Getting Out of the Fishbowl: The Unmachining Self-Assessment
Yes, yes, we know, so let’s get on with it
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The internet went public on April 30, 1993. Sometime soon afterward, I wrote my first email to a friend. I took my time composing the letter. It started with “Dear Henry”, and proceeded through a series of paragraphs that were written in much the same style as a letter that was handwritten on physical paper and sent through the mail.
After I had electronically sent the letter, I printed it up. I also printed up Henry’s reply, which came a day or two later, and placed both copies in a folder where I kept my paper correspondence. That is what I thought the internet was, at first. A convenient letter-sending system.
And now that sending letters would be so much easier, requiring no paper, stamps, or walking to the post office, I had even wondered if the internet might usher in a renaissance of letter writing, a new great age of written correspondence that would bring with it a renewed love of words and language—and really, it was about time. We were all watching way too much TV.
Honestly.
I had no idea.
So that was 1993, and by the end of 1995, over 24 million people in North America were spending an average of 5 hours a week on the internet. Today, people globally are online about 7 hours a day—or 9, if you’re a Gen Z.
We know what this online experience is like. We click, scroll, share, comment, link elsewhere. We know our attention shifts quickly, nibbling on selective or surface details like goldfish, and often moving across the screen in a non-linear way. Some readers may have already goldfished to the bottom of this article before goldfishing back up again.
We also know that, with our mental focus often divided or split across multiple inputs, we’re never fully immersed, but rather spread out in a state of continuous partial attention. We feel like Bilbo Baggins did when he said, “Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can’t be right. I need a change, or something.”
We’re all Bilbos, yes, we know that, each with our own magic i-Ring and a Big Tech eyeball burning in the back of our minds. And we know we’re not imagining the harm it’s causing. We know, we know. We’ve read Nicholas Carr’s classic book The Shallows, or else we know about the research that shows how excessive device use is associated with poorer attention and concentration and long-term memory, poorer classroom learning and performance, attention deficits in early adolescence, and addictive-type behavior, more impulsive decision-making, and a harder time delaying gratification.
We know that, yes, and we might even know how taking pictures of objects at a museum can make people less likely to remember the details of the objects compared to just looking at the objects without taking pictures—which is a bit like what happens with the internet, if you think about it. The internet is an external memory system. With the world’s information stored online, we feel less inclined to remember humanity’s knowledge for ourselves1 (sure, we always had books, but no book ever contained everything). And that’s a real shift for the entire human race since, up until April 30, 1993, part of the task of each human being was to carry a backpack of knowledge over our shoulders, whose contents were to be shared with the people around us, who in turn shared the stuff in their own packs, and in this way we all had a bit of responsibility for transmitting history’s memory through time.
Well, times have changed. We know that too. And really, even if we hadn’t read all the books and studies on what those vibrant handheld screens have done to the three-pound universe in our skull called “the brain”, we could have guessed it, given the nature of the situation: when we spend hours each day in a digital environment, we aren’t just exposing ourselves to a shallow way of using our cognitive abilities. We are training ourselves in shallow cognition.
Some Olympic gymnasts train for 7 hours a day. That’s as much as the 7 hours the average global citizen spends online each day, which means that we are training, or rather un-training, our cognitive abilities with the dedication of elite athletes.
We also enroll our children and youth into this elite cognitive un-training program, and we do it knowing that their brains are still growing. Their frontal lobes in particular won’t fully mature until they reach their 20s. This most forward region of the brain, just behind the eyes, is connected to our executive functions, which among other things include our ability to multitask, sustain attention, and control our impulses—some of the very areas that are targeted by our elite program.
But we knew all this, or sort of did—and if we didn’t, it all makes sense. Devices are bad for the mind. What reasonable person would disagree?
Actually, some might.
If you’re an expert in this area, you’ll know that the story is a bit more complicated. Not all digital tech is bad; some even has a positive impact. Device use has been shown to enhance cognitive functioning and social connectedness in older adults. My elderly mother would gladly hit the heart button on that factoid.
So, the argument goes, we need to remember that whether devices are good or bad depends on what device, what platform, and used by whom and how. Furthermore—our skeptical expert might continue—as for all the research showing a negative impact on the mind, we must be cautious, as the direction of causality in many studies isn’t clear. Are devices really wreaking havoc on our cognition, or are people with cognitive weaknesses drawn to unhealthy device use?
Actually, that’s a critical question.
has argued that certain forms of device use—particularly certain social media—are playing a causal role in rising mental health problems in youth. Not long after he published The Anxious Generation, which summarizes his findings, an article emerged in the prestigious journal Nature, accusing him of confusing correlation with causation. Haidt, his critic writes,supplies graphs throughout the book showing that digital-technology use and adolescent mental-health problems are rising together. On the first day of the graduate statistics class I teach, I draw similar lines on a board that seem to connect two disparate phenomena, and ask the students what they think is happening. Within minutes, the students usually begin telling elaborate stories about how the two phenomena are related, even describing how one could cause the other. The plots presented throughout this book will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference, and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines.
