Why putting down the phone and enjoying the summer is harder than you think
More than self-help techniques needed for mobile devices designed to be addictive
Most anyone who owns a smartphone knows the feeling: You pick it up to check the weather — then you see a news headline pop up. Then a recipe. Then a notification from a friend on social media.
Before you know it, you've been on the phone for an hour or more, swiping and scrolling through an endless river of posts, videos — and advertisements.
As the summer months roll along, you might feel powerless to tear your eyes and thumbs from the phone and actually get outside to enjoy the weather.
But it's not your fault, experts say, because the companies that design our devices are intentionally working to make them addictive.
"We don't realize it, because the designs that tech companies have made to keep us online longer are invisible to us," said Gaia Bernstein, a technology, privacy and policy professor at Seton Hall Law School in Newark, N.J., and author of Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies.
"They also want to make sure that we think it's our responsibility. And that's a very old trick that corporate industries have used for many years."
Infinite scrolls, infinite content
Bernstein, in an interview with Spark's Nora Young, cited a number of features and tricks meant to keep us glued to our phones that by now have become ubiquitous, no matter what phone or social network app we use.
Infinite scrolling, for example, ensures that there's no end or "next page" button after browsing a certain number of stories or videos. Whether on YouTube, Netflix or TikTok, a new video automatically plays as soon as you finish the previous one — unless you manually turn off the option.
According to Bernstein, Snapchat is home to "the most vile feature of all of them": streaks.
Users build streaks when mutual friends on the app exchange messages every day. The more consecutive Snaps they send, the higher their streak count climbs. Visual and audio cues such as a flame icon appear as you build a higher streak — but skipping a day brings your streak count back to zero.
The concept isn't unfamiliar if you've played any number of mobile games with friendship networks, such as Pokémon Go. But streaks have become so popular that in March, Snapchat introduced a way for U.S. users to restore a lost streak. The first "Streak Restore" is free, but subsequent uses cost 99 cents US.
Bernstein said the feature, introduced in 2015, is more about revenue than user engagement. "The whole idea is to get people on Snapchat so they will see the advertising," she said.
In 2019, the U.K.'s privacy regulator drafted a code of conduct that proposed penalties on companies that promoted "nudge" techniques, such as Snapchat streaks or Facebook "likes," to minors.
"We've designed streaks thoughtfully so they're a positive experience for our community," Snap Inc., said in an emailed statement. "There are no nudging notifications, public-facing incentives or in-app reminders to maintain a streak, and all Snapchatters have the ability to restore a streak if it lapses."
The company added that "in recent years," it made streak emoji graphics "less prominent" than before. It also touted a new ability to "freeze" streaks when users "want to go off the grid," which is limited to users who pay for its premium Snapchat+ service.
Phones are 'engineered to be addictive'
Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatry professor at California's Stanford University and author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, said phones "are engineered to be addictive" — roping users into a "compulsive state of overconsumption and, in some cases, outright addiction."
Flashy graphic and musical flourishes reward us for continued use, not unlike a slot machine on a crowded casino floor. And push notifications, often accompanied by a ring and vibration, grab your attention even if you're not actively using your phone.
Lembke said people often start overusing an app or device for many of the same reasons they might use a drug.
"That problem can range anywhere from boredom, isolation to depression, insomnia, inattention and everything in between," she explained.
We can be compelled to keep using our devices even if we don't like the news, videos or other content we're seeing — a phenomenon known as "doomscrolling."
"What ends up happening is you get sucked into negative news updates and ... armchair analysis of current news events, particularly negative events, because they are so pervasive now," said journalist Karen K. Ho, who helped popularize the term.
Lembke said there's a "general consensus" among health-care providers that people can be addicted to technology; however it's not currently included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Bernstein said video-gaming addiction is the only type of tech addiction that's formally recognized by the World Health Organization as of 2018.
Despite how often people talk about being addicted to tech, she said, it's usually more accurate to say we're overusing it.
Some legal steps are being taken to tackle technology overuse, particularly for children and students, but it remains to be seen how or whether they will be effective.
Seattle's public school district filed a lawsuit in January against TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat in an attempt to hold them accountable for a decline in youths' mental health.
In Canada, some schools are experimenting with banning phones in the classroom, though debate continues on whether it will help or harm students' mental health.
And a proposed class-action lawsuit led by a parent in British Columbia alleges that Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, designed the video game to be "as addictive as possible" for children — although it's not exclusively available on mobile devices.
Do screen time trackers help?
Major device manufacturers now include apps that can track and set hard limits on how much you use your phone or certain apps. On Apple's iPhones, it's called Screen Time; Google Android phones call it Digital Wellbeing.
Bernstein said she doubts these tools are very useful for weaning people off of devices that were designed to encourage compulsive use in the first place.
"Instead of giving self-help measures, I have to think about how we can solve this collectively by exerting pressures on technology companies to redesign [the devices] ... and not hope that people can help themselves. Because they can't," she said.
She pointed to a 2020 column by Android Central writer Daniel Bader, who found the Digital Wellbeing app "hasn't really stopped my scrolling — it's just sapped the fun out of it."
In an email to CBC, Apple pointed to its Focus app, which includes options to put notifications to sleep, and to its parental controls settings on iPhones, as additional tools beyond Screen Time.
How to stop the summer of scroll
Given the myriad ways tech is designed to keep us online for as long as possible, one can be forgiven for wondering what we can do to help us separate from our smartphones long enough to enjoy the sunny — and short — Canadian summer.
Lembke suggests starting small with a "24-hour digital fast" — and if you're spending a weekend at the cottage or visiting the park with friends or family, everyone can do it together.
"Just even pay attention to the number of times you think about your phone and want to touch it, because that alone can be a wake-up call for a lot of people," she said.
American psychologist and author Jean Twenge, whose 2017 book iGen interrogated how tech affects Generation Z (people born roughly between 1995 and 2012), advised parents to "put off giving your child a full-blown smartphone as long as possible."
She told The Sunday Magazine's David Common that there are lots of options for teen and preteen kids, like flip phones or other phones with only basic text and calling functions, without support for the apps that drain away our time.
Bernstein said it will likely take a while before government and legal actions dramatically shape our screen time habits. But in the meantime, small things may help "bridge the gap" — such as deleting the one app you use the most from your phone.
"I think we need to do everything we can to try to change norms in little ways, until things change more socially."
Interviews with Gaia Bernstein and Anna Lembke produced by Samraweet Yohannes
