The neurologist Oliver Sacks, in a posthumously published piece, describes what he sees as the damage wrought by smartphones:
I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see… by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale… I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth.
I understand how the technology and electronics industry spends unimaginably large amounts of money and manpower to keep us in a state of perpetual distraction, a state in which they can leech data and serve ads throughout the day. We have examined this both on this site and on Reclaim Attention.
At the same time, I don’t think it’s a problem for people to spend their time in multiple online and ‘real-life’ spaces simultaneously. In fact, we are often different people in different spaces at the same time.
Dr. Sacks termed this a neurological catastrophe. I think this rapid rewiring of our brains is a neurological revolution. The young don’t retain facts, phone numbers, commitments because the internet and their devices do. And that’s ok. As is the fact that "a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort."
It’s also why I think the high-level assumptions underlying the design of features like Apple’s Screen Time and its Android equivalent are fundamentally flawed: the amount of time spent on one’s devices is not inherently inversely correlated with mental health, and I suspect the younger you are the more obvious this is.
As I’ve written earlier, our online lives are an escape from the dreariness of our daily lives – even when in school. They’re safe spaces for marginalised people. They’re stages on which to express our talents, however well or poorly. They’re rabbit-holes down which we indulge our curiosities. They’re 24×7 telegraph and long-distance lines over which to sustain and deepen relationships with people no longer a few streets away.
I think we’re only now realising that globalisation is as true for human attention as it was for goods.