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The ubiquity of screens in our public life has had a debilitating effect, writes TIMOTHY LYDON
The ubiquity of screens in our lives has had a debilitating effect.
There has been a debilitating trend in American life that has diminished our powers of concentration and made us less mindful of our responsibilities as citizens. The downward glance has become our nation in profile. Our obsessive, addictive use of smartphones, through which we escape to virtual networks, prevents the building and repairing of actual flesh-and-blood communities. It’s preventing us from even seeing what needs to be built or repaired. And it’s preventing us from seeing each other. Our eyes are where we meet as citizens, and through our eyes, we can recognize our social bonds and realize the pleasures of knowing one another. Looking is the beginning of possibilities, and if we look at our phones every 12 minutes, as Americans are purported to do, then our possibilities are vastly circumscribed.
The act of looking is rooted in respect, a word which derives from the Latin respicere, which means ‘to look at,’ ‘to regard.’ And to regard one another in ordinary, face-to-face interactions is the sine qua non of society. Without which there cannot be. We develop the character necessary to participate in civic life by being open to chance, risk and vulnerable exchange, by finding ourselves in unanticipated situations, having random conversations and coming into contact with people unlike ourselves. But these connections, which include opportunities to teach, learn and share, are not possible when the downward glance prevails.
In the 19th century, the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that “human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” Mill believed that individual character is strengthened when allowed to find its own way, free from external force or control. He believed in the autonomy of the individual and feared that an intrusive state would impinge upon the privacy and liberty of its citizens. Today, the threat to freedom lies perfectly designed in the palm of our hands, and it is through these machines that social media corporations have abused their power and position.
Community simulation
Facebook’s business is sustained by spying on and advertising to its users, while collecting enormous amounts of their data. This results in billions of dollars in ad revenue and a grotesque overreach into our personal lives. Even non-users cannot escape the company’s rapacious grasp as it collects data on people who don’t even use the platform. A community is meant to serve people who live together in a particular place and share a sense of responsibility for one another. Who is Facebook serving when it shares its users’ data, including personal messages, with third parties? Who is it serving by experimenting on tens of thousands of its users, without their consent, to determine if it can make these individuals happy or sad? It determined it could do both. How this research is applicable to the company’s stated goal of ‘building global community’ remains unclear.
“Electronic community is only a simulation of community,” the writer Neil Postman observed. “A real, functional political community requires the nuance and directness of the human voice, face-to-face confrontations and negotiations with differing points of view, the possibilities of immediate action.” Inviting your neighbor over for dinner is a political act. Supporting local businesses instead of having goods shipped to your home by Amazon is a political act. Cleaning up your street or park is a political act. By addressing local problems we can see the effects our actions have on the world. Contrast these immediate actions, which require thought and effort, with time spent on social media, where nothing is asked of us and therefore nothing of value is accomplished. Time spent on social networks means time spent looking at screens, which means time not spent paying attention to what is going on presently where we live. You simply cannot see if your neighbor is suffering if you are not looking.
We’ve proven to Facebook, and to foreign intelligence, that we are vulnerable to social media manipulation. In 2016, Russian “cyber troops” — professional internet trolls — created thousands of fake accounts and persuaded both pro- and anti-Muslim Facebook groups to host events at the same place at the same time, provoking a confrontation. Eight of the 10 most popular Facebook stories in the months leading up to the election were wholly fabricated, and dozens of fraudulent websites were created by the Russians in which they collected donations from American citizens. In effect, we funded a campaign of misinformation against ourselves.
We don’t yet have the judgment to discern what is true from false on social media. If we are reading a print newspaper, it becomes clear to us that a page has been paid for by a group espousing an unconventional view. The tone and stridency of the full-page advertisement is often at odds with the rest of the paper’s content. It’s more difficult to make these distinctions on a virtual network, and it is virtually impossible to verify sources of information. Like Facebook, Twitter also claims neutrality while providing a platform that has been used to deceive. The magazine Science published a study by a team of MIT professors who analyzed controversial stories on Twitter. They concluded that disinformation and fake news are shared 70 percent more often than factual stories, and they are spread roughly six times faster.
Looking outward
People come to know their country by the news they consume, and two-thirds of Americans receive their news from social media. Recent polls have shown that most Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction, yet feel incredibly optimistic about the places they live and the institutions they know directly. In others words, the downward glance into the screen, where our attention is coerced and exploited, results in pessimism and despair. Looking outward, however, at the people and places that make up our communities, breeds confidence and optimism.
It serves as an example that Silicon Valley parents have restricted screen time for their children. Babysitters have been contractually obligated to keep phones off at all times. “This is beyond our power to control,” the former editor of Wired, Chris Anderson said. “This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as parents to understand.” These companies will continue to find new ways to stimulate, distract and dull our senses. They will continue to direct us away from one another and toward a virtual reality in which the trivial, senseless and, more often than not, false content has already been determined. Self-understanding cannot exist in this frenzy. Browsing doesn’t always supply a hit so we shift from one vacuous thing to another until there’s no longer any love in the act.
It’s clear why these technologies are popular. Connections formed on social media make up for the lack of community that exists for most of us in our lives. But the downward glance is a gesture of separation, and these devices are incompatible with neighborliness, citizenship and just plain good manners. Genuine community is possible only among people who make themselves available in an unmediated way, among people who are prepared to make connections without the creep of surveillance technology.
I was recently at Constellation Coffee on Penn Avenue in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The cafe was full and every person except one solitary woman was looking at a screen of some kind. A man sat down next to her and pulled out his screen at which she coolly nodded and said, ‘I don’t have one of those. I’m just watching and listening and talking.’ She is a model for us all.
What kind of interactions can you have with people who are wearing headphones while looking at their devices? Ask them for directions? Inquire about local restaurants or cafes? Expect any type of polite exchange? Good luck.