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Online Technology and Life

Are the many discouraging indicators, such as increasing depression and suicide and skyrocketing obesity, actually arising from our use of screen technologies? Clearly, these technologies cannot be the only factor, but in this chapter we look at how our omnipresent screens may be impairing our sleep and undermining other basic pillars of health and entailing a cascade of major compromises of our physical and mental states.

As we were writing this book, many of the tech industry’s most prominent members, troubled by the addictive and destructive behaviors that they perceive social media, mobile phones, and other technologies to intentionally foster, began offering serious criticism of the industry. They include former senior executives at Facebook, Google, and other prominent companies. Among the loudest and most insistent was Roger McNamee (whom we later asked to write the foreword to this book). Roger has been investing in technology companies, such as Facebook, for three decades, and introduced Sheryl Sandberg, its present chief operating officer, to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. From his seat at the table, McNamee has one of the longest perspectives on how the industry is affecting us and our world. In a Guardian interview in October 2017, he pointed out the underlying conundrum: “The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences. The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models.”¹

When those who have profited the most from tech and nurtured it from birth to dominance come to doubt and fear their creations, it’s worth paying very close attention. McNamee feels that these are matters of life and death, and that unbridled technology use is one of the serious threats to humankind.

Time Less Well Spent

When Alex first started using the Internet as a young freelance writer, he was intrigued by the possibility of reading anything from any publication anywhere in the world. He had always been a voracious news consumer, reading multiple magazines a week and several newspapers every day. The Internet made it easy for him to find and read interesting news about anything and everything. For research and to satisfy his curiosity, this was helpful: he often found unexpected associations between articles he was reading and topics he covered. Those led to ideas for articles and new thought paths. And he enjoyed the ability to range freely.

A habit developed. Before bedtime, Alex read the news and browsed the web for cool stories for a bit and then read a physical book or magazine. Reading from paper was calming, and after he read, he fell asleep. Over time, the Internet media consumption gained ground on his dead-tree reading, which fell from two books a week to one a week and then to half a book a week. Then the evening’s paper-based reading diminished to primarily magazines in the evening—and then disappeared, replaced by what he found on the Internet.

At the same time, Alex noticed that he was feeling tired much of the time. His bedtime was often pushed back as, after finishing an article, he read another, and then another. His sleep patterns became more erratic. He rarely got a full eight hours of sleep, and he began to regard anything more than six hours as a good night’s sleep. He was convinced that this was a normal part of dealing with a busy writing career and that he couldn’t turn down opportunities.

Alex was living in Hawaii then, and loved to go surfing in the mornings. As he stayed up later and later each night to read articles—ostensibly to stay on top of the news and learn more about the world—he found that his morning surfing sessions were falling away. Sleep and surfing were two of his greatest joys in life. Yet he chose reading on the Internet over those joys, justifying this change as “work.” He was always working (i.e., reading) on the Internet.

In those days, little research had been done into how technology consumption might alter sleep patterns. The temptations then were fewer—there was no binge-watching on Netflix, no Facebook, no Twitter—yet the endless run of text was enough to ensnare Alex. This behavior would come to affect Alex’s family life and his marriage. He often stayed up too late “working” on the computer (and sometimes still does). That meant missing early mornings with his children or conversations with his wife. The technology fog enveloped him. He often felt sad and alone, and didn’t understand why. From the outside, his life was extraordinary. He lived in Hawaii. He wrote on fascinating topics. He traveled the world. (And yes, he was grateful for his good fortune.) But deep down Alex knew that something was not right.

Beyond the sleep loss, Alex thought often, and still does today, about the sacrifice of precious joys for the dubious benefit of technology consumption. His sense of loneliness and disconnection was probably linked to a life glued to the screen.² But the long-term results of sleep deprivation are fairly stark and include a higher risk of obesity, mood disorders, diabetes, cardiac problems, and accelerated mortality.³

Alex is hardly alone in his concerns. As we detailed above, leading figures in technology have admitted that they zealously police how their children interact with technology, revealing some strong measures they take to minimize their tech addictions. For example, Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who envisioned and then created the first Like button, since exiling himself from Snap and Reddit has relied on his executive assistant’s use of a parental-control feature to keep him from installing more apps on his iPhone.⁴

Numerous powerful executives from Apple and Google send their young children to Waldorf schools, which ban computers and video games until children are in the seventh or eighth grade.⁵ Steve Jobs himself severely limited and policed his children’s consumption of screen time.⁶ (In fact, Alex’s children attended a Waldorf school, and several of their peers’ parents worked as high-level executives at high-tech firms, including Google.) If the savviest technology leaders in the world are wary of technology, shouldn’t the rest of society exercise more caution and proceed more slowly? If Roger McNamee and the creator of the Facebook Like button are worried, shouldn’t everyone be worried?

