Fear of Missing Out Is Addicting

Surveys have shown that mobile devices can be addictive, particularly for youngsters. Concern has grown to the point where investors are starting to urge tech firms to take action to address it.

To Ana Homayoun, author of Social Media Wellness, it’s really about the way phone apps are being used.

“When we think about social media, so much of it is created on this feedback loop of notification. They want to promote engagement,” Homayoun said during a CNBC interview. “They create this system where you always want to be online. And it can create this fear of missing out if we’re not online.”

Homayoun recommended that parents give younger children a flip phone for emergency use only. She also suggested that parents establish times when kids aren’t allowed to use the device, such as in the bedroom at night, even as an alarm clock. Parents should consider applications that monitor usage, too.

“Social media isn’t good or bad, it’s a new tool for communications,” she said. “But what is a problem is that we as adults don’t fully speak the language that kids are speaking, and we need to.”

A Digital Divide in Risk Awareness

Last week, the watchdog group Common Sense Media and the Center for Humane Technology—a nonprofit formed by several former Facebook and Google employees—launched a multiyear “Truth about Tech” campaign to increase awareness of the addictive nature of smartphones and other electronic devices and of social media.

Beginning with ads targeting 55,000 public schools in the U.S., the campaign aims to engage educators, parents, kids, legislators, health officials, and tech manufacturers on the dangers of constant connection. The aim is not simply to warn but also to encourage changes in behavior and in how devices are designed and marketed.

Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and a former design ethicist at Google, told CBS News, “The truth about what’s happening on the other side of the screen is that this is happening by design. There’s a whole bunch of techniques that are deliberately used to keep the auto-play watching on YouTube to keep you watching the next video, or streaks on Snapchat to keep kids hooked, to feel like they have to keep this streak going.”

The potential for harm is even greater for minority and disadvantaged children, who, according to multiple research studies, spend much more time in front of screens. In addition, a 2012 Pew Research Center survey found that lower-income parents are less informed about the risks of too much screen time than their higher-earning counterparts.

Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat, writing in The New York Times, said, “The real digital divide is not between children who have access to the Internet and those who don’t. It’s between children whose parents know that they have to restrict screen time and those whose parents have been sold a bill of goods by schools and politicians that more screens are a key to success.”

Students Go Tech-Free for Class

At the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, students who enroll in a special course taught by Justin McDaniel, professor of religious studies, get to experience a taste of the monastic life, including a vow of silence. In what may be even more of a trial for digital natives, they also relinquish use of their phone, texts, Internet, computer, TV, and radio for a month.

Rather than phone-addicted students running the other way, the pool of applicants is larger than the class can accommodate.

The tech abstinence extends beyond just the course, which is called Living Deliberately: Monks, Saints, and the Contemplative Life. They aren’t supposed to speak to anyone, including family, classmates, or even professors teaching other classes (in the event of an emergency, they can speak to family members, police, or health-care workers). They can’t use the web or computers for other classes either, having to acquire printed copies of readings and use handwritten notes to communicate with instructors and workgroups.

Other aspects of the course include writing in a journal every 30 minutes as long as they’re awake and taking part in kindness projects on campus or in the community.

McDaniel told NPR that it was surprisingly easy for the students to go cold turkey on their electronics. “What is hard is a feeling that they are missing out on activities, chances to meet other people (in person), and loneliness,” he said. “They actually love not having the electronics.”

He added that very few students in the course try to sneak in tech use—and when they do he can usually spot it from their behavior and their journal entries.

As NPR noted, the course suggests that patterns of tech use, including addiction, may be shaped more by the communities of which we’re a part—in other words, by people—than by neural interactions with the technology itself.