BJ Fogg, a behavioral scientist at Stanford, wrote an odd little book in 2003 that was largely ignored outside of academic circles. In Persuasive Technology, a young woman in a college library took a tiny electronic device out of her purse. It served as her entertainment, organizer, phone, and window into the outside world. She felt lost without it and carried it everywhere. When Apple introduced the iPhone four years later, Fogg’s fictitious student essentially became all of us.
Reading that book now has a subtle unnerving quality. No one was actually being warned by Fogg. He was talking about a chance for design. As Wired once described them, his boot camps at Stanford eventually turned into a sort of toll booth for the entrepreneurs going to Google and Facebook. The theory performed admirably. The way we think and act could be drastically altered by portable computers. How thoroughly they would do it was the aspect that no one focused on, at least not at the time.
The evidence can be found everywhere, including in train stations, cafes, and school pickup lines. Faces illuminated by that specific shade of blue, heads down, thumbs moving. According to a recent Ofcom study, over a third of British children aged five to seven use social media, and nearly a quarter already own a phone. Not much has changed for the adults. I know people who consider themselves to be successful, disciplined, and in charge of their lives, but whose average daily screen time exceeds five hours without fully comprehending how.
The scholarly debate about the effects of all this on humans is genuinely unresolved. According to Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the evidence suggests that young people are polarized, anxious, and fragile. Amy Orben and Pete Etchells contend that the data is not as reliable as the alarmists claim. Everybody has a point. However, it’s difficult to avoid feeling as though something has changed while sitting outside the journals in daily life. People now seem to be more fragile with one another. Public discourse now has a thinner texture. There are moments when even friendships seem to be negotiated through a glass pane.
In all honesty, the mechanism is not mysterious. The aspects of human nature that were never meant to be gamified—belonging, status, and the intense need to feel appreciated by a group—were gamified by smartphones. You don’t just get those things from the apps. Like a slot machine that occasionally rattles coins, they withhold them and dispense them in an unpredictable manner. The same is true of outrage. Your status feels threatened, someone from an out-group does something offensive, and all of a sudden you’re forty minutes into a comment section you didn’t plan to visit.
A question that would have sounded dramatic ten years ago is currently being discussed by researchers: is there a way back? In his new book on meaning, Harvard professor Arthur Brooks, who will be moving to Vanderbilt this summer, frames it through a helpful distinction. He claims that complex issues have solutions, such as constructing a skyscraper, debugging code, or completing a tax return. Complex issues don’t. Finding your purpose in life, raising a child, and loving someone well are all challenges you will always face. When it comes to complexity, phones excel. The problem starts when they subtly persuade us that they can also solve the complex.
Brooks is not advocating for desertion. He stated, “We really need our phones.” “But they should be tools.” Boredom is the more difficult prescription. When nothing else is tugging at you, the default-mode network—that aimless, wandering state where the brain stitches things together—activates. It is the place where ideas emerge. where grief is dealt with. where you return to your former self in a tiny way.
The true question is whether enough of us can remain motionless long enough to find out. And whether we will is still up in the air.
