Source: /pixabay On June 12, 2018, A New York Times headline read “AT&T Wins Approval for $85.4 Billion Time Warner Deal”. Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T since 2007, is quoted as having argued during the trial: “We want people engaged with their mobile devices all day watching movies and video.”
For months I have been mulling over the dangers this goal poses to psychological well-being. Focusing attention on electronic screens and valuing entertainment as a full-time activity each affects people in destructive ways.
Where is our attention focused?
- Babies find nothing more compelling than a moving image, especially if it includes colors. Our innate impulse to organize our sensory environment so that we can make sense of what William James labeled “the buzzing, booming confusion” of the world outside of the womb, leads babies to focus on what most attracts or arouses them. Depending on temperament of the child and content of the material, moving images provoke the positive emotion of interest, as the child follows the changes and is engaged by watching, or the moving images may frighten, when complexity and duration trigger a negative state of arousal. If the images become stable and assimilated and a child can recognize what it sees, these same images can bring joy. But without stability, only arousal remains.
- Stated simply, my concern is that the human connection that results in a “secure attachment”, with its lifelong benefits of health, happiness and the support of social relationships, can be replaced by a relationship to a device, by definition one that a person can control to some extent but not in a truly interactive fashion. Pushing buttons or swiping a screen to make something happen is not the same as exchanging real-time information with a real person.
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Source: /pixabay In the spring of 2018, Yale University sponsored a conversation “Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines”. One of the panel participants, psychology professor Laurie Santos, offered a particularly lucid comment. She noted the truth that babies uncritically absorb what they observe in their earliest years. If a caregiver is constantly focused on a phone, why would the baby NOT believe that the phone is the most important target for engagement? A recent report that Silicon Valley mothers are requiring their nannies to sign “no screens” agreements suggests that even those who are most professionally involved in and rewarded by technology understand the damage that replacing live interactions with virtual ones can yield, even if we cannot yet predict exactly how it will manifest.
- To speculate, today we are breeding what a 2011 Museum of Modern Art exploration of the future of electronics, “Talk to Me”, labeled “digital natives”, children who become confused when a screen fails to respond to their commands or actions. The sense of agency and trust that a child develops in a relationship with a human cannot be created with a device; even Siri fails to deliver what may be requested with some unpredictable regularity.
- Worse, a relationship with a device lacks the human energy of a face-to-face relationship with a real person. In the 1970’s, Albert Mehrabian documented that 55% of the emotional meaning in a communication is conveyed by body language; another 38% by voice; and only 7% by the actual words being uttered. The support offered by a hug, the invitation in an outstretched human hand, the intimacy conveyed in a complicit wink — all these are compromised when stripped of the human energy behind them.
Source: /pixabay The lure of entertainment
Not only can a baby fail to learn the lessons of secure attachment to another human being, but other developmental dangers lurk behind the lure of entertainment. These dangers can follow us throughout childhood, expanding as they become habits of response, and threaten our competence as adults.
- Dopamine, the “reward” chemical our brain brings us when we feel pleasure, can become addictive. An activity that turns off pain receptors and turns on the reward system is powerfully self-reinforcing.
- Encouraging entertainment can encourage passivity and dependence. Children need to first develop their capacity to care for themselves through play, exploring their environment and acting on it. Both expressive and constructive imaginative play teach adaptation, the first for emotional self-care and the second for problem-solving. Being riveted to an external story with no personal or other human input must lead a parent to ask, “what is my child NOT doing when watching screens?” Later on this habit can turn into a way to combat boredom and loneliness rather than pushing a person to develop self-reliance, external interests, and friendships.
- The lack of real-life engagement offered by screens can encourage people to avoid their emotions — especially pain, fear, and excitement — rather than to work with and learn from experiencing them.
- Attachment to a screen can become attachment to an object that one literally appends to one’s corporal being. The integrity of one’s body, acknowledgement of messages that come from it, and attention to those messages, risks being lost. Dependence on a phone for information (which admittedly can lessen anxiety) or distraction (which only disconnects emotions further from their source) means loss of real connection to other people.
- If a child develops an expectation of 24/7 availability, the capacity to delay gratification fails to develop. Worse, expectations of availability lead one to skip over a higher quality or better choice if it is not immediately available. Patience, persistence, and discrimination are not rewarded and thus capacities to discern and pursue quality are compromised.
- The role of information in one’s life — and lifestyle — can become overblown. Taking the time to verify loses priority. The development of wisdom is suspended, pushed aside by the fallacy that information can guide a life well-lived. As I recently heard someone observe, “Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”
The next time you are tempted to turn to a screen for relief, distraction, curiosity, or entertainment, consider if this is the life you want to be living. Do you agree with Mr. Stephenson’s vision, “We want people engaged with their mobile devices all day watching movies and video”? Or do you believe that other activities deserve priority seating in the theater that is your life?
Copyright 2019 Roni Beth Tower
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THE BASICS