We Need Digital Manners
After returning home from college, my first outing wasn't a trip to see friends or even a trip down memory lane. It was a trip to Best Buy.
I went to purchase a flip phone. I immediately worried the employees in their blue polo shirts assumed I was a drug dealer acquiring my latest burner phone. After purchasing the Tracfone 2 for $89.99 (a steep price if you ask me), my next stop was Verizon to get it set up. Walking in with an iPhone in one hand and my flip phone in the other, Drake's "Two Phones" rang in my ears.
As I explained how I wanted to transfer all my information to the flip phone and try going "old school" as an experiment, the woman behind the counter responded "More than a few people in here ask to do the same thing. I wish I could too because that sounds so relaxing." I felt vindicated that other people were having the same thoughts too.
My experiment lasted no more than 48 hours after my job interview asked me to download an app, and I realized my smartphone was a necessity and not just a nicety.
I was back to square one.
Why did I get a flip phone in the first place? I doomscroll Twitter(X) and Reddit constantly and find myself 5 hours later bewildered at where the time went. I had romanticized the idea of a more peaceful time pre-internet and an ability to concentrate I lack.
Most mornings I fell into a familiar trap. I wake up and lay on my phone for several hours before getting out of bed. I shirk all responsibility and let later-me suffer the consequences of my neglect.
I also keep a certain story in my head: that there are thousands of highly paid intelligent engineers spending every waking second trying to keep me on digital apps for another few seconds. I felt like my agency was being stolen from me, and I was doing nothing to stop it. So, I thought the flip phone was an extreme, yet guaranteed answer to my problem. But my experiment didn't work. I couldn't go back and hide in the early 2000s. Instead, I wrote this essay as an attempt to unravel my own relationship with technology.
In the 1950s and 60s a group of scientists studying addiction ran an experiment. They put 32 different rats in separate cages stacking them together to make a rat skyscraper.
But unlike the inhabitants of human skyscrapers with high-paying jobs in tech, finance, or consulting, these rats had one job:
Don't press the lever.
What lever? A lever in each cage that triggered morphine to be mainlined into the veins of every rat. The story goes that the rats began to push the lever so often they would forgo food and water just to get another hit until they eventually died of neglect. Just a small taste of the drug made it hard for them to resist pushing the lever in perpetuity.
But in 1977 a few researchers questioned their findings. They came up with their own version; this time with 2 groups of rats. The first group was put into individual cages like before while the new group was put inside "Rat Park."
Rat Park was the name the researchers gave to a large plywood enclosure, 200x the area of the lab cages. The researchers took extra care to cover the ground with cedar shavings, paint the sides of the enclosure with a natural landscape, and crucially, fill it with other rats to socialize with.
The findings of the experiment upended the traditional understanding of drug's inherent addictive qualities. "Given the chance to live in a normal society with comfortable housing and social contact...the rats living in Rat Park had little appetite for opiate drugs. Rather than becoming identically spellbound by addiction...the rats' drug-taking varied with physical, mental, and social setting." With the opportunity to live and play in community with friends, they didn't want the drugs! Now this doesn't "prove" anything in the scientific sense about humans. Rats are rats and people are people. But it does provide some thought-provoking ideas of how we can apply this to our own lives.
I spent 8 hours and 17 minutes on my phone this past Thursday. The crazy part of that sentence is that it's not a surprising thing to say. But I don't think the problem is with screen time generally. That's too vague. That's like saying the problem with obesity is food.
There's junk food like short form video a la TikTok and healthy food, like a long-form video essay, and straight broccoli, like Wikipedia articles. Different platforms afford the creator to chef up healthier or less healthy options. The platform design and its economics incentivize what type of informational food gets cooked up in the same way an industrial McDonalds kitchen is great at serving burgers and fries while a Michelin star restaurant has a completely different layout to serve gourmet foie gras.
Hank Green is the first person I've heard that articulates how this future of us eating digital junk food might end. Not with outright bans or taxes but simply altering social norms. Let me explain with a simple question.
Why can I keep Oreos in my pantry but not feel the urge to grab one first thing in the morning? I don't think it's that I have some superhuman willpower that gives me the strength to withstand my deep desire for chocolate at 7am. It's the norms I was raised in and the people I surround myself with.
