PHONE ADDICT BRITAIN
It’s a national epidemic. Millions of us spend up to five hours a day gawping at screens, oblivious to everything else. And LIBBY PURVES says it’s turning us into zombies
Is this progress ... or a kind of imprisonment inside a little screen? The little ping of a tweet is such a distraction
BRITAIN wakes up and, ignoring shafts of sunshine and birdsong, gropes around the bedside for its phone or tablet and peers anxiously at the glimmering screen — which was also, of course, the last thing seen before sleep. Old-fashioned souls like me just check for emails and texts from family, friends and colleagues, and perhaps the news headlines — but that’s beginners’ stuff.
Real smartphone junkies, whether they’re 11 or 70 (it’s a weirdly cross-generational pursuit), tap into Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Buzzfeed, Instagram, chatrooms, messageboards, dating sites and 10,000 shopping opportunities.
Then it’s on to videos, from rows between cyclists and motorists to gardening or make-up tutorials, and a billion pictures of kittens, panda cubs and people falling over in amusing ways. And all without even getting out of bed.
Later, even if the worst happens and the signal fails, there are games to entertain you. Barristers between cases have been seen playing Candy Crush in the robing room; former Prime Minister David Cameron apparently preferred Angry Birds.
Yes, it’s convenient, but it’s not all good news. In the new world of hyper-connectivity, our phones can blank out the solid world and suck at our souls. Everywhere heads are bowed, eyes fixed on tiny screens, companions ignored, our surroundings unseen.
Ofcom, the communications regulator, warned last week that more than half of all our 50 million internet users say they think they are addicted to surfing the web.
Their statistics reveal that the average Briton now spends five hours a day online. That’s onethird of waking hours.
Huge numbers of those surveyed admitted neglecting housework, being late for work, and being so ‘hooked’ on phones that a quarter of them frequently walk into people in the street, or are crashed into by other ambulant surfers.
Is this progress? Or is it a kind of mental imprisonment, confining intelligence and attention inside a little screen?
In the real world, the summer blazes and streets bustle with interest. But heads down, eyes on the phone and immersed, we scuttle and collide.
The screen draws our restless attention, picks it up, drops it, leads it on. It prevents our mind from ever landing for longer than a butterfly, or even remembering what we are seeing.
We expect instant gratification and quick fixes. Studies suggest that if a website is slow to load, 32per cent of us abandon it after between one and five seconds; 11 per cent won’t wait even one second.
This endless screen time devalues the very act of reading, rendering us less able to digest long, more thoughtful prose, whether it be fiction or fact.
And the click-quick change of topic from frivolity to scaringly terrible world news rewards only the most flickering attention, which is something quite new in human development.
In fact, it all may be changing our brains. A 2012 study baldly stated that ‘internet addiction is associated with structural and functional changes in brain regions involving emotional processing, executive attention, decisionmaking and cognitive control’.
And it happens not just at desks or on laptops, but through instruments carried around all day, consulted constantly, issuing carefully calculated ‘pings’ and ‘bleeps’ as unignorable as a baby’s cry.
There’s also concern that the ability to look up everything instantly, from names and numbers to facts, is causing the vital function of memory to atrophy. One 26-year-old recently wrote that she has developed the forgetfulness of a 70-year-old.
Of course, out in the street, some people will be doing something productive, such as changing a meeting, consulting a map or checking a museum’s opening times. But there’s always the little ping and ting of a message or tweet to distract from the sensible moment and make you click through to a picture of a breakdancing otter or Orlando Bloom in the nude.
It’s common now to see friends round restaurant tables, or children sitting in the sunshine, not talking but each staring blankly into their own mobile phone. Sometimes, yes, they share a picture and connect that way, but often it’s clear that in any gathering the most important people are not actually present.
For children, their parents’ fixed attention on phones (you see it in every playground) is clearly dismaying; for companions in social situations, there’s a sense of being devalued, of not being quite as important as — well, just about anything else on the cybertwinkling planet.
