We've all joked about spending so much time on Facebook that we must be addicted before -  but the further down the rabbit hole we go, the more serious this joke seems.

What happens when technologies that enable connection make us feel disconnected? When the desire to click, like and scroll keeps us fixated on our screens? Is more technology the answer to helping us re-orient our attention back to the real world?

PHD student and ex Facebook user, Alex Beattie, helps us unpack complex issues that revolve around attention and social media.

Topics include: privacy, attention economy, attention by design, personal development, comparison, mental health and more.

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Shownotes:

Find out more about Alex's thesis, writing or Healthy Tech Habits workshop

Alex recommends checking out the following examples of attention reorientation technologies:

The Disconnect- an online magazine that can only be read if you're disconnected from the internet

Ransomly - an app that creates 'internet deadzones' in spaces of your choosing

Yondr - an initiative that facilitates phone free performances and spaces (if you went to PHAROS by Childish Gambino, you would have experienced Yondr in action)

Transcription

Lucy O’Connor (intro): And… publish. Okay, now that’s done, I’ve got to go to the grocery store, respond to that email, go for a run. I’ll just quickly check for likes. Okay, 14, not bad for four minutes. Refresh, still 14, maybe I should share it in my story. Okay, outfit covered by sticker for good measure and publish, that should get more engagement, I hope. Ooh, I like her skirt, tap image, the iconic, click to profile. Click to website links, search skirts. Yes, I am feeling the vibe this season. Oh shit, I wonder how many likes my photo has, 19. What? I wonder if I should delete it. 

Okay, what about how many views my story has, 110, okay, not so bad, I have been meaning to read this article. Click to profile, click to website. What the hell! How is it 9:00pm already? Oosh, those social media platforms got us good don’t they? Every element of social media is incredibly enticing, to the points where these platforms are often referred to as addictive. 

They are so damn good at holding our attention on the screen for extended and embarrassing amounts of time, that it can feel difficult to draw the line between where social media ends and real life begins. Today I’m talking to Alex Beattie, an award winning researcher and PhD candidate at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. 

Alex has almost finished writing his thesis, which is titled, The Manufacture of Disconnection. This thesis has seen him interview and pioneer a community of technologists, entrepreneurs and researchers who are developing new ways to help us disconnect from our screen. Two interesting things here. One, the technologists who were involved in The Manufacture of Disconnection are leveraging technology as a means of getting us off technology, to some of the people who Alex interviewed, once worked for Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook. 

So while connection was once the dream of these technologists, the goal has shifted and now they’re working to help us humans disconnect from the very technologies they once helped build. 

Today Alex helped me unpack the attention economy and attention by design. We talk the different personality types that might be drawn to perform their lives across social media. We discuss comparison and responsibility and although I am guilty of using the word ‘addiction’ a lot when talking about our relationship to these technologies, Alex explains to me why it’s so difficult to prove that social media is even partly responsible for a spike in mental health issues. Enjoy the show. 

Alex Beattie, welcome to the podcast. 

Alex Beattie: Thanks Lucy, it’s a pleasure to be invited and really looking forward to having a conversation. 

Lucy: Alex, you’ve chosen an incredibly interesting and relevant thesis topic, The Manufacture of Disconnection. Could you give us a bit of background on how you landed on this? 

Alex: I guess my journey in this topic started a little bit earlier. About six years ago I chose to delete my Facebook. I was living in the UK, I was sort of tired of mindlessly scrolling social media, felt a little bit stink about the lives of others, a bit too much. It made me feel a little bit insecure, which I’m sure I’m not the only person to have felt that way. And I just decided, you know what? I’m fed up with this. I’m just going to delete my account and see what happens.

And it was quite an interesting experience. Facebook is such a useful tool; it has been such a useful tool for so many of us. We use Facebook to keep in touch with people, to organise our events, to follow the lives of people that we maybe met a day a travelling or we connected with them through university or through jobs. 

And it was quite difficult to disconnect, to be off Facebook. But overall I really enjoyed it. And so I thought, maybe I could study myself and my experience of being offline and not using Facebook anymore. But what I also found was that there was a group of technologists, people in the Silicon Valley that had done the same thing and they had actually deleted their Facebook.

