The Cyber Effect (7 page)

Addiction is explained in Panksepp's work as an excessive form of seeking. Whether the addict is seeking a hit from cocaine, alcohol, or a Google search, “dopamine is firing, keeping the human being in a constant state of alert expectation.” If you think about it, cyberspace is like outer space—infinity in terms of seeking. With our evolutionary memory driving us toward exploring and making sense of this new environment, cyberspace, are we trying to evolve at the speed of technology? And if the biochemical rewards of seeking online are the very ones that can make losing the lottery feel like “fun” to a vast number of the population, what does this mean for individuals who struggle with compulsive gambling or other addictions or ADHD?

Hard to resist. That's how many of us find the Internet. It's always delivering a wild surprise, pulsing with breaking news, statistics, personal messages, and entertainment. The overwhelming evidence points to this: A combination of the fast delivery, exploring opportunities, unexpected information, and intermittent rewards creates a medium that is enticing, exciting, and for some individuals totally irresistible. Now let's add in the design aspects of the apps, ads, games, and social-networking sites—the alerts, push notifications, lights, and other visual triggers that signal us like primitive mating calls.

The Latin word
addictus
was once used to describe the stretch of time an indentured slave had to serve his or her master. The servant with the sentence was called “the addict.”

We've all observed it firsthand: the otherwise polite and well-meaning friend who chronically checks her phone while you're trying to have a lunch conversation. Does she really mean to be so rude?

Her connection with you—and the real world—is competing with the little buzz of pleasure she gets every time she checks her in-box. Most of the emails, texts, or notifications your friend is receiving are not urgent. (Most of her emails are probably advertisements from online retailers!) But she can't stop checking in hopes of getting a personal email from someone she cares about—or exciting news of any kind.

A 2015 study found that Americans check their phones a total of 8 billion times a day. As mentioned in the prologue, a study shows that an average adult with a mobile phone connected to the Internet checked his or her phone more than two hundred times a day. That's about every five minutes. In the evening it escalates. When most people are home from work, on average they begin checking their mobile phones once every six minutes. (How many times have you caught yourself picking up your phone mindlessly and checking your email queue again, then realized you just looked at it two minutes before?) Studies differ, but the overall results are similar: Average phone checking per day is surprisingly high.

Given the dependence on mobile phones, it was only a matter of time before they were repackaged as wearables and strapped to the wrist—but wouldn't this only escalate the distractibility?

In terms of controlling compulsive behavior, there are a slew of
tests to take online to scale your own “smartphone addiction.” And while these questionnaires are not really scientific, it's worth paying attention if you find yourself starting to feel a little uncomfortable or, worse, nodding in agreement:

If you recognize yourself in some of the above compulsive behavior, it might help to understand what makes mobile phones so irresistible. To begin with, they are sleek, well-designed little devils that are portable, they are easy to slip into our handbags and pockets, and they travel
with us almost anywhere. (I've heard of swimmers getting waterproof cases for them.) And the mobile phone, like the lottery scratch card, offers an intermittent reward. The surprise of hearing or reading news on our devices gives us a buzz of pleasure, which sets in motion a complex set of reinforcing behaviors: You check your phone to (intermittently) get good or surprising news, which is enough to keep you checking.

Now let's add in what a psychologist would call the
related stimuli
of these digital devices, or the flashing lights and other alerts and notifications that come with each new email or text or Facebook “like,” depending on how you've customized your settings. Related stimuli are cues or situations that an addict associates with their addiction. One famous addiction study found that related stimuli associated with drinking alcohol or taking drugs could induce craving, explaining how the sight of a liquor bottle can cause a person to feel the urge to drink. This is the result of classic conditioning, like the lab experiment with the men who became aroused by the slide showing a pair of shoes. In the past, antidrug campaigns often used drug paraphernalia in their posters—syringes, needles, spoons, and piles of white powder, all designed to shock the world into total abstinence. But paradoxically the visual stimuli actually drove some addicts to relapse and led to a fundamental redesign of antidrug campaigns.

Just as substance addicts are constantly fighting urges provoked by related stimuli, the alerts and notifications on a mobile phone can cause its user to have an uncontrollable urge to check his or her device. It isn't so different from the spinning of slot machine wheels or the intense cravings that someone with atypical sexual behavior may have for a fetish object. And while the only noticeable downside for your nice but irritating friend at lunch is that she has alienated you—when will you want to have lunch with her again?—in extreme cases an individual with a serious case of “mobile phone addiction” can become socially isolated and even financially ruined. Depending on where they live and their data plans, compulsive phone users can run up monthly charges that they can't begin to afford.

In the behavioral sciences, a phenomenon called
signaling theory
may help us to understand the irresistibility of mobile phones. Signaling
theory, which originated with the study of animal behavior, explains why, for example, peahens choose to mate with peacocks with the biggest tails. Evolutionary psychologists have taken these cues for attention and selection, and have applied signaling theory to understanding human interactions. For instance, a number of research studies have shown that we are likely to be even more afraid of snakes and spiders than we are of large predatory animals such as bears, lions, and tigers. From an evolutionary perspective, this could be because snakes and spiders are difficult to spot, don't make sounds or produce other cues, and are therefore more dangerous. It made sense that our ancestors would look carefully for poisonous creatures before sticking their hands into overgrown brush or putting their feet into moccasins (still a good idea today). Over time, this fear became an instinctive human reaction.