And even users themselves feel a bit devalued as others’ fabulous, airbrushed, Instagrammed lives invade their own. Although, of course, the Instagrammers and Tweeters aren’t quite taking in the thing itself, just passing it on.
Even when the phone becomes a camera and takes a picture of food on a plate, or an amusing sign, the point is to send that sight out into the world on Instagram or Twitter, not to relish it properly yourself.
Grimmer still if the camera is used just for a selfie — the ultimate statement of egotism, that there can be nothing more remarkable in any place on Earth than the glorious fact of them being there, grinning or pouting.
Maybe part of the lure is that the devices, despite their demanding nature, seem neat, containable, biddable. The screen changes instantly at your will.
In contrast, real people are puzzling, unpredictable, complex, uncontrollable. So hunching over the phone can be a withdrawal, like a cat going under the bed.
The little screens promise the immensity of the worldwide web but also can be a comforting little world: with only the interest group you have chosen, or a reassuring, repetitive churn of ideas and attitudes of which you approve.
It may seem like a window on the world, but it’s a world you can censor, muting and de-friending those who disagree, clicking rapidly away from unwelcome sights, while also feeding snippets of malicious gossip without making you feel judged, and joining in Twitterstorms against common enemies that you would hardly dare in real life.
One can only hope that the recent Ofcom report might jolt us out of complacency and make us ask why our hand is so often curved around the familiar hard glassy shape (an average 85 times a day: far more, surely, than we hold hands with another living, breathing human).
Who knows, we may be brave enough to ask ourselves why we are scared of being off-line and phoneless even for an hour.
It is such a hard habit to break that firms are offering ‘digital detox’ breaks. You pay a travel company to ‘help you disconnect’, either by formally removing your gadgets as you arrive at your destination, or by joining a £745 ‘retreat’ for a weekend.
How depressingly decadent is that? Spending money on a sort of psychiatric intervention — like an addict in rehab — just because you don’t trust yourself to give up jabbing all day at a gizmo, surfing, scrolling, tweeting, ordering things you don’t need, playing silly games.
Evidence is building, though, that an enforced detox is not such a bad idea. Scientists have theorised that the screen habit is neurologically similar to what happens in drug abuse and compulsive gambling.
There are pilot studies on physical changes in the brain, and psychologists are examining how it affects our ability to relate to other people: one-third in the latest survey said it damaged relationships.
It’s easier to send an angry email
It’s not like giving up booze — a phone’s vital
or block a friend than think about it, and then talk face to face or on the phone, with honesty. No. Click away from them, and back to your 500 Facebook ‘friends’.
The physical effects of this virtual existence are all too real. In young people, doctors report symptoms of sensory overload, lack of restorative sleep, and a constantly ‘hyperaroused’ nervous system. At any age, the restless surfing through the day weakens our ability to concentrate or to think things through. We’ve all felt it.
As for the body, U.S. doctors report cases of ‘text neck’. That’s spinal strain and possible longterm damage through constantly looking down and not ahead.
Temporary half-blindness has even been reported: people stare at their bright-lit smartphones for ages with only one eye while resting on their side in bed in the dark, the other eye being covered by the pillow. The eyes adapt differently and take time to catch up.
So there we are: hooked, neglectful of rest and duties and other people. The young, in particular, admit that without their phone they panic and feel rudderless.
Yet screen-addiction takes less time to kick than most habits. Detoxers generally report that after a day or two, they’re happier, calmer and better rested
The problem, though, is that it’s not like kicking booze or drugs, but more like an overeating disorder. Just as you can’t totally renounce food, the phone in the pocket has become a genuinely vital thing for work and family.
So back to it we must come. And we begin clicking again, just to see what’s happening out there in the world we can’t see, but which has started to matter more than real life.
Friendship, empathy, real and present joys and dangers all recede. The living planet blurs and is reduced to pixels. It’s a sci-fi nightmare.