How Technology Erodes the Core Pillars of Happiness: Sleep and Health

In previous chapters we discussed specifically how technology affects how we love and how we work. These are two of the biggest parts of our lives and two of the largest contributors to our emotional well-being (or lack thereof). And the relationships with technology are fairly direct. For example, too much e-mail and texting during meetings makes the meetings less effective and leaves workers frustrated, and swipe-based online-dating apps can lead to the commoditization of people and to lower self-esteem among heavy users.

We are perhaps even more troubled by the second-and third-order effects of today’s technology on our well-being at a deeper level. These are of three types. Risk factors for mortality such as depression, obesity, and diabetes are all strongly associated with sleep deprivation.⁷ Loneliness and lack of close connections with other people, also risk factors for mortality and indicators of something deeply amiss in our social lives, arise from behavior that shuts others out.⁸ And changes in brain structure arising from the ways we interact with our screens are signaling lower cognitive abilities.

It is one thing to be annoyed and unhappy at work, or to feel unsatisfied in our love lives. It is entirely another thing to say, as we are saying, that technology is undermining our psychological and physiological bedrock.

Tech’s Assault on Sleep

Ever since humans have been able to sit up and read at night by candlelight or gas lamp, the night has beckoned. A quiet time to read was heavenly and enveloping. Then came electricity, and it became easier to light the entire house, the town, and the entire city. Night blended into day. Then came television, and we learned how easy it was to sit and stare at a screen rather than read or listen to the radio. Eventually, the Internet linked to television (and later to smartphones) and became our go-to evening entertainment and a staple in our bedrooms. From e-mail to social media to Netflix, endless entertainment—a moveable mobile feast—flowed into our lives.

We were strongly drawn to the flickering light of the screen. A 2011 poll by the National Sleep Foundation, “Communications in the Bedroom,” found that 95 percent of respondents watched or looked at some sort of screen within an hour of going to sleep.⁹ A 2016 study of 2,750 teenagers in the United Kingdom found that 45 percent admitted to checking their smartphones while they should have been sleeping and 42 percent slept with their phones next to their beds.¹⁰ According to research by venture capital company Accel and data technology company Qualtrics, 53 percent of millennials check e-mail if they wake up in the middle of the night.¹¹

Scientists have long known that jobs exposing humans to bright light in the middle of the night—such as graveyard-shift jobs—cause higher rates of heart attacks and other sicknesses, as well as lower life expectancies.¹² The reason, they believe, is that light stimulates our circadian rhythms; the internal biological clock that tells us when to sleep and when to wake. Blue light emitted by electronic screens tends to quash the production of melatonin, a key hormone necessary not only for sleep but also for proper function of the organs. Some sleep researchers and doctors now believe that reduced sleep may also cause obesity and other diseases of modernity due to lowering the metabolic rate during resting times.¹³

What are new are the addictive behaviors in screen consumption and the portability of screens. Prior to the smartphone era, we never turned on the television in the middle of the night when we went to the bathroom, and we didn’t sleep with our television sets lying next to us in the bed. And though we may have watched television for hours on end, binge-watching is far more common today, encouraged by features designed into Netflix and other video services. Yes, we got up in the middle of night occasionally to watch television, but it was far less convenient and also far less addictive. Late-night TV was pretty bad, even after the cable television channel explosion. Its ability to grab attention pales by comparison with that of smartphones, which carry not only video services but also social networks, e-mails, text messaging, and the web in a small package that sits conveniently on our nightstand.

