The End of Digital Gullibility
When I was a freshman in college, Facebook was irresistible. I was one of the “lucky” new college students whose newfound freedom was laced with a new addition to university life: social media.
Facebook was addicting long before the smartphone and the mini-feed. Sure, we wanted to figure out who the cute girl in our Econ class was, but more than that we wanted to catalog our friends, communicate with them, and keep an eye on what everyone was up to back home. I crafted my profile and let facebook beome a significant part of my life. I was digitally gullible. We all were.
What I didn’t know that I was one of the first lab rats in one of the most seismic social trials in human history.
We Know Better- Right?
Now we know better. If we were too busy scrolling to read The Shallows or Digital Minimalism, we at least harnessed our Netflix addiction to watch The Social Dilemma. We understand that the most powerful companies in the world are hiring attention engineers and using their billions of dollars with one goal- to addict us.
We now know social media is hacking our brain, stealing our time and our happiness, eroding our attention span, and tearing at the social fabric. We now understand that we are not the user- we are the product that social media giants are selling to advertisers.
So why in 2021 are we still spending over three and a half hours on social media per day?
Why are my pre-kindergarten children being issued their first Ipad as I write this? Why do I still have friends buying Apple watches and tablets without a clear use case for them? Why do we spend our entire night- from dinner to bedtime- hypnotized by the glow of our digital drug?
Maybe it's no big deal.
What’s at Stake
Wrong. Just weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal accessed an internal study that Facebook conducted. The stats that came from it aren’t the most damning- they’re just the latest. Here's some gems:
32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.
6% of American users who reported suicidal thoughts traced those desires to Instagram. For British users, it was 13%.
+178%: Suicide deaths for children ages 10 to 14 nearly tripled from 2007 to 2017, when social media saw mass adoption.
Instagram is facebook’s most harmful, yet most profitable app- and, yes, they are coming for our kids.
21st Century Cigarettes
Social media is the cigarette of the 21st century. Today we take for granted that smoking cigarettes is both terribly addicting and terrible for your health. We forget that it took us the better part of half a century to figure that out. For decades, we gave them to our soldiers and smoked them around our kids. Even our doctors prescribed them. Cigarettes were everywhere even though they were slowly killing us.
This naive stage is where we are with social media. We are just beginning to understand the power and the peril of social media- particularly to young people, particularly to teenage girls.
One day we’ll see instagram and twitter for the cigarettes that they are and our habits (and our laws) will reflect that. But what do we in the meantime?
The Solution
If the "cool kids"- first the Marlboro man and now the IG influencer- keep getting us into trouble, then the solution to this epidemic lies with a group who has never been afraid to be uncool- the Amish.
We idealize the Amish in ways I assume are unhealthy, but it’s worth saying they aren’t actually against all modern technology. When a new technology comes into society, they evaluate it from the sidelines. They watch us like scientists watch lab rats with a new drug. Does it make us healthier? Or sick? Is it a net positive or no? They let us volunteer for the human trial. Then they have a community-wide conversation.
We’re still testing [the technology of the last 15 years] out as a species. And the early results are terrifying.
John Mark Comer, Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, p.42-43
“The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.”
Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism
The Amish like technology just as much as anyone else- but they simply have a conscious process for adopting and using new technologies as they come out. We must do the same.
Whether you take a digital detox, batch your social media to 1x/week, put a blocker on your phone, or completely dismantle your mini-feed like I did is secondary.
The primary step is to simply wake up- to start being intentional. We know that social media companies are being extremely intentional with us.
I'm for the intentional use of social media when we've consciously decided how we will use the product. But we must exert effort to keep the product from using us.
Conclusion
The 20th century saw the rise and fall of the cigarette. We went from celebratory acceptance to addiction. Eventually we realized how cancerous they wereand our behaviors and laws soon followed.
In the 21st century we must again let our intuition and the early science guide the way. This time around, it's not our lungs at risk- it's our minds, hearts- our very souls. For ourselves and those we love- we must end the age of digital gullibility.
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