And some were even involved in the process of inventing Facebook. They weren’t Mark Zuckerberg, but one of the people had invented the Facebook ‘like’ button. So here were some people that you could argue are some of the most pro kind of connecting social media type people, but yet they were disconnecting, and I found that really interesting. 

So my research focus shifted to that and I thought, you know what, this is really worth studying, learning a little bit more about. I think there’s a shared feeling that what are we doing? We acknowledge on one hand that this tool is wonderful for keeping in touch with friends, family, other loved ones, but at the same time we spend so much time on it and what are we losing and why is it so seductive and why is it so appealing? 

Lucy: So let’s dig into the reasons why these people are having such a 180 degree turn on what they were doing? Why are they now trying to disconnect us from the very things that they worked so hard to get us hooked on? 

Alex: Yeah, great question. There comes a point in time where one starts to wonder what kind of a fix is connecting, being online, scrolling social media, is having on my wellbeing, is prohibiting me from discovering who I am, from developing. There’s a really strong culture in California, Silicon Valley, of self-development. Of transforming yourself, becoming a different person, becoming a better person. You can go all the way back to the late 60s, early 70s, when people like Steve Jobs and his network and cohort, these early technologists in Silicon Valley, they used to drop out from mainstream society and they were fed up with Cold War increased materialism of that time. 

Big tech like IBM, and they wanted to sort of drop to their own kind of communes and sort of re-imagine what society could be. A strong part of their culture was taking LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs and really kind of discovering the potential of the human and that kind of thing. And that strand, that culture has really continued in California. It’s one of the reasons why California is quite unique. 

And we’re sort of seeing a resurgence of that today. And there was a Guardian article, I think at the end of 2017 that talked about these technologists that were disconnecting and dropping out because they were concerned that the new big tech, IBM was the previous big tech, now it’s Facebook, now it’s Google and they had this sort of quite persuasive sway of [** 0.06.34] people’s lives. And so it’s a big part of tech culture to sort of really foreground what effect is this having on my wellbeing?

What effect is this having on my ability to develop as a person? So it’s a really big part of their culture and I think it’s largely guided a lot of their decisions to, how long should I be online, do I need to disconnect and that sort of thing. 

Lucy (thinks aloud): I found the personal development insight about Silicon Valley really interesting. I mean it makes sense that the people who kickstarted Silicon Valley were rebels striving for a better world, who were also striving to be the best, most successful, most optimised individuals they could be. But what I find fascinating is that this type of mentality is mirrored in what we look for and celebrate across social media. 

If you’ve listened to episode one with Kaila Tova, we discuss why constantly performing health or wellness development on social media can lead to some incredibly unhealthy behaviours. And as Alex tells me, today even the declaration that one is going offline has become another way to demonstrate development and self-care online. 

Alex: I don’t know if ‘irony’ is the right word, but when someone kind of shares a post or tweets or shares a picture on Instagram about them detoxing or having a weekend away, there’s a sort of irony there that you’re socialising your need to disconnect. And one of the, in my view, more convincing critiques with social media in the last couple of years is how social media does encourage an element of performativity. 

I draw analogy to a high school reunion in that social media kind of encourages a type of performance where you put your best version of yourself upfront that you want other people to see. And that can be kind of exhausting. I do think some of the reason why people are feeling more anxious and more depressed is because we’re encouraged to sort of put our best version of ourselves on social media. 

I think particularly for those of us that can find that sort of exhausting, that’s why we need to take a break and disconnect. When we tweet around disconnecting, in some ways it sort of defeats the purpose, in my view. It’s something that I don’t necessarily think needs influencing. So there’s a funny tension there. Like #offthegrid, you know, I mean is that more about telling people that you’re going off the grid than actually going off the grid? 

Lucy (thinks aloud): I guess if you don’t post about it, does it even happen? Do you even benefit from it? Hearing Alex talk about performing disconnection and the irony in that triggered a personal memory. After organising and hosting a party that celebrated the launch of the new Monday Hustle website, I was exhausted and I felt I needed a break from social media. 

I remember feeling guilty for this need though and was truly worried that going offline would slow any momentum I’d generated during the process of re-launching the website. To front foot this, I published a post that said this: 

‘Hey Hustlers, just thought I’d let you know that for the next 36 hours I’m going off the grid. I need to retreat to refresh, rebalance, refocus and re-energise. I look forward to checking back in with you once I’ve emerged from my cocoon.’

