Social media slowly stealing our brains

A few mornings ago, I found myself having a “driveway moment” where I couldn’t get out of the car because of what I was listening to on the radio. Guy Raz, host of the TED Radio Hour, was interviewing Amber Case, a cyborg anthropologist.

Yep, you read that right. And she doesn’t study half-human/half-machines, like I envisioned. She studies the interaction between humans and technology. And what she talked about is changing the way I look at my smartphone.

For a while now, I’ve been uncomfortably aware of my consumption of social media “mind candy,” especially when I should be doing other things. It was never a problem when I just had a computer, but with the smartphone, it’s always near me: I start my day with it because it’s my alarm; I don’t wear a watch anymore, so it’s usually my clock; I keep it close in case I get a time-sensitive email; I check Pinterest at night for dinner recipes; I find digital coupons on the Publix app before I grocery shop. But those are ways smartphones make my life easier.

The problem comes when I stop to “take a quick look” at Facebook or Instagram each time I pull out my phone for some other, more worthy reason. Then the “quick” turns into 20 minutes spent doing something that has absolutely no lasting effect on me. It means I spend time doing something I don’t even love just because the temptation to disengage is sitting there in my hand. 

Enter Amber Case. She talked about something called “ambient intimacy” — it’s not that we are in fact connected all the time, although it feels that way. It’s that at any time, we have the ability to jump online and connect to anyone, anywhere. This ability (or some might call it a disability) is changing our brains. The effect is that there’s no time where we are just sitting. Thinking. Letting our minds wander. Instead, we fill that mental downtime (in the grocery store check-out line, at the stoplight, while we’re stirring pasta) with a steady stream of stimulation. In general, we used to take more time for mental reflection, or as she said it, taking time away from “all the people in the room, all the time, competing for our attention.” She said when there’s no external input, we find out who we really are and what we think about matters without others telling us something is worthy of a like or an “I’m laughing so hard I’m crying” emoji. 

The biggest kicker for me was the idea that what we absorb from social media doesn’t stick in our minds like time spent in the real world. When you think back on what’s made an impact in your life — memories you treasure, times you really enjoyed yourself — it’s never time you spent online, is it? Those chunks of time are mostly wasted, and hours later, we can hardly remember what we were looking at. Not so with our real, flesh-and-blood life. We remember all those things that tend to be blotted out by online interference. 

Yes, it’s nice to disengage sometimes. At the end of the day, many people — myself included — like to hop online and see what we’ve missed. But hearing someone else (and with such an impressive title) put into words this idea that had been stirring in my mind for so long has made me set more firm boundaries for myself and my phone.

I know of a woman in Homewood who traded her iPhone for an old-school flip-phone for this same reason, and I applaud her! I’m not there yet, but who knows? Maybe one day I’ll take that step. For now, I’m setting strict limits and working hard on my self-control. The reminder that my children — who are “digital natives” instead of “digital immigrants” as we adults are — are watching how I interact with the very thing they’ll have in their hands in a few short years is reason enough to force it to take a back seat to the real life happening right in front of me. 

Email Lauren at Lauren@LaurenKDenton.com, visit her website, LaurenKDenton.com, or find her on Instagram @LaurenKDentonBooks or Facebook. Her first novel, “The Hideway,” releases April 11 and is available for pre-order from Amazon.