Notice that Haidt’s critic is comparing Haidt—a veteran scientist—to a first year grad student who hasn’t got a grasp on elementary statistical concepts. Days after the article in Nature was published, Haidt provided a thorough (and respectful) response to the criticism.
That probably won’t stop the criticism—scientists being scientists after all—which means that every time we say we know how devices are bad for us, even when researchers like Jonathan Haidt offer slam-dunk evidence of how, why, and which ones are most problematic, there will always be somebody who says “Nope, you’re wrong”.
So where does that leave us?
A favorite default position goes something like this: Let’s just focus on being wise consumers of digital technology in our personal lives. Let’s learn to distinguish good versus bad content on the internet (apps, platforms, etc.), just as when grocery shopping we try to buy a lot of nutritious foods and to limit our junk and snack foods.
This approach has a lot of sense to it, and we might call it the focused approach, as it targets specific concerns. And it’s not a bad method. But on its own it’s misleading, as relying on the focused approach can distract us from a bigger issue, which is this: everything on the internet is a representation of something, rather than the actual thing. What we see on our screens is a binary string of 1s and 0s that have been arranged to produce the illusion of real people and real objects.
The fact that we use our devices an average of 7 hours a day means that a substantial part of the waking life of the typical global citizen is spent interacting with a digitally presented image or idea of the world, rather than with the world itself. This means we aren’t just consuming content in the digital medium. We are consuming the medium itself.
It’s difficult to get our heads around this basic observation—that the medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan prophetically observed. Or, in terms of Ian McGilchrist’s neurological study of the brain and society, that Western society has drifted from an emphasis on whole, lived experiences (a right hemisphere emphasis), to a focus on manipulating representations of life using words, ideas, and concepts (a left hemisphere emphasis). We’ve gotten so enthralled with digitally mapping out our reality that our understanding of reality is being overdetermined by the map.
Which is why, when it comes to managing our device use, it’s much easier to focus on the specific app, social media platform, videogame—whatever we habitually use—rather than to see that the main problem isn’t that our device use is shrinking our attention spans to the level of a goldfish, but that we’re turning our lives into fishbowls.
So, along with the focused approach—being “wise” tech users—we need a whole-person approach. This approach asks big-picture questions like, How many hours of my day is spent acquiring experiences primarily through a screen? How much of my personal space is saturated with devices? How much do devices dominate or intrude on the most important areas of my life?
From this perspective, it doesn’t matter that our device use is “good” or “productive” if we’re drowning in a twinkling pool of binary code that leaves us separated from the real substance of life—the real people and things that exist outside the digital fishbowl.
We need to pull the fishbowl off our heads for long enough to remember who we are. The focused approach won’t help us if we don’t do enough of the whole-person approach.
The Renaissance genius and polymath Leonardo da Vinci had this advice for painters:
One painter ought never to imitate the manner of any other; because in that case he cannot be called the child of Nature, but the grandchild. It is always best to have recourse to Nature, which is replete with such abundance of objects, than to the productions of other masters, who learnt everything from her.
Today, we are the painters, and our devices have become the masters whose digital productions fascinate us. And if we translate da Vinci’s advice into our own time, it means that our best recourse isn’t to focus primarily on those productions, but on the abundance of nature.
Nature—not just in the sense of plants and animals, but the world of human beings and lived experiences—is the raw material of life. It’s unprocessed and pure, though not always predictable or easy. And it’s the only place where each of us, in our own small way, might find our genius.
The Unmachining Self-Assessment
To help you in your practical effort to apply the focused and whole-person approach—to be a wiser consumer, but more fundamentally to get out of the digital fishbowl—Ruth from
and I have created a self-assessment tool below, downloadable as a pdf. We call it the Unmachining Self-Assessment or “USA” for short (no relation to the superpower!).As you go through the list of concerns around digital technology, you can ask yourself whether it applies to you (we’ve even added a space for personal reflection). Going through the form together with family or people close to you can also give you a sense of where you and others might differ or share overlap in your areas of concern, as well as in your solutions.
If you feel that any important categories are missing, let us know below! Feel free to distribute the questionnaire (with attribution, and non-commercial use only).
A final technical note: The psychometric properties of the USA (statistical reliability and validity) are as yet unknown, so there’s no use trying to score it—it won’t be quantitatively interpretable. It’s just a qualitative tool for now. If you’re a psychologist like myself, or a researcher, and you had some thoughts about this, just chime in below.
If you found the Unmachining Self-Assessment helpful, or would like to support our work of putting together a book on “The Making of UnMachine Minds”, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Please share your reflections or questions in the comments below!
Also, if you completed the Unmachining Self-Assessment, we’d be interested to hear about it!
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See The Great Forgetting - How 'critical thinking' and outsourcing of memory are withering culture, and how to turn the tide by
One interesting self assessment you can do is right on the phone itself. Digital Well-Being stats are there to be reviewed (screen time and which apps etc.). Check it out. Compare with your peers.
Also, I really feel that the more portable the device is, the more dangerous it is. The phone in your pocket all day is begging to take your attention every moment it's not already taken, and then some.
Wow!!! Creating this assessment was a wonderful idea! Do you have follow-ups planned -- e.g. ideas for how to respond to V's in particular categories?