Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (6 page)

Have you ever felt you should
C
ut down on your usage?

To help you, here are some telltale signs from my own life:

• Your friends constantly make sarcastic comments about your smartphone or Facebook use and say things like “Look at Kim on her iPhone again! She’s so much fun to have dinner with!” I’ve gotten this one hundreds of times.

• You’ve made life-changing decisions because of your addiction (e.g., you failed to go to class because you were immersed in heavy stalking of your ex, or perhaps you called in sick to work because you drunk-texted a coworker the night before and simply could not stand to be seen).

Have you ever been
A
nnoyed by your friends’ criticism of your addiction?

Again, use my own experiences as a guide:

• Your friends tell you in advance that they will only go to dinner with you if you keep your smartphone in your bag and away from the table. In response, you get defensive and threaten to call the dinner off.

• Your friends grab your phone out of your hand while you are texting in an effort to express their annoyance and, in turn, you grab theirs out of their bag and throw them on the floor.

Have you ever felt
G
uilty or bad about your usage?

These are particularly embarrassing for me:

• You have started faking bathroom trips during dinners to get your fix without people knowing about it because you feel guilty.

• You find yourself lying about your usage to almost everyone you know.

• You write an entire book about it (ugh).

Do you ever need to check your smartphone first thing in the morning (an
E
ye-opener) in order to start your day and steady your nerves?

Things to admit to yourself:

• You cannot go more than ten minutes (one minute) after you wake up without checking your smartphone/social media.

• Not seeing your phone on your bedside in the morning sends you into a state of complete anxiety. You jump out of bed, find your laptop, and use the Find My iPhone app to create loud pings to see if you can find it. If that doesn’t work, you begin blaming others. Someone must have stolen it! Later, you find it in the bathroom.

When I used the CAGE questions as a guide to talk to people in my generation about their smartphone and Internet use, I estimated that 96 percent of us were addicted. The language we used to talk about our digital lives was strikingly similar to the words used by other friends and people I’ve spoken to who have gone through actual substance abuse. Our lives are full of shame and secrecy. One person admitted, “I try to hide from my boyfriend the fact that when I wake up each morning, I roll over and check my Facebook and Instagram, and pretend that I am really just on my side taking a vitamin and drinking water.” Also, do people really keep vitamins by their bedside? All I have are my phone/iPad/computer and their respective chargers.

William Powers, author of
Hamlet’s BlackBerry
, describes our addiction as akin to being on a “hamster wheel” of always needing another hit of dopamine. He said to me,
“There is something satisfying that we all feel deep inside when we hear the sound of a new e-mail coming in or see
that . . . light on our phones. But really, how satisfying is it? How much is that micro-feeling adding to your life versus what you are giving up by dividing your attention?”

• • •

Media, television networks, and even some schools are finding that their only choice is to play into our acquired attention deficit disordered brains and create shorter programming, send out constant reminders about school-related events on websites and Twitter pages, and write countless blog posts in order to reach this new type of increasingly addled mind.

The media has been equally affected. I remember writing two-hundred-fifty-word articles for the
MTV News
website and being asked to cut them down to just one hundred or one hundred twenty-five words because our audience would get bored and click away. (Thank God; it became outrageously tiring to find two hundred fifty words to say about Miley—this of course was before her 2013
VMA
“performance.”) In one year, the suggested word count went down to seventy-five or even
fifty
—barely enough words to convey anything remotely journalistic beyond a bulleted list of comments and a joke or two.

The constant distractions and all our time online are clearly affecting our brains and may even be leading to new challenges in learning. Matt Richtel’s 2010
New York Times
article “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” featured a group of bright kids who were failing many of their classes because they did not have the attention span to
finish the assignments, and in some cases even forgot to do homework. They were consistently plugged in—surfing the Web, texting, playing video games—and younger brains, which are still developing, get used to this behavior. Richtel wrote, “ ‘Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,’ said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston.” Dr. Rich and other experts are worried that staring at screens will rewire kids’ brains, with harmful and lasting effects. Teachers are concerned that their students can’t concentrate at all and that they are leaving high school with less-than-ideal reading, writing, and discussion skills. Some teachers are resorting to reading books aloud in class because students can’t focus long enough to read twenty pages of a chapter at night.

These detrimental effects are more obvious in developing brains but can be seen in adult brains as well. Nonstop distraction hinders productivity.
According to a 2011 study by Cisco, 24 percent of college students and young professionals “experience three to five interruptions in a given hour, while 84 percent get interrupted at least once while trying to complete a project.”
Further, a recent study of university students found that those who multitasked heavily in a variety of media—texting, instant messaging, Facebooking, and tweeting while at work or a social gathering—were less likely to process information in a meaningful way. They had slower response times, were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, were unable to switch
tasks easily, and retained useless information in their short-term memory. In other words, they may not have been born with ADD, but it certainly seems as though they
acquired
it.

Perhaps we were never meant to multitask. After all, according to the aforementioned study of university students,
“processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition.” Further, psychiatrist and author Edward M. Hallowell describes multitasking as a
“mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.” It’s why your mom told you to turn off the TV while doing your homework,
why some companies are now preventing their employees from using some social media sites, and why people have died while texting and driving. As Dr. Richard Cytowic explains on his
Fallible Mind
blog,
“The same inefficiency that freezes up your computer bogs down a brain when it is forced to divide attention among multiple tasks . . . In a world of nonstop distraction, you may be able to juggle things for a while, but you can’t keep it up; it simply takes more energy and bandwidth than we have.”

