimes it didn’t even end then.’ Even now, he is not wholly cured. While he was supposed to be hard at work writing this book, he found a game called Lucky Larry’s Lobstermania and couldn’t bring himself to stop playing it for a full three hours.

Not long ago, he invested in an app that shows you how much time you spend on your phone. He guessed his total would add up to an hour a day, but it was in fact three hours, or 21 hours a week, and he discovered that he picked his phone up 40 times each day. In this, he is pretty well average: 80% of people check their phones at least once an hour and use them for two hours 48 minutes a day. In the end, this amounts to a quarter of their waking lives.

And the statistics keep coming, like snow on a windscreen. Forty per cent of the American population suffers from some form of internet-based addiction ‘whether to email, gaming or porn’, and 46% say they ‘couldn’t bear to live without their smartphones’. In 2000 the average human had an attention span of 12 seconds. By 2013, it had dropped to eight seconds. The average goldfish, on the other hand, has an attention span of nine seconds. If this is true, it can’t be long before the first goldfish wins Mastermind.

Quite how they come up with these statistics is never made clear. For instance, how can you tell if a goldfish is paying attention? And what exactly would it be paying attention to? I find it hard to believe that if you sat the average goldfish in front of, say, an episode of Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time (‘Well, we’ll come back to that in a moment if we may, but first I’d like to bring you in, Simon Schama...’) it would be all ears for more than a couple of seconds.

In the same way, virtually every page seems to carry a phrase such as ‘researchers have shown that…’ This is followed by the results of some faintly ludicrous experiment using a group of students and/or a group of mice, rats or kittens.

In one such experiment, four neuroscientists feed 25 people drops of water or fruit juice through tubes, monitoring their brains for varying degrees of satisfaction. In another, a group of psychologists asks students to walk into a crowded room wearing T-shirts featuring photos of Barry Manilow. But why? The book is so chock-a-block with these experiments that it soon becomes hard to remember what they prove – unless, of course, you happen to be a goldfish, in which case you’ll be able to remember the conclusions for at least a second longer than I can.

Some of these ‘researchers have

‘Our attention span is now eight seconds. The average goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds. It won’t be long till the first goldfish wins Mastermind’

shown…’ results seem pretty dodgy, to say the least. For instance, towards the end of the book, writing about how gaming might be used to serve rather than hinder mankind, Alter mentions a computer game called SnowWorld, in which players throw snowballs at penguins while listening to upbeat songs. ‘Researchers have shown,’ he writes, ‘that it reduces dental pain, pain suffered by children as well as adults, and the psychiatric trauma of survivors of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001.’

No further detail is offered, so we are presumably meant to take it as read that pretending to throw snowballs at penguins on a computer can somehow lessen the trauma of surviving the collapse of the Twin Towers. But can that really be so?

Alter’s central point is, of course, that internet addiction can be as extreme and destructive as any other form of addiction, and that it is increasing every year. Another of his experiments revealed the same pattern of brain activity in a teenager playing Warcraft as in a heroin addict injecting himself: in both instances, a rush of a chemical called dopamine is released. Willpower is clearly needed to combat the internet, but is willpower enough? Alter points out that there are thousands of people on the other side of each screen who are being employed solely to break down what little willpower you have left. It is their job to work out exactly how to lure you on to the next stage of the game, or to encourage you to place the next item in your shopping trolley. Even those few gadgets specifically designed to improve your life can end up sending it haywire. Every now and then I have thought of buying a wristband that shows you how many steps you have walked each day, and thus encourages you to take more exercise. But it turns out that even this can lead to addiction. A 10-year-old boy who was referred to an addiction clinic in Minneapolis was up all night running around his room, obsessed with boosting his mileage. A pregnant woman about to have a caesarean was found running on the spot in her hospital bathroom immediately before the operation, just to keep up her quota of steps.

‘Other runners blaze down airport corridors when their flights are cancelled, and persevere through debilitating illness and injury,’ adds Alter.

As a writer, Alter himself has an obsessive quality, drawing all sorts of things into the book that don’t really qualify as addictions, so that in the end all of human existence seems to be one great prolonged addiction. Take the binge-watching of box sets, for instance. ‘A Lithuanian psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik stumbled on the power of cliffhangers,’ begins one of his most ominous sentences.

He then goes on to demonstrate, at some length – and with a diagram, too – how to avoid cliffhangers by stopping watching five minutes before the end of each episode.

All in all, Irresistible is an interesting book, but, like so many of the characters in its case-studies, it just doesn’t know when to stop.