Evidence is mounting that binge-watching does indeed cause insomnia and shorten our sleep. In a recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 423 adults were surveyed on their screen habits, and 81 percent of them identified themselves as binge watchers. The study found that higher binge-watching frequency was associated with poorer sleep quality, greater fatigue, and insomnia.¹⁴ Because respondents did not find that normal television viewing affects sleep similarly, the authors speculate that the hyper-engaged state occurring during binge-watching is what harms sleep.

Even less-intense exposure to bright screens can reduce sleep. A study by Harvard University researchers found that using an iPad to read at night before going to sleep resulted in a 55 percent fall in melatonin production.¹⁵ The iPad cohort took an average of ten minutes longer than others to fall asleep, and when they did fall asleep, they spent less time in critical REM sleep, which scientists believe to be crucial to restoration. In the morning, those who had viewed the iPads before sleeping felt sleepier and took much longer to begin to feel completely awake and alert. And on that evening, the iPad users began to feel tired a full ninety minutes later than normal. Their circadian rhythms had been scrambled by only a few days of presleep exposure to the devices.

Such circadian disruption may be the constant state of most people today. We do seem to be sleeping less and less over time. According to a 2014 Centers for Disease Control study of hundreds of thousands of people, roughly one in three adult respondents gets less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, and one in ten gets less than five hours nightly.¹⁶ These studies are notoriously difficult to vet for accuracy, because self-reporting is always fraught. Nonetheless, a recent study took this question a step further by measuring actual smartphone screen time against sleep-behavior surveys. The findings were clear. More time spent on a smartphone screen correlated with poorer sleep quality and shorter sleep duration. This effect was more pronounced when smartphone use was close to bedtime.¹⁷

As discussed, sleep deprivation has been clearly associated with a host of health problems, such as depression and most of the diseases of modernity (metabolic disorders, heart problems, and obesity). As the evidence linking both less sleep and poor-quality sleep with more screen time continues to build, more scientists are concluding that our devil’s bargain with technology is making us sick and reducing our quality of life—and probably making us more depressed.

Technology Makes Us Lonelier and Sadder

Alex met Steven when they were both living in New York City. They briefly lived in the same neighborhood and shared friends in the media business.

In college, Steven had been active in campus politics and intramural sports. He’d hung out at the local coffee shop where students combined studying for classes with heated political debates. His life was almost a stereotype of what we expect people to do as university students, and he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation.

After graduation, Steven moved to New York City and worked as a Wall Street analyst for a number of years before taking an upper-management role at a company that sold packaged healthy food products. His job matched his ambitions and his aspirations. He liked the idea of helping people be healthy. He was proud of his accomplishments and worked hard.

The long hours at work took a toll. Rather than going out with friends, Steven defaulted to staying home and watching Netflix or Hulu. He stayed connected with his friends from school and home through social media and text messages. He often felt empty and wished he could return to college and the coffee shop. He could go to coffee shops in his city and enjoy a higher-quality, single-estate coffee served by a hipster barista, but all the technology couldn’t replace the company of friends.

Even when he was with others, Steven often felt that for him attending to a gadget was more important than the present moment. People always checked smartphones in the middle of dinner or at bars during games of pool or darts, and everyone wearing an Apple Watch was in a constant state of interruption. Steven got the urge to run away whenever he saw a Fitbit on someone’s wrist, because he knew the person would check it constantly during any conversation. Through it all, Steven wondered whether it was just he who felt that way or whether his friends—who looked so happy and adventurous on Facebook and who sounded smartly snarky with witty repartee on Twitter—did too.

Steven’s concerns echo those voiced by many people Vivek and Alex know—people single and married, young and old, from all over the world. They love their technology. They wouldn’t live without it. But the always-on lifestyle makes them lonelier and, ironically, less connected to those around them.

An Epidemic of Loneliness

In 2000, when the World Wide Web was still quite young, political scientist Robert Putnam, in his best-selling social critique Bowling Alone, wrote that technology was partly at fault for the growing disconnection of most Americans from friends, family, and society.¹⁸ This was prior to the mass adoption of smartphones, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Instacart, Blue Apron, and all the other services by which technology has encouraged us to fulfill our needs, social and commercial, via a screen rather than by venturing out into the world.