And this post was, of course, accompanied by a picture of the back of my head as I looked whimsically across the ocean, #content. Then, sure enough, nearly 36 hours later, to the minute, which isn’t even a whole weekend’s worth of time, I shared a post that declared how good I felt after giving myself permission to switch off. I’m calling bullshit on my Monday Hustle identity because it’s so clear to me now that I was performing the idea of self-care, not actually taking a break. 

And this got me thinking, maybe the fact that we feel the need to perform a disconnection feeds into our sense of being addicted to these things. The feeling that social media not only rules our online world, but our offline world as well. I wanted to chat to Alex about the attention economy and attention by design, to dig into the backend of how social media platforms operate. 

Alex: When we occupy the digital space, when we’re online, when we’re scrolling through various platforms, people call it an ‘attention economy.’ And the attention economy was not invented by digital technology. It wasn’t invented by Facebook, but they have advanced the attention economy to its current state. You know, newspapers were some of the pioneers of the attention economy. And the attention economy is really to try and describe when your attention, your eyeballs are the commodity and what you look at, what you scroll, you click on. 

Where you pause your video, that creates data for these platforms, like Facebook and Google and it’s very valuable for them and it creates revenue for them through the advertising that you see and the data that you share with them. So this sort of way that money is made and a commodity is traded has a huge influence over the way that the online space is designed. The financiers of the online space, you know, they are incentivised for you to spend more time online because the more time you spend online, the more money they make, right? 

So this is why particular design features are the way that they are. There’s a reason why social media newsfeeds are bottomless, it’s to encourage you to keep scrolling because the more time you scroll, the more money Facebook makes. There’s a reason why notifications are coloured red. They were originally blue, for any of us that can remember Facebook in its earliest iteration back in the mid-2000s, but they did studies and they worked out that if the notification was coloured red, people were more likely to return and check their notifications. 

There’s theories that the colour red sort of conveys a sense of urgency and we all can probably admit that when we have notification, there’s that sense of anticipation and like, oh, is this the one that I’m waiting for and it encourages us to check them more often. 

I guess the wider point around thinking about these attention based mechanisms is that the digital world is more by design and it’s for a particular reason, which is to make money. And we have sort of come to accept certain environments and the physical space. Like a supermarket, a casino, that they are designed for someone else’s economic gain. 

So we know that with a casino, and we know that with a supermarket and we need to come to this understanding for environments like Facebook, for environments like YouTube, Instagram. They are designed deliberately to encourage you to trade your attention, to scroll for as long as possible and it’s very seductive and it’s very tricky. 

So the attention economy has been around for some time, but I think what the likes of Facebook and Google have done, they have managed to make it sort of more seductive, using more precise methods because as time has passed, behavioural and social psychology has developed. So I think the attention economy has never been so seductive and appealing and it can be really hard to get out of that rabbit hole. 

Lucy: Okay, so the design and the economic factors don’t really play in our favour. But what about our desire for attention? Don’t lie, I know you want it! Is that something that’s kind of innate?

Alex: I don’t think I would go so far to say that it’s innate. I think some people are much more happy and comfortable being much more private and find it much more difficult to share openly and can kind of feel the gaze of other people when they’re online. And therefore coming up with a pithy tweet or status just doesn’t come as easy to them because they thrive and they operate more comfortably in more intimate circles. 

There are some people that can answer the phone in a crowd and not be awkward and there are other people that get really awkward and have to go to another room when they answer the phone. That’s one way of sort of answering your question, is some of us are much more comfortable with the public performance of talking about yourself and others aren’t. 

And I guess social media has forced us to work out which one you are [laughs]. And of course, you know, we’re not sort of, no one cleanly falls onto either side, but we all probably fall a little bit into each category depending on what circumstance, but it’s an interesting thing to think about. 

Lucy: It is an interesting thing to think about. I mean for me performing on social media versus say performing on a stage in front of people in real time feel like two really different things. I would never get stage fright before hitting ‘publish’ on an Instagram post or an Instagram story. When I was on social media it didn’t feel like me as Lucy O’Connor, it felt like me as my online alter ego, Monday Hustle. 

