What's on the other side of the looking glass?

Our dependence on smartphones and devices with screens might be having a negative impact on health – especially of children. Terry Moore investigates

Older Magpie readers – anyone over 30 – might remember the Nokia 3310, a now iconic mobile phone. Along with other early mobiles, it effectively had only three functions; you could use it make a call, send a text message or play ‘Snake’. And of those, sending a text was far from easy to accomplish. A tiny screen, crudely digitised characters, predictive text functionality that was more annoying than useful, and an awkward keypad that required you to press a key multiple times to select specific characters.

Despite all of that, texting was rapidly adopted, especially by younger people as their preferred means of communicating with each other. A whole new abbreviated lexicon emerged and kids mastered it at lightning speed, clunky keys or not. And, ironically, hardly anyone actually ever used a mobile to make a call – except maybe to phone mum.

What is quite astonishing about this is that the rise of texting was never anticipated – the dominant use of messaging instead of voice calls by a younger demographic was never foreseen. Which got me thinking: new technologies are developed, researched, refined, launched, commoditised, and yet it seems that we have no way of really knowing what people will actually do with that technology – and more importantly, what the potential downsides might be.

Photography (c) Charles Deluvio

Never out of reach

A mere 11 years since the first iPhone arrived on the market just about everyone you know has one, or AN Other smartphone, and the latest model is a must-have for any self-respecting 10 year old. And just like no one predicted the take-off of text messaging, no one (well, apart from Steve Jobs) could imagine the effect on human behaviour and our everyday lives that smartphones, and other devices with screens, would have.

Who would have dared to imagine modern society’s total dependence on them, as they have invaded every aspect of modern life – work, leisure, relationships, friendships, shopping, travel, everything? Who foresaw that a whole generation would document their lives on Facebook? Who could have imagined crowds of people walking along city streets staring at their phone screen?

Our smartphones are never out of reach; we check them last thing at night and they’re the first thing we turn to when we wake. A study in 2015 concluded that young adults used their phones an average of five solid hours a day and Apple says that, on average, iPhone users unlock them 80 times a day. Of Generation Z, the cohort that grew up with this technology, 40% self identify as digital device ‘addicts’ and cannot imagine going without their devices.

It is the nature of technological change that it influences, and hopefully improves, the way we live our lives. But while the impact of the smartphone clearly has been seismic, it is a moot point whether this advance has been entirely positive.

Some of the world’s biggest businesses, like Facebook, are predicated on a need we didn’t know we had, to use our smartphones to post information about ourselves and express our opinion to the world every few minutes. Whole industries have sprung up, bent on finding the next ‘Angry Birds’ or ‘Candy Crush’ to keep us eyes down and glued to these small screens. And when Apple’s engineers put a camera in the iPhone did they have an inkling the entire world would become selfie obsessed? On a visit to China last year it felt like the whole population of the Peoples’ Republic were taking pictures of themselves. I saw a very young girl, I guess no more than five years old, posing and taking selfies, most likely copying her older sister.

This could all be classified as harmless fun, perhaps. But in any other context we would call this type of behaviour an addiction, an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Everyone with a smartphone is afflicted to a greater or lesser degree. And these mass obsessions are not passing fads – these are the defaults of the way we live now.

Should we be worried? I think we should.

Broken bonding

By 2019 over 36% of the entire world’s population, 2.5 billion people, will have a smartphone. That is the same number of people in the world that do not have access to proper toilets. And while the health implications of poor sanitation are well understood we are only beginning to consider the potential long-term health effects of the smartphone on humans.

As the generation that lives life on social media become young parents they’ll most likely continue checking their phones 80 or more times a day. How often do you see a young mother or father wheeling a pushchair or sitting next to their child on a bus checking messages on their phone? Or mother taking selfies with baby as prop? Or the fractious infant pacified by playing with mum’s iPhone? Not a problem, right?

Except psychologists are coming to realise that this common, everyday behaviour in today’s young parents is compromising the development of their young children. These habitual phone behaviours reduce the level of parent-baby and parent-child interaction and so compromise the ‘bonding process’ – forged by facial expression, eye contact, and talking to the child or new-born – that is so critical in those early months, laying the foundations of healthy development.

It’s generally been accepted that prolonged exposure to screens is not good for kids – to the point that some countries by law impose limits on ‘screen time’ for children. The proliferation of tablets and smartphones has introduced a whole new complexity to this issue.

The US Department of Health and Human Services estimates that American children now spend a whopping seven hours a day in front of electronic media, and that kids as young as two regularly play iPad games and have playroom toys that involve touch screens. According to Dr Aric Sigman, an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, when very small children get hooked on tablets and smartphones, this can cause permanent damage to their still-developing brains. Human evolution over centuries has determined that, to develop normally, a child brain’s neural networks need specific stimuli from the outside environment. Unsurprisingly, these stimuli are not found on today’s tablet screens.

A recent article in Psychology Today highlights a number of troubling studies connecting delayed cognitive development in kids with extended exposure to electronic media. Well-meaning parents who give their toddlers iPads with videos and interactive stories to keep them amused may be doing more harm than good. A baby will often try to ‘swipe’ a real photograph or pinch their fingers on a book as if it were a touchscreen, and young children arrive at nursery often struggling to pick up basic fine-motor skills such as holding pencils, pens and crayons.

iPads also have the potential to make young children ‘cognitively lazy’ – a tablet spoon-feeds images, words, and pictures all at once to a young mind; it bypasses the need to take the time to process a mother’s voice into words, visualize complete pictures and exert mental effort to follow a story line. Kids become lazy because the device does the thinking for them, and as a result, their own ‘cognitive muscles’ remain weak.

When a child gets too used to an immediate smartphone-style interaction – that is, an immediate response and gratification – they will learn to prefer smartphone-style interaction over real-world connection. Too much screen time impedes the development of a child’s ability to focus, to concentrate, to lend attention, to sense other people’s attitudes and communicate with them, to build a large vocabulary—all those abilities are potentially harmed and normal development becomes stunted.

In any other context we would call this behaviour an addiction. Everyone with a smartphone is afflicted to a greater or lesser degree – these are the default of the way we live now.

Et in smartphone ego

It’s not just children we should be concerned about either. Research has shown smartphone use and technology dependence in adults can impair attention, productivity and memory, dampen creative thinking, increase stress levels, reduce sleep quality and lead to ‘cognitive errors’ like forgetting meetings and walking into people. The research also suggests that the constant availability of the smartphone limits the analytical and intuitiveness of people’s thinking and reasoning – because everything can be googled.

Of course, smartphones in themselves are not a bad thing – it’s obvious they bring huge benefits and pleasure their users. But there should be no doubt that heavy use of them can all too easily bring about trends, behaviours and traits that can impair quality of life.

We marvel at the bright, the shiny and the new in technology, and we rush to embrace it all in the belief that it can only make our lives better. For the most part it does just that, but with the lightning speed of technological development and stuff of science fiction becoming a reality daily, we must be ever more alert to not just the benefits but also the unintended consequences of technologies on our wellbeing.

Photography (c) Hugh Han

Shortly before his death, Stephen Hawking suggested that most of the threats facing humanity come from progress made in science and technology. “We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it,” he said, “so we have to recognise the dangers and control them.”

Sources: https://www.psychology today.com/us/blog/behindonline-behavior/201604/ what-screen-time-can-reallydo-kids-brains?page=1

https://www.psychology today.com/us/blog/mentalwealth/201402/gray-matterstoo-much-screen-timedamages-the-brain

https://www.fastcompany. com/3061913/whathappened-when-i-gave-upmy-smartphone-for-a-week