In their book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, John Cacioppo and William Patrick report that loneliness has increased markedly in the past fifty years.¹⁹ Cross-sectional studies show that between 11 percent and 20 percent of Americans felt lonely in the 1970s and 1980s, depending on the study; those percentages increased to 40 percent to 45 percent by 2010, again depending on the study.²⁰ (Longitudinal studies gave lower percentages, for reasons that are not yet clear.)

Recent surveys in the United Kingdom also found that more than half the population feels lonely.²¹ And people are most likely to be lonely in London, where they live in close proximity to many others and where technology adoption and consumption are extremely high. In the United States, a 2010 survey by the American Association of Retired Persons showed that more than 35 percent of Americans over the age of forty-five feel lonely some or all of the time. That survey also found that heavier users of technology were more likely to feel lonely than lighter users.²²

The problem is so acute that many leading authorities in public health are calling it “the loneliness epidemic.” Many of those experts blame the epidemic, as Putnam did, on technology and social media. Virtual connections are not a replacement for the real friendships that come from face-to-face meetings and the real social interactions we have while out in the world and off our devices.

These findings do not discount the use of online communications in ways that reduce loneliness or build connectedness. When Vivek is travelling in Asia or when Alex is on business in Germany or England, FaceTime or Skype sessions with their families help them to stay connected and close to their loved ones. When the online supplants the real world, though—when the SMS or e-mail becomes the default contact method, when we rarely or almost never spend time outside the tech bubble with people we care about or meet interesting people we would like to know—then it becomes cause for worry.

Chronic loneliness is harmful to your health, shortening life just as obesity and smoking do. People who are lonely or socially isolated or who live by themselves are more than 25 percent more likely than others to die within the next few years.²³

How large a role does technology play in this epidemic? A host of other causes probably have some influence, including an increase in the number of people living alone and of people living far away from parents, relatives, and the communities in which they grew up. But many surveys show that respondents have strongly implicated the adoption of technology as one of the major catalysts of feelings of loneliness and disconnection.

As discussed, John Cacioppo agrees. So does former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, who has become a leading voice advocating steps to mitigate tech-induced loneliness at work and at home. Murthy said on CBS News in 2017, “Technology can help or hurt; it’s simply a tool; but for too many people technology has led to substituting online connections for offline in-person connections, and ultimately I think that has been harmful.”²⁴ And MIT professor and author Sherry Turkle argues in her books Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together that technology has alienated us from each other by replacing traditional conversation and face-to-face interactions.²⁵

Social-science research offers mixed findings, with some research showing that communications technology use can be beneficial.²⁶ For example, Facebook use for some is associated with a greater sense of connectedness when it is used primarily for conversation and to lend support to others rather than for envious comparisons. In one study of students in Texas, researchers found a positive correlation between intensity of Facebook use and the subjects’ life satisfaction and civic engagement.²⁷ In another study, researchers found that by asking subjects to increase posting volume on Facebook, the experimentally induced increase in status updating activity reduced loneliness.²⁸

That said, the preponderance of studies that look at the pure volume of consumption indicate that isolation and loneliness arise from higher social-media usage. Researchers texted eighty-two subjects five times a day to ask them how Facebook influenced two critical components of subjective well-being: how they were feeling at that moment, and how satisfied they were with their lives. This type of study, called “experience sampling,” is a reliable method of measuring real-world behavior and psychological sensations. The researchers found that the more a respondent used Facebook over a two-week stretch, the worse he or she felt at the researchers’ next contact. The researchers’ conclusion: “On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.”²⁹

A much larger study, published in 2016, examined patterns of social-media consumption among 17,878 people between the ages of nineteen and thirty-two, using a twenty-minute online questionnaire. Respondents were split equally by gender, and 58 percent were Caucasian. More than one-third earned at least $75,000 per year. The survey respondents well represented fairly young adults across boundaries of economics, gender, and race.³⁰

The questions focused on how isolated and depressed respondents felt and how frequently they used major social-media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, and Reddit. The quartile of respondents who checked social media the most frequently (more than fifty times per week) were nearly three times as likely to feel socially isolated as were the quartile of respondents who checked social media the least frequently (only nine times per week). In other words, the study found a strong association between frequency of social media use and feelings of isolation, which strongly correlate with feelings of depression and loneliness.³¹

For Vivek and Alex, this study was eye-opening. Most people they know in media or who are very active in their circles check social media at least a dozen times a day, so nine times a week across the various platforms seems incredibly light.