So in some ways I personally feel that the screen takes away from some real world realities and it allows us to embody someone entirely different online and perform in a way that we never would have if there was a crowd of people watching. That feels different, it feels slightly removed. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. 

As well as being a space where you can perform an alternate identity, it’s also the place where we find new products, where we get our news and keep up to current events. Our enemies are just a search bar away and on social media we also connect with those close to us. Having all of those things on one cosy little platform, it’s kind of weird, especially when sponsored content starts getting involved. 

Alex: Totally, yeah, I mean I guess what we don’t want is a kind of trim and show scenario where we live in a world where products and services are just effortlessly integrated into content. So it becomes impossible to distinguish between genuine use and sponsored content. And sometimes it can feel a little bit like that, you know. 

To some of your examples you just talked about, when you go from Instagram to a magazine to something else and things are just constantly being promoted and it becomes really difficult, as a consumer or a user to distinguish between a promotion and otherwise just a genuine piece of news or something else. And I think that line is becoming really blurry. And I’ve written a little bit about the sort of slippery slope of sponsored news. 

It’s difficult, the other problem is like how do you fund news and advertising has funded news for so long. So this is such a complex and tricky problem that I don’t really know what the answer is. I mean I think what we do need and living in an age of Trump and Brexit, the most attention grabbing news ever, probably, is just thrown at us every day and I do think it’s had an effect on politics. 

We do need to think about new rules and regulations about protecting people’s attention and it’s possibly exploiting people’s attention and you know, can we think of public spaces where people’s attention is protected? What would that look like? We have the idea of a public space in terms of a park, in terms of a square in a town, but what would a digital public space look like? How would we protect people’s attention? What are the measurements? 

I mean these are quite high level questions, but we do need to think about them as these methods become more precise, more exact and more damaging. It’s, as a whole, the rules are you know, so far behind, the ethics are so far behind the economic engine, you know. We’ve had a huge economic engine behind the attention economy for decades and the rules are hopelessly out of date. 

So if anything, I do think it needs to shift back to thinking about the effects and a way to sort of regulate the space. I think privacy is a huge one. If we had better privacy, if we had better privacy protection, you know, I think there would be trickle down effects into our mental health. The problem is that privacy is not a very sexy issue, right? When I’ve asked students, when I’ve asked people, you know, what they think about privacy, a very common response is, privacy, well, I’ve got nothing to hide, you know?

And this sort of response that I’ve got nothing to hide, I don’t really need privacy, it positions privacy from a very defensive or negative space, you know, implying that the only people that need privacy are sort of those that are up to something devious or causing harm or something. And this is like a gross misunderstanding of human behaviour. Everyone needs privacy. Privacy is actually a form of freedom. To have privacy is to be able to live a life without the fear of making mistakes, of being judged or doing something embarrassing. 

To have elements of agency or control over what other people know about you. I mean part of the problem with the attention economy is that the likes of Facebook and Google have so much data about our behaviour, where we click, where we scroll etc. And it erodes our very sense of freedom, you know, because the more information they have about us, you know, the more enticing the carrot that they dangle in front us becomes. 

And so that kind of relationship between us and the platform becomes much more asymmetrical. We become more powerless and they become more powerful and it’s privacy that resets that boundary. So I’m a huge privacy advocate and there are some really cool tools out there that people can use to enhance their privacy and you know, give away less data. And we definitely live at a time where we trade so much about ourselves for, yes, for something in return, yes we get access to a lot of free content, but we also lose so much. 

We do need to rethink that equation and you know, maybe give back a little bit more than what we’re trading. 

Lucy (thinks aloud): Alex mentions mental health a couple of times in that piece and I wanted to ask him, does he think that social media is responsible for the spike that we’re seeing in mental health issues? 

Alex: You know, I don’t think that the emergence of social media is the sole reason for increases in anxiety and depression and other mental ill health. I think there’s other reasons, you know, living in a world that’s increasingly uncertain and fragile and the rise of different political ideologies in certain parts of the world. You know, house prices for people who want to buy homes, there’s a whole host of reasons why I think people are more anxious and uncertain about the world. 

