Out of the Gadget Prison

MOHITYANCHE VADGAON, A VILLAGE just under 150km from Mumbai, made it to the newspapers two years ago because its sarpanch observed that there was too much mobile addiction among students there. They came up with a plan. Every evening at 7PM, a siren would go off at the temple and all mobiles and tele­visions would be switched off for an hour-and-a-half. Children could study and parents too could get a break to return to the com­pany of human beings. This was their limited answer to technol­ogy’s dictatorship. Once they did it, some neighbouring villages too were reported to have come up with their versions of it.

A village embarking on something like this is a statement about a paradox in the Indian growth story. Poverty is usually an obstacle to the reach of new technology but mobile phones have been an exception to the rule. Even remote hamlets without running water have access to it and they have become part of the capture by technology. And occasionally they figure out that this is not altogether a good thing. Many who consume technology get this feeling. Last year, when a channel ran a story on the village, industrialist Anand Mahindra put it up on his X feed along with a post: “Fascinating. This could be a global trend-setter coming out of India. Do you think this could be sustained? Am in the process of experimenting with a daily detox window on a personal basis. Any one tried it out?” The comments section under it echoed with people saying how they kept phones switched off for a while too.

The history of the invasion of technology into minds has a direct correlation with the size of the screen getting smaller. There was no screen at all 150 years ago. Then movies happened, which was once in many weeks. When television came, it initially took up a few hours of every evening. Then it became round-the-clock but you still had to be at home. Then screen size decreased with mobile phones and you could carry it around. The visual medium demands full involvement. You can listen to music and do other things but not so much watching something. Time spent on the screen is completely given. On that the internet first added a universe that spanned the spectrum of work and pleasure. Social media added yet another layer to it, becoming a medium of bulk relationships between strangers. Your ‘follower’ and ‘following’ count is also your tribe and even though you might not know most of them personally, your actions are designed keeping them in mind. All of which leads to an upending of the traditional behaviour of the human brain.

This is what social media companies exploit when they mon­etise your attention. They have to constantly refine the algorithm to keep you attentive in order to make profits. Billions of dollars are going into this singular idea. The brain does not have much of a chance to resist it because it is going through a cycle of being fed dopamine and then being bereft of it and wanting it again, like a drug addict. It protests with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues. A study by IIM Ahmedabad last year looked at how much social media was infringing on Indians and found on an average 194 minutes or over three hours daily were spent on social media. The report said that social media behaviourally locks people in when compared to OTT or gaming and, therefore, “technology tools to limit the time people spend on social me­dia are of highest priority. At present, those who want to curtail their usage of an app usually make use of third-party apps that impose screen-time constraints. Tech companies have, however, also shared in the responsibility of helping users limit their screen time. In 2018, Google’s Android launched an in-built app called ‘Digital Wellbeing’ to let users restrict the time they spend on their frequently used apps, and to offer parents the option of imple­menting parental controls for their children. A similar initiative was also undertaken by Apple, which allows users to schedule time away from their screen by using the iPhone’s settings app.”

There is an irony in technology being used for freedom from technology. Google is doing all it can to get your attention while also at the same time recognising the problem and providing a small fix for it. An entire industry of focus apps has come up, in­dicating just how much people want it. There are apps that block all apps on the phone so that people can be app-free when they want to. One such popular app which claims to have three million users is aptly called Freedom. Another popular one is titled Cold Turkey, referencing the addictive nature of technology and this one can even lock you out of your own computer when it should have been easy to just use your fingers to switch it off.

Software can tackle the distraction of technology but so can hardware, provided it time-travels back into the past. Once upon a time, a phone did what a phone always did—it dialled a number and someone picked it up at the other end. At most, there were some rudimentary applications which were isolated within the phone itself. Smartphones changed the equation entirely. Speak­ing became just an afterthought. Now, there is an intriguing trend of ‘dumbphones’ that recognise the corrosive power of the smartphone and seek to break out of it. There is a demand, but sup­ply is limited because why would manufacturers handicap the goose that lays the golden egg? A BBC writer had this to say when going about looking for dumbphones: “Despite demand from a rising trend, I came to understand phone manufacturers have little to no interest in offering these devices. While small, there is a market for dumbphones. In the US, August 2023 data from Counterpoint Research shows feature phones—a type of basic dumbphone with stripped down capabilities—comprise just 2% of the handset market. That only accounts for a tiny sliver—but it’s still plenty of devices. Counterpoint estimated feature phone sales in the US alone would hit 2.8 million by the end of the year.”

The idea of digital detoxification is catching up with the rul­ing class. In February this year, the Karnataka government an­nounced that they were going to promote it. Its minister said at an event of the All India Game Developers Forum that they would make people aware of the negative effects of technology, espe­cially social media and gaming. They also planned to set up Digi­tal Detox Centres in the state to counsel good behaviour around technology to those affected.

No matter how many tools are available, like all habits and addic­tions, the first step to be free is to accept that there is a problem and that the only person to get you out of it is yourself. There are digital detox retreats and meditation centres where you can break the chain for a while and they are useful to some extent. But eventually one returns to the environment that fed the problem. For sustained liberation, lifestyle changes that address one’s relationship with the habit are necessary. This is especially true for children. American social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt has for long been cautioning against what technology is doing to them. His latest book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness lays out how society must enforce rules to protect teenagers and children from phones and the online world. His main recommendations are that schools should not allow students to carry phones. Outside schools, they should not get phones before the age of 14. They should not be on social media before the age of 16. They must retreat from the digital world and have brick, mortar and flesh experiences in the real world. And then possibly a creeping epidemic of anxiety, depression, lack of sleep, inability to hold attention and more can be stalled.

Last year, at Pariksha Pe Charcha, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told students that if six hours of their daily life, which can be used for creative ends, are going into phones then it was worrying. “Gadgets enslave us and so we have to always be on the alert as to whether that is happening. Use technology. Don’t run away from it, but keep it only to the limited uses that you need from it.” He used the metaphor of the culture of fasting in India to suggest a remedy. “Ask yourself whether it is possible to do technology fasting some days a week or some hours in a day,” he said. That is sensible advice even adults can heed for a beginning against the enslavement of technology.

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