What about the use of smartphones? People love their smartphones, but inability to disengage from them diminishes many other aspects of life.³² Researchers at the University of Essex found that the mere presence of a smartphone can harm the intimacy and quality of conversations.³³ In another study of young adults, researchers found that perception of a romantic partner’s higher smartphone dependency correlated with lower satisfaction with the relationship.³⁴ Another study found that being distracted by a cell phone in the presence of a romantic partner can cause conflict and lead to lower satisfaction with the relationship.³⁵

In a highly controversial and widely read article in The Atlantic, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” sociologist Jean Twenge argues that skyrocketing teenage loneliness and depression since 2011 follows from overexposure to screen communication and underexposure to personal interaction and books.³⁶ Critics claim that Twenge cherry-picked statistics to form her argument and that teens did not show significant increases in depression. Author and technology journalist Alexandra Samuel comments that “if we’ve let smartphones run roughshod over our lives, it’s not just because they offer respite from our annoying kids, but because they offer respite from our annoying selves.”³⁷

Your Family on Technology: More Time Together, More Technology, Less Connection

We have all seen it on the playground: a child calling out for the attention of a parent e-mailing or texting or posting on a social network. “Hang on a second, honey!” the parent calls back. In fact, at times in their lives, Alex and Vivek have both been that parent to a degree. Now, through the lens of this book and their research, they see parental distraction as a recurrent theme all around them.

Parents are spending significantly more time with their children than they did three decades ago, families are spending more time together, and spouses are also spending more time with each other. So we should be closer than ever, right? Yet we see evidence that loneliness is increasing across all age groups. What can explain this?

Increasingly, time spent together is also spent engaged with technology. In our society, we spend more time with our families, but for the majority of that time we are also spending time with our devices. The exception may be time spent with children: a few studies show that quality time actually does trump quantity time when it comes to parents’ spending time with their children.³⁸

We know from research on group dynamics that the mere presence of a cell phone has negative effects on closeness, connection, and conversation quality.³⁹ As writer Alexandra Samuel points out in her criticism of Twenge’s article, social-media use among adults skyrocketed from 2007 to 2010.⁴⁰ According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans between the ages of thirty and forty-nine who use social media rose from 6 percent in 2006 to 86 percent in 2016.⁴¹

Samuel argues that it’s not the kids who are the problem. Rather, distracted parents are doing even more damage through their inability to disconnect from their own tech. Samuel points to previous research, from the 1980s, that shows that distracted parenting causes significant stress for young children. (In that research, parents conducted another simultaneous activity while caring for their children.) More recent research by Brandon McDaniel and Jenny Radesky found that technological interruptions caused by parents using smartphones are strongly associated with eruption of problem behaviors among young children.⁴²

The Internet, along with the technology connected with it, monopolizes attention powerfully enough to erode family closeness, diminishing the family experience on measures that are basic and intuitive. According to a 2008 Pew Internet report, busy tech-using families are less likely to share meals.⁴³ In another study, researchers tracked seventy-three families for two years to examine the effects of Internet use on social involvement and psychological well-being. The families all used the Internet extensively, and greater use corresponded with less conversation with each other, a smaller social circle of friends around the family, and more depression and loneliness.⁴⁴ As we have stated before, this is all very new territory. And, certainly, technology can bring parents and children—and families—closer together in other ways. But without conscious monitoring and understanding of the interactions, technology has the potential to disrupt and harm family interactions.

How Technology Changes Our Brains

Because evidence suggests that even into old age our brains are more plastic than we had ever imagined they were, the effects of technology use on the physical structure and functional systems of our brains are worth examining. Already, clear evidence shows that screen technologies change our fundamental brain structure. London black-cab drivers must pass a daunting test of geospatial acuity called “the Knowledge” before they can receive their licenses. Researchers performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on cabbie trainees prior to their intense studies to acquire the Knowledge and again after they passed the Knowledge test successfully. In the second MRI, the cabbies who had passed showed an increase in the size of the posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with spatial memory.