Never giving our brains a break is dangerous; according to the
New York Times
article by Matt Richtel,
scientists in California found that rats were only able to develop permanent or long-lasting memories after experiencing something new if they
rested
. No one likes to be compared to a rodent, but we all need to power down in order to process our experiences in a valuable way, to retain what we have learned and establish the memory. Other research shows
that taking a quick rest will actually
enhance
our memory. As reported in
Psychological Science
, two groups of individuals listened to a story, after which one group played a video game and another shut their eyes for about ten minutes. The study found that
“memory can be boosted by taking a brief ‘wakeful rest’ after learning something verbally new and that memory lasts not just immediately but over a longer term.” Apparently, whatever we do in the short time after we learn something new will determine the quality of our memory. We don’t necessarily need to take a nap—we just need to take a break from all the noise. We need more Thoreau-inspired experiences. We need to find our own Waldens.
A University of Michigan study revealed that walking in nature helped people learn more effectively than walking through a busy urban environment, which may mean that our brains get fatigued from an onslaught of information. I can tell which chapters of this book I wrote at my apartment in New York City versus the ones I wrote out in the country at my parents’ house. I notice that I have a harder time finding my voice in the chapters written in the oversaturated and bustling city. You’ll probably notice too. Being in the silence of the country allows me to relax just enough so that I actually absorb what I am writing and how it sounds. This type of downtime is essential for our brains to work better, but in a constant state of stimulation, we’re not allowing ourselves to have it.

In addition to making us less responsive to people we love and perhaps a bit dumber, our addiction also makes us do some pretty crazy things. Thirty percent of people I
talked to seemed alarmed when reading a sentence in which the word
BlackBerry
referred to a fruit, almost half the people know how to drive with their knees so that they can text and drive, and just over 20 percent admitted to only buying fingerless gloves because it’s too hard to text while wearing regular gloves or mittens. One Christmas, I actually cut the fingers off a beautiful pair of cashmere gloves my mother bought me so that I could freely type on my phone during my wintertime commute. I am still disturbed by this, though apparently I’m not disturbed enough to have refrained from specifically asking my parents for fingerless gloves the following Christmas.

I am admittedly one of those people who tend to lose things easily and frequently. This year, I made the decision to attach an adhesive pocket to the back of my iPhone to serve as a wallet. I may lose my wallet five times in a year, but it’s almost impossible to lose something that I’m checking every two to three minutes, so I finally arrived at the brilliant idea that if I actually turn my iPhone into a wallet, I won’t lose anything. My iPhone has functioned as my wallet for over a year now and I have yet to cancel any cards or take that arduous trip to the DMV to replace my license.

A few years ago, I sat on a panel at South by Southwest about teenage cell phone use in America. When one of the speakers mentioned that he missed the good ol’ days when people used to put down their phones during dinner and pay attention to their friends instead of texting or scrolling through Facebook, the room lit up with excited nods and chants of “Yes!” The audience included smartphone addicts
like me, bloggers, and digital media professionals—basically all the kinds of people who annoy you at dinner because they can’t put down their devices. Yet all of us were agreeing enthusiastically that we hated how much our dinner companions and friends constantly ignored
us
. I wondered if some of the people nodding in staunch agreement were sort of guiltily admitting that they are often the ones who are too busy tweeting, Instagramming, e-mailing, Tumblring, Facebooking, BBMing, or Snapchatting to give their friends and family the attention they deserve—I know I was.

We hate ourselves for using these things so much, but we learn to live with the guilt—we are
relieved
instead of aggravated or insulted when others take out their phones at dinner, because it means we can too. It’s like when you want to cancel plans with someone but are dreading that awkward e-mail and then they send you a text canceling before you have the chance to! The best. That is how I feel when I see a friend take out her phone at dinner. What a relief. I can now reach for mine. We can remember when we were focused and attentive, and it bothers us, but that doesn’t mean we will stop.

While on the panel, I began to notice how the reactions differed throughout the audience. The group consisted mainly of people in my age group, between twenty-five and thirty-five, but there were also several teenagers, as well as a few people who were at least forty or fifty. When the complaints about tech and smartphone addiction were raised, those in their midtwenties and early thirties were by far the most passionate—responding as if we were all
inmates of the same prison, aware of our lives beforehand, and dumbfounded by how we had let ourselves become captive to these devices that now run our lives. In contrast, the younger members of the audience seemed less annoyed and at times almost nonchalant and generally unaffected. I guess it makes sense if you consider that these digital natives haven’t known life any other way. But what really surprised me was that the older people in the room, those who had spent much more time in their lives
without
such technology, were just as affected by its hypnotizing pull.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of all the people I talked into joining Foursquare (my parents, seven friends, and two coworkers), my
dad
was the one who became the most addicted. Foursquare is the location-based social media game that crowns a person “mayor” of any location once they have visited and “checked in” at a place more than anyone else. It works with your phone’s GPS functionality, so you need to actually be at or very near the place at which you are requesting to “check in.” When someone checks in more than you, Foursquare sends you an e-mail saying that you’ve been “ousted” as the mayor. The other day I was ousted from my mayorship of the Amanpulo resort in the Philippines. It destroys me that I will likely never get it back and there is nothing I can do about it.