I do think social media is certainly one of the reasons, but it’s not the reason and again, it’s really, really hard to prove. Studies that try to find a link between screen time and mental ill health haven’t managed to find any link. In fact one study that was published at the end of last year made the case that there’s more of a chance of becoming depressed if you eat potatoes than time on social media. 

So it’s really, it’s an issue that’s really hard to prove. If you think back to smoking and cigarettes and tobacco, it took decades, it took decades to be able to prove that one cigarette was bad for your health. There was so much money invested by big tobacco to muddy the science and convince some researchers to try and prove that smoking isn’t unhealthy. And think about the size of Facebook, the size of Google, these are billion dollar companies and they stand to lose so much money if scientists can prove that screen time is unhealthy. 

That’s not to say that they’ve reacted to it, because they have, you know, check out screen time on Apple, check out digital wellbeing on Google. They have reacted because it does matter to some people and so they have recognised that to some people it is an important thing. But in terms of the mechanisms and what has to happen for regulation to fall in place, we are so far away from that happening because it’s really hard to prove. 

So I hope that kind of answers your question. I kind of think there is a connection, but it’s really hard to prove. 

Lucy (thinks aloud): Okay, I really want to dive into what sort of connection Alex thinks there is between mental health and social media, but first, can we just expand on the fact that some technologists, like in social media to cigarettes, does this mean that kids these days start smoking, aka scrolling at the age of two or three? 

Alex: Yeah, I mean what’s also interesting is that their reaction to screen time is also similar to the reaction to cigarettes. And with technologies like Yondr, which is a sort of pocket device where it’s sometimes used at schools or live performances and people are forced to put their smart phone in the Yondr pocket and they can’t take it out of the pocket until they leave the premise. 

So this sort of technology encourages a phone free environment and you know, we have smoke free environments, right? All around New Zealand we have smoke free environments in a lot of public buildings, public spaces, stadiums etc, parks, you’re not allowed to smoke. We are sort of seeing that trend with technology. You turn up at a café and it might say ‘no Wi-Fi, talk to each other,’ you know, Childish Gambino did a worldwide tour in the last couple of years and they were notorious, they were famous for being phone-free. 

A lot of performers, they don’t like it when people watch the performance through the screen. I think Hannah Gadsby, the comedian, is another person. She’s gone on the record and said that she finds it really distracting and actually it degrades the kind of connection between the performer and the audience. 

So the analogy of phone-free and smoke-free is quite apt because we’re seeing this trend where people desire a phone free space and what kind of benefits that can sort of allow and things to happen. One thing I sometimes chuckle about is how often does it take someone to ask for your Wi-Fi password when they turn up at your house [laughs]. 

Lucy: Oh my gosh!

Alex: This is a new dynamic, right, that 10 years ago or 15 years ago wasn’t around. And if you turn up at someone’s house and your phone automatically switches onto their Wi-Fi, it’s a sign that you’re close, right, because you’ve gone through that process before. I mean these are interesting new dynamics. 

Another interesting insight that I learnt when interviewing some of these developers for my PhD was, who finds it easier to disconnect than others? One of the people that I interviewed was an artist, who wasn’t just a coder or a developer, he was an artist and he reflected that people that have already got something to do something to do in mind, a writer, like you are, may find it easier to disconnect. 

It’s similar for an artist or a musician, people that are used to spending their time in a certain way may find it easier to turn off their phone. But for those that don’t and you know, and just enjoy watching TV or using the device to read articles, or whatever, which is totally fine. Like there’s nothing against that, they may find it harder because you take away the connection and then you take away the ability to watch Netflix, to read content on your phone. 

Which I thought was quite an interesting observation, that some people may find it harder than others to go offline. 

Lucy (thinks aloud): We all have creative interests and a lot of these do happen offline. Whether you’re a painter or a writer, this isn’t always done specifically on the medium of social media. Normally you’re sitting away in a dark room, you know, brooding over your life’s challenges and creating a brilliant piece of art around it, for example. So the tension for me arises because we feel a pressure to share this on social media platforms. 

And like personal development or going #offthegrid, if you don’t share the thing, does the thing actually exist or happen in the real world? We’re not sure. To explore, I wanted to loop back around and ask Alex, in his opinion, what are some of the trends we see that might be linked to our experience of negative mental health and being on social media? 

