Imagine that you have turned on the television, flipped through 150-some odd channels in the span of a minute, turned it off, turned on another television, done the same thing, turned your head slightly, turned yet another television, watched a show for 30 seconds, turned back to the first television and broadcast your own short TV show before you look at another 100 or so—and that you will do this another 30-40 times today.
If this frenetic attention-spiraling sounds exhausting, it is because it is: I have just described the way that most people use social media.
Most social media users know that they use their media too often, but very few are aware of just how excessive their consumption has become. Nobody needs to be told to put down his or her phone, or that he or she spends too much time on it… and yet, so many of us continue to hold on to the devices (or, even when we do put them down, to take ourselves to the same sites through our computers and tablets). We drown ourselves in the constant noise.
Digital Detox
Search the web for this phrase—“digital detox”—and you will find hundreds of sites, including reputable ones like WebMD, the National Institutes of Health, the Cleveland Clinic, tech reporting like CNET, newspapers like the New York Times, and many, many others not only telling you how to perform a digital detox but explaining why you should. In a certain great irony, I even found an app that promises to help you with the process. It is a bit like “drink responsibly” lines tagged onto alcohol commercials showing people having a great time through irresponsible drinking: “come to our website to get all the great tips you need to stop coming to websites… and while you’re here, check out these other interesting articles we have…”
Ironies aside, it is important to think through the significance of the term, “digital detox”. This implies that digital technologies are intoxicating. But what a strange intoxication it is: the highs are seldom, if ever, very high, while the lows seeming get deeper and bleaker by the hour. As Anton Barba-Kay writes in his Web of Our Own Making:
The digital forces us, as no other technology, to face the unquenchable lust of the mind to be diverted nowhere to no end. It is an experience as familiar and squalid as what is called in German Neugier — greed for novelty — or what might be called sin: the commonplace seductions of what we know to be smaller satisfactions…
…engagement and doomscrolling, boredom and fascination, are always two sides of a coin. The digital thus evokes the experience of total attention while tending to empty it of substance beyond the moment; the satisfaction of being connected overwhelms the significance of its contents. The more we are rewarded, the less we are fulfilled.
Anton Barba-Kay 2023: A Web of Our Own Making, 69 and 70.
Why is the internet so intoxicating? The idea of a digital detox suggests that the technology itself has an intrinsically-intoxicating property. But perhaps we could, and should, turn this question around: why are we so intoxicated by our use of the internet?
Technology and our Psychological Habits
It belongs to technology to affect not only our manners of interacting with the external world, but, conversely, to shape our own psychological habits through its modulation of these interactions. As an example ready for reflection, consider how your clock and calendar affect your habits of thinking about time. Likely, your conception of time is structured through-and-through by the clock and the calendar; though increasingly, as the clocks upon which we rely are the ones snuggled in the corners of our device screens, that sense of time becomes further and further removed from the relative movements of earth and sun, stars and sky. We think of time less and less in terms of nature and increasingly in terms of a mathematical abstraction.
I would not suggest that we get rid of clocks. But I would suggest that we find ways of reminding ourselves that the digits on our screens are signs only of something out there in the world.
In a similar way, I would suggest that it is not the digital device as such that intoxicates us, but the psychological habits we have allowed ourselves to form in their use: habits, mind you, that pre-existed the internet. It is a topic too complex to unravel here, but, in short, we developed a set of habits under the environment constituted by television that disposed whole generations in the worst possible way for the use of internet technologies. Allow me to name and briefly describe three of these habits.
Outsourcing Our Attention: the word “attention” comes from the Latin verb tendere, meaning to tend or incline, and the preposition ad, meaning “towards”. “Attention” is something reflexive: we tend ourselves towards… In the age of television, we learned to give “total attention” to the screen. But, despite the exponential increase in the number of television channels over the decades, the choice we exercise in directing our attention to the screen has always been largely illusory. Once we “tune in”, we hand our minds over to the programming directors, writers, producers, and actors. In contrast to a book or a play, next-to-no active cognitive participation is required on the part of the audience.
Fantasy: how is fantasy a habit of television? A very complex issue! We could also include video games in the constitution of this psychological tendency. But, briefly stated, (well-done) television shows us the impossible and the possible with equal presentation. From science fiction to training montages, we, being a visual people, take seeing for believing and habituate ourselves to seeing incoherent and fantastical ideas played out alongside what is normal and natural. Eventually, we fail to distinguish the two.
The Comfort of Distraction: finally, television thrives on the repetition of comfortable patterns. This appears with special clarity in broadcast television, where most shows follow regular methods of establishing problems or situations, showing their consequences unfold, and providing a resolution at the end of the episode. More complex storytelling may involve multi-episode or even multi-season arcs, but these typically are woven into “scenario-of-the-week” settings. Regardless of the means, we are comforted by the regularity of these fantastic conductors of our attention. Furniture centers around the television, which turns on every evening.
Re-shaping the Digital for Silence
These habits instilled by a televisual age are not merely habits of the individual, but have become fundaments for relations between individuals, and, thus, are disseminated throughout the pattern of cultural relations within and through which we all live. These pernicious behavioral dispositions have, moreover, permeated our approach to the use of digital technology. We are reactive to social media and its trending topics (outsourcing attention); we live in a world where fact and fiction are blended by rapidly-crafted narratives (not only games, but fake news); and we can barely go an hour, to say nothing of a day, without picking up our phones—perhaps a dozen or more times.
Noise! We are bombarded with it largely through our own outsourced attention. We have written our algorithms to work for us, but now we work for them: attending to the trending, minds torn by ideas unreal. We cannot stand silence.
But we do not, today, seem even to know what silence is. We think of it negatively, privatively, as the absence of noise. In truth, silence belongs to the habit of our attention. Absent noise, our minds may still be (and often are) lost in the chaos of fantasy and distraction. Only by cultivating habits of silence and self-directedness can we begin not to detoxify ourselves of the digital but to remove the intoxicants from the digital environment itself.
As an example, consider the way we interact with old but now distant friends—that is, people known well offline—through the internet. Do we dash off messages to them just as we would someone only known digitally? Do we “like” their posts? Or do we write them with conscious intent of maintaining the relationship? To schedule a phone call? Social media creates a habit to fantasize the appearance of our lives, allowing us to present our being as we wish it to be seen. Conversely, this trains others not to “pry” beyond that presentation. We train ourselves to see these presentations as noise and not as signal; a signal induces us to investigate further, to discover that which is signified.
Further Thinking
I have a lot more to say on this topic—here, indeed, I am just spilling out some thoughts—but I believe it important to be thoughtful about not only how we interact digitally as the digital has been given, but to re-conceive the very integration of the digital into our lives as such. As a technological environment, it will not go away. It has become a part of how we live in the day-to-day, even hour-to-hour. We cannot curtail all the ailments this rapid integration has wrought simply by managing our devices, by periodically detoxifying ourselves. We need to develop habits in ourselves that do not create so toxic an environment—to reconstitute the pattern of digital relations by which we are surrounded.
Continuum Philosophical Insight 