Subsequent experiments have shown worrying effects of using GPS devices or turn-by-turn software in lieu of navigating by reading maps or using landmarks. Researchers at McGill University in Canada used fMRIs to compare the brain activity of older people who used GPS devices and those who used landmarks to find their way.⁴⁵ The researchers noted significantly lower brain activity in the hippocampi of GPS users. They speculated that low brain activity could lead to atrophy of the hippocampus, which might lead to cognitive disorders later in life. Alzheimer’s disease is associated with impairments to the hippocampus, causing its sufferers difficulty with spatial orientation and remembering where they are. Researchers also found a greater volume of gray matter in those who used spatial navigation, and this group scored higher on standardized cognition tests. This research suggests that using maps and building cognitive maps is better for the brain over the long term than relying predominantly on GPS.

There are probably other ways in which using tech in lieu of our memory compromises our brain function and potentially our ability to do big-picture thinking. For instance, Nicholas Carr makes the argument that Google search activities have reduced our ability to read deeply and replaced it with a proclivity to skim.⁴⁶ He cites a study by researchers from University College London that found that visitors to two popular research sites rarely read more than one or two pages and bounce quickly from one hyperlink to the next.⁴⁷ Carr made the controversial argument that Google is actually making us stupid, which we don’t believe is true.

In fact, there is plenty of counter-evidence suggesting that Google and heavy Internet usage does have beneficial effects such as enhanced brain function.⁴⁸ And humans have long sought to use technology to aid memory, from lists to abacuses for calculation. But we have never before experienced technology that has supplanted reliance on our memory in so many capacities. I don’t mean only phone numbers, bank account numbers, and historical snippets; alarmingly, we now refer to YouTube to remind ourselves of skills that previously we fluently recalled: how to clean the lens of a camera, how to dice vegetables, and the like. And wayfinding and following directions to places fall into this category. Research also implies that we are developing a strong dependence on search engines as the default means of finding information.⁴⁹

It appears that our growing reliance on digital information retrieval is self-reinforcing, making us less and less likely to attempt to recall simple facts rather than Google them. In a study of university students, half of the students were instructed to answer a set of somewhat difficult questions on their own; the other half were instructed to use the Internet. The researchers then gave the students a set of easy questions. Both groups were instructed to use the Internet if they wanted to. Those who had initially found answers on the Internet were more likely to rely on it in answering the easy questions—to which they probably knew the answer. The researchers concluded that this may be an early sign of changes in how we use our memory.⁵⁰

This study dovetails with other research that used brain imaging of habitual Internet users to show that they generate significantly more activity in short-term memory than less-frequent Internet users in performing online tasks.⁵¹ In other words, our brains more easily learn to disregard and discard information we find on line than information we find off line in printed matter. This has serious implications, because long-term memories are necessary to critical thinking and other deep thinking capabilities.

Additionally, this growing dependence has implications for the quality of the information we receive, because search engines’ algorithms are not designed to optimize for knowledge but instead are highly commercial vehicles with algorithmic intermediaries whose biases and rules are opaque to us. In short, their primary purpose is to sell our attention to people who want to sell us stuff, rather than to provide us with the information we seek, which is secondary.

As well, when we can use search engines to access information, we humans tend to believe that we know more than in fact we do know.⁵² This false confidence has some troubling implications, because narrow information without a connection to a broader understanding of facts and context derived from a good store of relevant memories results in shallower understanding. This, in turn, could make us more likely to fall prey to psychological biases, such as the confirmation bias (the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information consistent with one’s existing beliefs) or recency bias. In others, when we allow search engines to thin our pool of stored facts, then our ability to process and validate information from searches as part of a broader understanding may be diminished and impaired. The limiting aspects of social media, search engines, and smartphones readily explain how our thinking and the information we receive can so easily take on the status of truth. As Eli Parisier outlines in his book, the algorithms and digital intermediaries shape what we find, what we find shapes what we think we know, and what we think we know shapes what we think is the truth.⁵³

To be fair, other types of technology and other activities also change our brain structure. Learning foreign languages and studying music both result in structural changes. Certainly the advent of reading from print, and later television, caused some physical changes to our brain structure. Smartphones, though, are new in their ubiquity and in substituting for so much mental activity in our lives. Though that opens up new opportunities to help us—for example, we can quickly learn about health problems—it may also enable our technology exposure to swamp or eradicate beneficial activities, fostering unhealthy reliance and a rewiring of our brains to favor the behavior that search engines, social networks, and video games favor.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to say whether technology’s influence on our brain structures is affecting our well-being. But we do appear to be undergoing long-term rewirings of our brains in ways we don’t understand and have not examined.

