This morning, I sat down to check my email inbox. The political emails are growing exponentially as Election Day nears, and my favorite retail hotspots send me their daily messages marketing holiday gear with catchy phrases. I can’t resist clicking on an ad or two. A text message crosses my screen from a girlfriend who has shared a link to a YouTube video. I quickly delete most of my email, but hopefully nothing important, and click over to the message and video link. Ten minutes later, I look up and realize I’ve done it again: I’ve been sucked into the deep dark web!
Earlier this month, I watched the documentary (part docudrama) The Social Dilemma, a disturbing exposé that divulges how Google and Facebook engineers targeted its “users” to develop a population addicted to screen time. The victim of algorithms that respond to our search patterns and history, we are lured deeper and deeper into social media, news platforms, and markets. In other words, the search engines and sites track our interests and prey on them. Of course, we are already aware of their hawkish tactics; we know that the mere mention of a new product in daily conversation seems to lead to the appearance of an ad for that product in our feed. We may dismiss its placement as coincidental, but we know better. The depth of our addiction is so unsettling that we likely avoid confronting it.
I believe that for most users, our children included, a direct correlation exists between screen time and an inadequate work ethic. My students are struggling like never before to keep pace with assignments. We lose abundant time in our days to YouTube, gaming, Instagram, news alerts, and more. Do we even know or track how much time disappears?
The ramifications are profound. While we might disagree about whether the risks are as high as the filmmakers argue, we need to understand what could be at stake:
1. Our children’s self-esteem due to online bullying and the false representations commonly found in social media postings;
2. Our perspectives on the world around us because the algorithms know our political leanings, and rather than offering us all of the news from a variety of angles, our feed pushes us farther right or left so that the chasm between us widens; and
3. Most importantly, valuable time learning, truly connecting, and living.
Without our digital world, we would be paralyzed during this pandemic, but we need to regain control.
Consider checking your children’s smart phone’s settings (and your own) to identify where the time is going. If you already know that your children are particularly unproductive during asynchronous time or accumulate missing work and submit work late for seemingly no reason, then I urge you to take action.
Sit down with your children and build their awareness of the weapon they are wielding. With most of our lives beyond work and school curtailed because of the pandemic, the source of their anxieties, their idleness, and/or their poor behavior may be right in their back pockets, and they need to know it. Set limits on the offending apps, schedule downtime, and let’s break this cycle and reclaim our sanity. The first step is admitting that we – I – have a problem.