A s we approach the Festival of Freedom two recent articles in the New York Times give cause for taking stock of where we stand vis-a-vis technology’s chokehold on our lives. In one Adam Alter an NYU professor who researches psychology and marketing was interviewed about a new book he’s written in which he argues that “many of us — youngsters teenagers adults — are addicted to modern digital products. Not figuratively but literally addicted.”
I’ve written before about the many technology industry executives who strictly limit their children’s screen time because as one of them put it “we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself and I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.” Similarly Alter tells his interviewer that the impetus for writing the book was his discovery that “there’s a private school in the Bay Area and it doesn’t allow any tech… and 75 percent of the parents are tech executives…. What was it about these products that made them in the eyes of experts so potentially dangerous?”
Defining addiction as “something you enjoy doing in the short term that undermines your well-being in the long term — but that you do compulsively anyway ” he observes that the “technology is designed to hook us that way. E-mail is bottomless. Social-media platforms are endless. Twitter? The feed never really ends. You could sit there 24 hours a day and you’ll never get to the end. And so you come back for more and more.”
Alter says the proof that these devices are literally addictive is in the putting… of these devices next to one’s bed: “In one survey 60 percent of the adults said they keep their cell phones next to them when they sleep. In another survey half the respondents claimed they check their e-mails during the night.”
