Raising Humans in a Digital World
Page 12
The dopamine reward center that notifications and rewards activate is the same area of the brain that experiences pleasure from eating, sex, drugs, alcohol, and gambling. This is big news, because for a long time the scientific community believed that the pleasure derived from playing World of Warcraft, for example, could never rise to the same level of addictive pleasure achieved with physical substances. It turns out they were wrong. The patterns of neurons firing across the brain in all these instances are almost identical. Today, PET scans and functional MRIs reveal an increase in glucose uptake in the areas of the brain that are pleasure-oriented, and the neurotransmitter associated with that process is dopamine.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras addresses this phenomenon in “It’s ‘Digital Heroin’: How Screens Turn Kids into Psychotic Junkies”: “We now know that those iPads, smartphones, and Xboxes are a form of digital drug. Recent brain imaging research is showing that they affect the brain’s frontal cortex—which controls executive functioning, including impulse control— the same way that cocaine does. Technology is so hyperarousing that it raises dopamine levels—the feel-good neurotransmitter most involved in the addiction dynamic—as much as sex.”12
It’s tough enough resisting technology when one has a fully functional frontal cortex, which, presumably, most adults do. But teens don’t have this biological advantage. And if that wasn’t enough of a handicap, a trifecta of other factors converge during the teenage years that makes this age group particularly vulnerable to technology’s charms.
First, beginning in early adolescence and peaking midway through, teens experience an increase in the activity of the neural circuits that use dopamine. This is why teens gravitate toward substances and experiences that yield rewards, such as social media “likes” and text message pings. During an experiment conducted at UCLA’s Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, researchers showed thirty-two teenagers’ photographs on a computer screen for twelve minutes and analyzed their brain activity, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.13 Each photo displayed the number of “likes” it had supposedly received from other teenage participants (in reality, the researchers assigned these “likes”). When the teens saw their own photos with a high number of “likes,” researchers observed increased activity in their brain’s reward circuitry, a region that researchers say is particularly sensitive during adolescence.
Second, in addition to experiencing pleasure from internet activities, teens are more easily addicted to that pleasure than adults. In her book The Teenage Brain, Dr. Frances Jensen explains that teens learn behaviors more quickly than adults, and addiction is a form of learning.14 This efficiency for learning a behavior that could later become an addiction has been observed in adolescents who smoke cigarettes. Teens who smoke cigarettes show higher rates of tobacco addiction than adults who smoke the same amount.15
Finally, compulsive or addictive behavior can hijack the brain’s ability to access the judgment center in the frontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain that should be asking, “How important is this text?” or “Do I need to check Snapchat every five minutes?” Since a person’s judgment center is not fully operational until the age of twenty-five, youth are already disadvantaged when making sound decisions. Most car rental car companies know this, which is why twenty-five is the minimum age to rent a car.16
So, let’s add this up. First, kids receive a dopamine hit every time their phones announce and deliver rewards, which is often. Second, kids are more easily addicted to pleasurable experiences, like those delivered by phones, than adults. And third, kids lack the judgment to know when to put down or ignore their phones.
One can understand why they seem “addicted.”
HIJACKING KIDS’ ATTENTION
Technology is designed to capture and hold our attention, and an entire science underlies this fact. Dr. B. J. Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University, was the first to articulate the discipline, coining the term “captology” in 1996. Captology is the study of computers as persuasive technologies. According to the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab website, captology includes “the design, research, ethics, and analysis of interactive computing products (computers, mobile phones, websites, wireless technologies, mobile applications, video games, etc.) created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors.”17
Fogg is perhaps best known for his signature “Behavior Model,” a system that explains how humans are driven to act a certain way when three forces converge: motivation, trigger, and ability. When they occur simultaneously, these three elements are the secret to eliciting a desired behavioral response from an unsuspecting device user. Using Fogg’s model, technology designers can even identify precisely what stops a user from performing the action they seek. As someone who has spent a good portion of her academic career studying media psychology, I find this utterly fascinating. As a mother, and educator, it deeply concerns me.
Reportedly, in 2007, seventy-five students filled a Stanford classroom to study this model under Fogg: “Ten weeks later, the students—who included future product designers for Facebook, Google, and Uber—had built apps that had amassed 16 million users, made $1 million in advertising revenue, and had cracked the code for creating apps we just can’t leave alone.”18
In his 2003 book, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, Fogg revealed what makes his model work. He, somewhat apocalyptically, wrote, “No human can be as persistent as a machine. Computers don’t get tired, discouraged, or frustrated. They don’t need to eat or sleep. They can work around the clock in active efforts to persuade or watch and wait for the right moment to intervene . . . when it comes to persuasion, this higher level of persistence can pay off.”19
It’s impossible for me to read these words and not think about my seventh-grade students and their horrified reactions to being asked to put down their phones for one day. They don’t stand a chance against the combined forces of biology and technology. And the tactics used to hijack their attention improve each year.