A Lesser Version of Our Selves

We’ve talked here about how misuse of technology can make us unhealthy, ruin our love lives, and come between us and our families. The very, very deepest root of all these ills may well be that technology as we use it today makes us worse people: more narcissistic, less empathetic, less friendly, less caring. Facebook, for instance, is supposed to be about connection and sharing. But Facebook and other social media are equally important for self-presentation, another key human trait. Never before have we had such a perfect platform for self-presentation: infinitely scalable, immediate, and free.⁵⁴ And how do we choose to use it? To build Potemkin villages that often mask rather than communicate.

Driving, Texting, Dying

Thousands of people die every year because drivers are texting or using a smartphone while driving.

Director and author Werner Herzog created a half-hour documentary in 2013 for AT&T that portrayed the devastation of families whose loved ones have been killed by distracted drivers. This film, along with others in a series on YouTube, has been viewed tens of millions of times and garnered dozens of news articles. Meanwhile, deaths from distracted driving increased sharply from 2010 to 2015.⁵⁵ The poignant films, as well as aggressive “Don’t text and drive” campaigns on many state highways, have inexplicably failed to reduce the incidence of this dangerous act.

How is it possible that people can continue to make this choice even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the dangers and constant reminders of the consequences? In the largest distracted-driving study ever undertaken—one that relied on actual cell phone measurements rather than surveys—safe-driving app company Zendrive found in 2017 that drivers used their smartphones in some capacity on 88 percent of driving journeys.⁵⁶

Dying for technology—or killing someone else through our technology addiction—is the ultimate intrusion of tech into our lives. All those who text and drive have the executive ability to stop texting, and even to take an action such as placing their phones in their vehicles’ glove compartments or on rear seats—and they know that they should not text while driving.

This problem underscores the ultimate power and peril of the technology we invite into our lives. Distracted driving used to mean talking on the mobile phone while driving. Of course, this is a very dangerous activity. But the rise of texting came after we had already adopted mobile phones. The younger generations no longer spend much time talking on the phone. Texting, by SMS or Snapchat or other means, occupies far more of their time. And texting, which requires both fine manual dexterity and close attention to a small screen, is twenty-three times as dangerous as talking on a phone while driving, according to a study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.⁵⁷ The Zendrive study showed that a driver distracted by texting for just two seconds—during which interval a car moving at thirty miles per hour travels twenty-nine yards without driver supervision—increases the likelihood of crashing by 2,000 percent.

We couldn’t have easily predicted how commonly drivers would risk their lives in this way, just as we couldn’t have easily predicted that young children would soon start gaining access to screens and electronic media in their bedrooms for hours each day and well into the night. Most of the destructive behaviors and consequences of our technology choices sneak up on us. Adoption and participation rates suggest that we as a society continue to hold an overwhelmingly positive view of how technology will affect our lives, even in the face of evidence to the contrary as plain and clear as a blood-stained stretch of highway and the twisted wreckage of a car.

The technology companies are complicit in this sad state of affairs. There are obvious ways to stop people from using smartphones while driving. For example, the car companies could simply block mobile-phone texting or voice usage while a car is moving if there is only one occupant in the car, or allow mobile-phone operation from the passenger seats only. But fixing problems when your customers don’t want the fixes takes a real commitment. In fact, vehicle manufacturers are actually moving in the opposite direction, seeking to install Wi-Fi in vehicles. True, technology companies have made modest efforts to restrict smartphone use while driving. Apple added a Do Not Disturb While Driving mode to iOS 11, for example, in the autumn of 2017. But technology companies have for the most part not taken this problem seriously enough to bring about a reduction in distracted driving.