Alex: Yeah, social comparison, I think is a big one for some people. You know, people have kind of talked about the keeping up with the Joneses, that’s been a term that’s quite old right? Feeling that pressure to keep up with that person, that couple in your life that is always one step ahead of you, has always bought the house a couple of years before you, had kids a couple of years before you. Having climbed that so-called ‘life ladder,’ and they’re always a few rungs ahead of you. 

That kind of idea has been around for some time and some people talk about keeping up with the iPhoneses and how technology sort of amplifies that experience because in the past you might only come across the Joneses once a month or once a week. But with a smart phone, with a mobile network that enables you to be connected all the time, in most parts of the world, you know, you can keep up with the iPhoneses all the time. 

So in some ways it’s the kind of increased intensity that the internet allows. But then again, you know, social comparison orientation is not a thing for some people. And in fact for them, or for different types of people, connecting with others online can be great for their mental health. And I think earlier I talked about, it’s a wonderful thing to be able to turn your gaze inward and really think about yourself and understand who you are. On the other hand, for some people that can lead to rumination. 

And you know, thinking too much and getting stuck on a problem, so unfortunately I think the internet can be used for so many different things. It can amplify some aspects and then it can do the opposite in others. So it’s really hard to pin down what exactly it is about the internet that can be damaging because we’re all so different. 

I don’t want listeners to think that I’m some kind of disconnecting savant -

Lucy: That’s what I thought Alex, you’re shattering my dreams!

Alex: Yeah, no, I mean the reason why I study this and I talk about this and I write about this is that I acutely feel the pull of Facebook, just like everyone else, maybe even more. My partner tells me that I have low impulse control, you know, which means there’s no chocolate in the house, there’s hardly any beer because if it’s there, I’ll drink it, I’ll eat it, you know? And so part of why I talk about this stuff is because I get it completely. 

And so by being off Facebook I probably spend more time on Reddit or I fall down the YouTube rabbit hole and so forth. I research it, but I’m not a brilliant practitioner of this, of all this stuff. You know, even if you delete Facebook, it’s not going to solve everything, you know? It’s something that you’ll think about every day. You can get better at things, but just by removing one device doesn’t meant that you’ll be immune to all devices. 

So I can be very good at wasting my time online, and you know what, it’s okay to waste time, you know. We can easily think that disconnecting is the be-all and end-all and if you’re not careful you’re just disconnecting to be productive, to be, in your mind, healthy and have the best wellbeing. But you know what, it’s totally okay to have the kind of days where you just, you’ll just be on YouTube for four hours and yeah, you don’t want to do it all the time, but it’s okay to do it every now and then. 

In gym culture they call it ‘cheat days,’ don’t they, where they just eat a ridiculous amount of stuff, you know? We need to also have cheat days in the digital sense. So it’s okay to fall down that rabbit hole every now and then. 

Lucy: Thank you so much for your honesty in that piece. I think a lot of people will definitely resonate and feel supported by that final statement, so I think that’s a great place to wrap it up. 

Alex: No, hey, thanks so much for the opportunity to talk and this has been a real pleasure. 

Lucy (outro): Whoa, are you feeling as mind blown as me? With all of Alex’s insights, I’m pretty sure we all just got like 24% smarter, at least? If you’re interested to learn more about Alex’s work or to get in touch with him about a workshop, you’ll find his details in the show notes. I’ve also included links to some of the platforms and tools he mentions in the show. 

As well as being a very clued in human about the topic of technology, I have it on good authority that Alex also does a mean impression of Gandalf the Grey. So if you do get in touch with him, be sure to enquire about that too. You tell him I sent you! 

If you have any questions, feedback or recommendations for this podcast, I’m so excited to hear all of the things. Please get in touch by emailing selfiereflective@gmail.com, or find me on Facebook or Instagram @selfiereflective, all one word. If you enjoyed the podcast, hit subscribe and share it with your pals. 

Our next episode unpacks the top of masculinity on social media and we’ll be live next Tuesday. I’m Lucy O, thanks for listening to Selfie Reflective. This episode was hosted, produced and edited by me, Lucy O’Connor; final episode audio was finessed by Tom Frankish. 

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