There are several types of signal cues that communicate and attract—visual, acoustic, chemical, and tactile. The visual signals are limited and require a line of sight. A predatory female firefly lures in males with her flashing body light, and then preys upon them, just like the blinking and flashing of your mobile phone. Vervet monkeys have a language of distinct calls representing different types of threats, not unlike the ringtones or your early morning alarm. The waggle dance of the honeybee is a tactile cue to secure social bonds. Next time your phone vibrates in your pocket, you'll feel its need to bond with you. The scent of a queen bee motivates and attracts her worker drones—and no doubt manufacturers are developing chemical signals for their mobile phones. Just wait until your device starts emitting those irresistible pheromones.

Bria Dunham, in an excellent paper on the role of
signaling theory in marketing, asks the question “Why are black iPhones sold with white earbuds?” She wonders if perhaps Apple has a backlog of white earbuds or perhaps white ones are cheaper or easier to produce. Eventually, Dunham settles on a more compelling explanation: White earbuds serve a signaling function. Those “telltale white earbuds indicate to passersby that the bearer ascribes to certain notions of coolness and style, engages willingly in some degree of conspicuous consumption, has the necessary resource control to afford a portable Apple device…
that's a lot of information content for less than an ounce of plastic and wire.”

In other words, unconsciously we might want to display our phones to signal to others that we are part of the Apple Tribe—and have the requisite status and coolness levels to be accepted. This is herd behavior, of course, and there's just as much of this present in real life, and perhaps even more online.

So you've got your phone to prove (unconsciously) that you belong, and then…you find that you can't stop checking the darn thing. The problem is great enough that there are now
apps created to help compulsive email checkers break these patterns of behavior—or retrain themselves to start feeling “rewarded” by resisting the temptation to check their email in-box. One such technology is BreakFree, an app that will monitor the number of times you pick up your phone, check your email, and search the Web. It offers nonintrusive notifications and will provide you with an “addiction score” every day, every week, and every month—to track your progress. These incentives and rewards help motivate a change in behavior. It's like going on a diet and standing on the scale every night for encouragement.

BreakFree bills itself as a “first of its kind, revolutionary mobile app, aimed at controlling smartphone addiction and helping you maintain a healthy digital lifestyle.”

The question is, are you
breaking free
from your compulsion, from yourself, or from the technology? Where does control lie? Who's in charge of your behavior—you or your new app?

Another app called Checky tracks how often you unlock your iPhone and encourages you to share your stats on Twitter and Facebook. It's a spin-off from the app Calm, which sells itself with information about behavioral studies linking compulsive Internet use to ADHD, OCD, and other serious disorders. In the app description, Calm claims to have been created by “recovering” phone addict Alex Tew “to help individuals relax their minds.

In psychology, we call this
mindfulness
—adopting Buddhist terminology to describe the state of mind in which our attention is directed to the here and now, to what is happening in the moment before us, a way of being kind to ourselves and validating our own experience. As a way to stay mindful myself and keep track of my time online, I have set my laptop computer to call out the time, every hour on the hour, so that even as I'm working in cyberspace, where time flies, I am reminded every hour of the temporal real world. It's very helpful for me, but a little unnerving for my colleagues who are at the other end of a Skype call and have to hear a voice suddenly call out,
“Eleven o'clock!”

Some other practical remedies to combat phone distraction—or even compulsive use—are to uninstall some of the beckoning apps on your phone screen. You can also go to your phone settings and turn off your notifications, which are how social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp keep users checking constantly (because they want you to be checking constantly). Keeping your phone in “airplane mode” will silence it—and prevent you from accessing the Internet. Or you could just go cold turkey every so often and simply turn it off. I went to Bora Bora once and for the first time was in a country where I could not get cell coverage. For the first twenty-four hours I went through the predictable phases of mobile connectivity bereavement: disbelief, anger, panic, and night sweats—followed by exhaustion, then finally
acceptance
. I enjoyed a great five-day break after that, beautifully cellphone free.

For those who are looking for philosophical or intellectual inspiration, a number of books deal with this new aspect of our lives and offer help and insights, including Nicholas Carr's
The Shallows
, Sherry Turkle's
Alone Together
, and William Powers's
Hamlet's BlackBerry
. Since 2006, Powers and his family have taken an “Internet Sabbath,” a day or two a week totally unplugged, which he believes has helped them remain mindful, less distracted, and in control of their use of technology. Addiction expert and pioneering psychologist Dr. Kimberly
Young also recommends taking a forty-eight-hour “digital detox” every weekend. Plug your device into its charger and leave it there on Saturdays and Sundays. Even Pope Francis calls for an unplugged Christmas.

The conundrum of “connectivity” is only bound to escalate. More mobile phones are sold each year than the year before.
For 2017, the number of cellphone users is forecast to reach 4.77 billion. As the “usefulness” of these devices grows, more people will own them—and will be spending more time on them. We use them to read the news, connect with friends, photograph our lives, shop, manage our address books and calendars, and pay our bills. Meanwhile, we aren't just learning how to use new devices, new apps, and new interfaces. We are learning how to live in a totally new environment—cyberspace—unlike any other we've been in before. When people talk about cellphone addiction, what they could be trying to express is something more serious than just compulsive checking of texts or emails. People feel addicted to technology itself.