I don't eat candy for breakfast because my parents don't, and my friends don't, and no one really does! We like to think of ourselves as individuals with individual willpower, but the best thing to happen to my teeth was being raised by two parents who don't eat a lot of sugar. This is a social norm that I was raised in. Those norms just haven't evolved for digital technology yet because we've been so open to their role in our lives. Over time, we will create the digital equivalent of healthy eating habits. The solution to bad eating habits isn't weightwatchers. It's living with people who eat healthy and sharing meals with healthy people. Then, it becomes easier to envision yourself wanting to order a healthy meal alone too. You've been socialized into a new worldview and experienced the benefits, so you stick with what's familiar.
I can see this already playing out in parenting circles right now. On subreddits I've seen the parents of young children posing the question, how do I get my kid to not want to go on screens? They keep the screens away from them, but still the kids beg to be on screens anyways. The comments reply to the parent, "you can't be on them around your kid. If you're on the screen, they'll want to be too." They're kids so of course they model behavior and look up to their parents. The only difference is that as adults we seem to think we're not affected by the same behavior! Humans are social creatures, and we learn just as much through our culture as we do through education. But the beautiful thing is we can decide which culture to be a part of. We can set good digital hygiene habits and be around others who do as well. That becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I still enjoy Oreos, but infrequently. This is my guess as to the eventual arc of short-form vertical video and algorithmic social media in my own life. I will enjoy it infrequently relative to the other information in my info-diet but as a fun treat every now and again. So now we know how this could look on a society-wide level. But individually, how do you make this happen in your own life so you're not waiting for social norms to develop. I'm too impatient for norms to develop.
Two solutions come to mind:
- A Narrowing of Affordances
- Embody the Rat Park
1. A Narrowing of Affordances
If I want to do something but find myself distracted and not able to start, I've learned to narrow my affordances. This was a term I became newly acquainted with.
Affordances are what any object or system affords someone to do with it.
Still confusing. Let me try with some examples.
A pen has a few affordances. You can draw with it. You can write with it. But that's about it. It has a limited number of potential uses. But the affordances increase in relationship to the person using it. An object or system's potential is predicated on both the object itself and the agent interacting with said object. If in the hand of an artist, their use of a pen is dramatically different and more fine-tuned than yours or mine.
So what about smartphones?
I contend that a smartphone/computer has too many affordances. Steve Jobs famously calls it a "bicycle for the mind". But what kind of bicycle affords me the opportunity to gamble on Kalshi where I lost $250 betting on the Tampa weather or doomscroll on Twitter for 8 hours like I did the other day?
A narrowing of affordances would help keep me in check. Reading an article printed out with pen and paper is way better for deep reading than reading on a computer precisely because it doesn't afford me the chance to go check another tab or see a notification pop up. A narrowing of affordances allows me to focus.
When I took a drawing class last semester, I would draw on a sticky note first if I had a bigger assignment due because the barrier to entry was so low and it had no repercussions. I could just start drawing and it would be over in 15 minutes. It was like a warm-up. The same could be said for writing. If I want to write, I'll start on paper first to limit the affordances around me before hopping on my computer once my brain juices are flowing. This can be analogous to how athletes' warm-up before playing a game. Most importantly though, do it with friends. That's how it will become more fun. The reason I have found the time to finish this is because I told my friend I was going to email a letter to him about how I've been doing the past few weeks.
2. Embody the Rat Park
What kept the rats at bay will also keep us at bay from developing anti-social habits. Playing with friends is not just a fun Sunday afternoon activity but increasingly a way to ward off anti-social behavior. Build up a life where you get good sleep, see friends daily, and go outside and play. If those things are in order the screens become a lot less tempting not because you block their capabilities but because the rest of the world becomes a lot more exciting.
Sincerely,
Jake
P.S. There is a whole host of software that has cropped up over the past 5 years to solve this problem with technology from Opal to Jomo. I've tried most of them and still find myself compelled to find workarounds to their blocking features even on the "strictest" settings. One that works well for me though that I recommend is an app called Cold Turkey specifically for your laptop which has a one-time purchase of $30 for lifetime access. You simply cannot unblock websites when on the "block" setting. It is the strictest and best one for me.