What Harm Does Your Phone Cause - The Reading Dilemma

When did you get your first phone? The average kid gets their first device at the age of ten. What were you like when you were ten? Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made sure that their kids were quite a bit older when they received their first iPhone (or whatever Gates’ kids got). Both Gates and Jobs also limited the amount of time their children would spend in front of the devices they themselves invented and sold. But why is that?

How Long Do You Go to The Bathroom?

According to the Rescue Time App we spend about 3 hours and 15 minutes on our phones. Other sources give different estimates. 3 hours and 15 minutes is on the lower spectrum. 3 hours and 15 minutes is also about 14% of your entire day. And 14% of an entire year are about 51 days…

That’s a lot!

Dopamine From A Nigerian Prince

But let’s first agree on one thing: Not all time on our iPhone is a waste. Checking emails, calling friends and family, banking or taking pictures are not a waste of time. In most cases at least (there is probably no need to reply to the Nigerian Prince who recently found gold and needs 100k from you immediately). We can also agree that some of that 3 hours and 15 minutes is wasted and some is not. What’s the balance for you? 50/50? 70/30?

We also like to pick up our phone a lot. It is instant dopamine and the excitement of a possible text from a friend, a Facebook alert or an email. According to Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, we check our phone about 150-times a day. Most often we stay on it for under a minute.

It is getting excessive.

How often do you have to check your email? Really every 30 minutes? How often do you need to take your phone to the bathroom? Really every time (and stay there for that looong)? Sadly, our minds get fooled by the designers behind the phones and apps that we use daily. Their design encourages us to look in our mail account every 30 minutes, to take the phone to the bathroom and for you and me to spend as much time as possible on them. In the best case, even more than 3 hours and 15 minutes.

A Big Nudge or Why Casino Carpets Don’t Have 90 Degree Angles

A nudge is a change of “the presentation of […] choices in a way that makes people more likely to pick the option that benefits them.” Organ donation programs are a frequently cited example. Countries where you must actively opt out of donation programs have a far higher donating population than countries where you must actively opt in. All without restraining the rights of anyone. Your options are simply the same in both scenarios. Humans are just lazy.

The term “Nudge” was popularized by the scientists Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler, who also co-authored Noise. Their book Nudge describes the science and applications of nudges in government, health care and personal finance.

Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Gmail all nudge us to spend more time on their applications and sites. Time on device/site is the new key success for these companies, who make money of advertisements. The more time you spend on Facebook, the more advertisements you can see.

Nudging is tricking your mind subconsciously. We don’t notice. Just like how we don’t notice how our gambling behavior in Las Vegas’ casinos changes, if the carpets would have 90 degree angles (Natasha Dow Schüll has done some great research on gambling addiction, presented in her book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas).

In Chapter 1 of The Reading Dilemma, we will explore questions, answers and opinions about these addictive products, apps, and software designs. We will discover the ethics behind the digital economy and persuasive technology. Are our phones fundamentally bad? Should we allow our minds to get tricked? What good can nudging do? This will also involve getting to know the fundamentals of behavior design, which was pioneered by Stanford professor BJ Fogg, whose ideas helped shape Instagram.

The Science Behind Phone Addiction

The Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma ”, in which Tristan Harris is also featured, received a lot of criticism for disregarding a basic statistical principle: correlation doesn’t prove causation. Just because teen suicidal rates increased dramatically around the time when the first iPhone was released (Correlation) doesn’t prove that the iPhone caused that increase (Causation).

But one would be highly naive to believe that the two don’t relate to each other in some way.

It is tricky though and the science behind our phone addiction is not straight forward.

We will dig into the research on the research on phone and social media addiction and try to shed some light into the ongoing debate: How bad are our phones really?

I won’t be able to offer you a final answer to that question. Not even scientists can. But we will try and there will be some conclusion. A conclusion which will hopefully help to raise awareness for the consequences of persuasive technology.

I want to encourage you to think about your phone usage. How long do you need to use it? How often do you have to pick it up? Maybe we will be able to derive at our own personal conclusions – not needing one from science. If you feel terrible and less energetic after scrolling through Instagram, then don’t use it anymore. Conduct your own study. Go without social media for a week. Find out how it is.

Chapter 1 aims to encourage us to rethink our relationship to our digital devices. We don’t answer all the above raised questions at once – we will go one by one. Digging deep and seeing where we get. It’ll be interesting and unfortunately – I believe – frightening as well.

A First Conclusion

Technology is not about you on your phone anymore. It is about the deep insights of human psychology. Our minds are getting dunked on by all kinds of apps on our phones. We are getting outplayed and don’t even notice. It is a game, and we are losing. The cost of losing is our time, attention, health and even life. No wonder, that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn’t let their kids spend 3 hours and 15 minutes on the devices they designed themselves. So why the hell do we?