Here’s an example: When kids get “tagged” in a photo, they often receive an immediate notification, unless they’ve disabled this feature. When they’re texting or using Snapchat to message a friend, they instantly see when that friend begins typing a response (unless they also change that in their settings). YouTube, one of the sites kids use most, holds their attention by autoplaying a new video immediately after the one they are watching ends. Netflix and others use this strategy, too, cuing up the next episode or a similar show immediately upon the heels of the one being viewed. These design features are meant to keep kids (and adults) from leaving the conversation, site, or app—and these strategies work.
Snapchat (or “Snap”), one of the most popular social networks among teens, has designed spectacularly effective strategies to hold their attention, including the “Snapstreak.” When friends have “snapped” each other within twenty-four hours for more than three consecutive days, a Snapstreak begins. Snap rewards this behavior by displaying a flame emoji and how many days in a row friends have snapped each other, as an incentive to keep it up. Users even see an hourglass emoji next to their name if their Snapstreak is about to expire.
Driven to keep Snapstreaks going, some teens will give friends their login information and beg them to snap on their behalf if, God forbid, they have to be away from their phones (perhaps due to a pesky homework assignment like the no-media one I assigned).
“It’s so stressful keeping up a streak,” one young girl told me. “But I feel like if I’m the one ending it, I’m also ending the friendship, and I don’t want to be the one doing that.”
Resisting the urge to respond immediately to a text message or maintain a Snapstreak can cause anxiety to spike in teens. Even being in the same room as an unanswered phone or an ignored streak causes adrenals and cortisol (stress hormone) levels to become and stay elevated. This spike in cortisol can increase blood pressure, heart rate, and anxiety, and c
an cause a dip in mental performance. The easiest way to self-medicate this discomfort is to pick up the phone and attend to whatever is happening on it. Succumb to this urge, and wham, you’re rewarded with a comforting dose of dopamine.
I think about this while watching my own teenage daughter try to do her homework. She seems to get interrupted every minute with a question or comment from a friend (although most interruptions are related to her homework). Even with her ringer off, that damn phone buzzes like an angry rattlesnake. We’ve talked about this endlessly, and though she is pretty good at “unplugging” (interestingly, it’s usually when I need to get in touch with her), that’s not realistic when she needs her device to do homework.
So why don’t companies who invent the products kids use take their vulnerabilities (and homework) into consideration when designing these devices? Don’t they have a social responsibility to do so? I asked Ouri Azoulay this question. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Azoulay is the former CEO of PureSight, one of the world’s original parental monitoring software companies. Today, PureSight’s software is used all over the world, and one of its most popular features lets parents control how much time their kids spend online.
“It’s just as easy to design an algorithm that keeps kids from using phones excessively, as it is to create one that encourages them to use phones excessively,” says Azoulay. “But remember, when consumers spend more time online—whether that consumer is seven or seventy—that means more money, more advertising revenues, and more in-app purchases. Bottom line, it’s a business.”20
That’s what Gabe Zichermann told me, too. One of the world’s foremost experts on gamification, user engagement, and behavioral change, Zichermann is an entrepreneur, behavioral designer, public speaker, author of multiple books, and self-described “bon vivant.” Despite his obvious enthusiasm for technology, he finds the issue of addictive technology “really insidious and deeply concerning.”21 His newest venture, an app called “Onward,” uses the latest science and artificial intelligence to help users curb addictive behaviors.
“The most important headline here,” explains Zichermann, “is tech companies can’t charge for the products by and large, and as a result they have resorted to coming up with ways to get and keep people addicted to their products, meaning, we will not shame Facebook or the games industry into making their products less good. That’s not going to happen.” Zichermann says this problem “cuts across every socioeconomic status, every category of product and service—it’s everywhere. Although Facebook and Instagram are two of today’s biggest offenders, they’re only two of many companies. There’s no possible way to pressure everyone.”22
IS CHANGE ON THE HORIZON?
Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist (and a graduate of B. J. Fogg’s Stanford lab), left Google and founded a nonprofit called Time Well Spent. His mission is to persuade technology companies and designers to make products that don’t “hijack our minds.” As he explained to National Public Radio (NPR), “most companies aren’t really thinking about how their products might affect kids, because most designers aren’t much more than kids themselves.”23
“Age really matters,” explained Harris, “because if you don’t have anybody in the company with kids, for example, how sensitive would you be to what this is doing to that generation?” Harris calls this “a huge blind spot, especially at a young company like Snapchat.”24 Snapchat, whose founders were in college when they designed the app in 2011, is used daily by 54 percent of U.S. teens, 47 percent of whom claim it as their most important social network.25
Many leading technologists and tech investors have recently jumped on to Harris’s bandwagon. Two of Apple’s biggest investors asked the company to study the health effects of its products and to make it easier to limit children’s use of iPhones and iPads.26 Apple’s chief executive officer, Tim Cook, told The Guardian there should be limits to technology in school and that, personally, “he does not want his nephew to use a social network.”27 In a highly publicized interview, Sean Parker, of Napster fame and the founding president of Facebook, told Axios that the company knew it was creating something addictive and said, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”28 Dozens of pediatric and mental health experts have called on Facebook to abandon “Messenger Kids,” a social media messaging service for children as young as six, saying it “preys on a vulnerable group developmentally unprepared to be on the social network.”29 Meanwhile, a growing movement called “Wait Until 8th” encourages parents to take a pledge not to give their children smartphones until eighth grade.30
Today, Harris has a new venture, the Center for Humane Technology, which is supported by an impressive group of concerned technologists. Its website announces their bold vision: “Reversing the digital attention crisis and realigning technology with humanity’s best interests.”31 A webpage titled “The Way Forward” claims, “Humane design is the solution,” and that the center will be “creating humane design standards, policy, and business models that more deeply align with our humanity and how we want to live.”32
Zichermann told me of his concern with this vision, which he says he’s raised directly with Harris, and it’s this: “Companies and organizations, when they feel put upon, by government or by pressure groups, end up agreeing to self-regulate. And in the process of doing so, it ends up being mostly just lip service.” He urged me to recall the pressure that was once exerted upon the alcohol industry. What we ended up with was a tagline: Please Drink Responsibly. “This was literally the maximum that alcoholic beverage companies had to do to address the question of the addictiveness of their product. So that’s where this ends up,” says Zichermann, “unless we empower people with tools to set their own limits.”33
EMPOWERING KIDS TO SET THEIR OWN LIMITS
While empowering your kids with tools to set their own limits with technology sounds oxymoronic, it’s the most effective strategy I can offer you (short of waiting for government or industrywide regulation or reform to happen). The following steps will help you achieve a happy and healthy balance between online and offline life, for your entire family.
Step 1: Educate Yourself About Screen Time Guidelines
In the spring of 2015, I accepted an invitation from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to attend “Growing Up Digital: A Media Research Symposium” in Rosemont, Illinois. The purpose of this event—which brought together leading social scientists, neuroscientists, media researchers, educators, pediatricians, and others—was to give the AAP a chance to explore the current evidence-based research on the impact of increasing media exposure upon a child’s physical, cognitive, social, and emotional health.
For many years the AAP, a respected source of information for parents and pediatricians, stood by a policy statement they issued in 1999 and, even as media changed, their policy did not: Children ages two and under should avoid all screens, and for children older than two, parents should allow a maximum of two hours per day of high-quality material.
If, as you read this, you find yourself muttering, “Are you kidding me?” then join the club. That’s the typical reaction of parents who compare it to the actual screen time habits of today’s kids. But science doesn’t care about habits. It cares about drawing conclusions from scientific data, preferably long-term. Hard to come by with brand-new technologies.
To its credit, instead of waiting for long-term research to roll in, the good doctors of the AAP convened their symposium to study the data on hand. Then, after taking eighteen months to digest it, they released updated recommendations in October 2016.34 You may recognize these guidelines for young children from Chapter 1:
•For children younger than eighteen months, avoid use of all screen media other than video chatting. Parents of children eighteen to twenty-four months of age who want to introduce digital media should choose high-quality programming and watch it with their children, to help them understand what they’re seeing.
•For children
ages two to five years, limit screen use to one hour per day of high-quality programs. Parents should co-view media with children, to help them understand what they are seeing and apply it to the world around them.
Regarding older children, the AAP decided to stay away from numbers altogether and focus on limits, content, and communication:
•For children ages six and older, place consistent limits on the time spent using media, and the types of media, and make sure media does not supplant adequate sleep, physical activity, and other behaviors essential to health.
•Designate media-free times together, such as dinner or driving, as well as media-free locations at home, such as bedrooms.
•Have ongoing communication about online citizenship and safety, including treating others with respect online and offline.
To make it “easy” for parents to follow these new recommendations, the AAP created an online Family Media Use Tool (https://www.healthychildren.org/English/media/Pages/default.aspx), to help parents manage the time each of their children spends online.
But here’s the rub: Even with these new guidelines and this helpful tool, actual implementation requires parents to do the following:
•Find and choose the right programming.
•Co-view and discuss the right programming with their children.
•Limit and manage screen time for each child, based on her age.
•Ensure the essentials of daily living don’t get lost in a Netflix binge.
As you know, parents are busy. It is difficult for even the most well intentioned to source the right programming, let alone squeeze in an hour here and there to co-view and discuss it with their children, especially when that media often offers a much-needed respite from the demanding job of parenting. But the consequences of not taking time to do this are too severe to ignore.