While waiting for the bus home when I was working in Edinburgh, a man in line asked what I was doing on my phone. He criticized the fact that young people were always on their phones. I said I was reading, which was true. We ended up talking for more than an hour about our lives, and topics in history and science before he got off at his stop.
I don't mind the silence of a long ride or evening, but you can do a lot on a phone that you couldn't do before: access a freely available encyclopedia, keep in contact with people thousands of miles away, or even just tap a chicken across a road in Crossy Road. What can appear disconnected or dystopian is the image of a row of people, of any age, with their heads hunched over glowing screens.
Without limits, however, the ‘cyberspace’ can hijack parts of ourselves that evolved long before we had phones.
I often frame things from an evolutionary perspective. With brains and bodies that have remained remarkably similar for hundreds of thousands of years, I like to wonder what kind of lifestyle we were shaped for.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that humans function best in groups of around 150 people, often called ‘Dunbar’s number.’ We aren't meant to know the intimate lives of thousands of people. Our social world was once physically encountered through a smaller network. In our network, survival depended not only on external threats, but on our reputation within that group. We therefore developed instincts to monitor our surroundings, notice what is out of place, and understand where we stand amongst others.
Social comparison, hierarchy, and gossip were not distractions; they helped us navigate the tribe. Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind that “our language evolved as a way of gossiping.” If you were ostracized, you could lose access to essential resources and ultimately put your survival at risk. In this view, gossip helped develop language, and language helped develop our sophisticated brains.
Gossip was just one way humans navigated social survival. Harari also connects our ability to cooperate with our ability to create shared stories. As Barbara’s Book House, an online literary blog, points out, Harari limits his claim about gossip developing language to groups of fewer than 150 people. She cites Harari as writing, “Any large-scale human cooperation is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination.” These myths include anything from currencies and belief systems, to nations and even the stories we tell about ourselves. Myths help us, like gossip, make sense of our social world, giving us a shared center through which we build shared purpose and social order.
Social media gives us the ability to construct how we appear to an enormous audience. The stories we make of ourselves now become a self-mythology of identity. But when someone becomes trapped inside a role, we lose their complexity.
I’m a big Hunter S. Thompson fan. One thing that arguably contributed to his decline was the expectation surrounding his Gonzo “Frankenstein”: Raoul Duke, his alter ego, bouncing off the walls in a bar in Aspen, Colorado, and shooting at typewriters. In reality, Thompson could be shy and thoughtful, and beneath all his mania was a man deeply concerned with American culture and politics. The real Thompson became warped by the mythology constructed around him.
The other day, I was walking through local graveyards. The wheat fields surrounding the stones seemed like a clean slate against which to reflect on how a life can be reduced to a name, dates, and perhaps a quote. An obituary might list your relatives, occupation, and hobbies, but not always the quirks, hopes, and habits that make someone cherished. In the same way, the stories we construct about people online can flatten them into something easier to understand.
The desire to simplify people is not new, but the scale at which we can do it is. Our versions of ourselves are also shaped by fluctuating ideas of what we are supposed to be, reinforced through mass comparison and media tropes. We ask less, “Who am I?” and more, “Who am I supposed to be?”
I once read an interesting question: if we never saw examples of love in the media, what would love actually look like? Consider kissing: we treat it as a classic proof of love, but you are essentially exchanging saliva with another person. The more you think about it, the weirder it becomes. But because we’ve witnessed it countless times, it’s normalized.
I support the democratization of knowledge, even if it comes with comparisons and tropes. Everyone should have access to information and be free to speak their mind. A phone lets you freely access just about anything, from computer-programming lectures and ballet performances, to courses in Mandarin and virtual walks through the streets of Guadalajara, Mexico.
The problem is that the same systems that democratize information can exploit our instincts. Social media capitalizes on conformity, which evolved for survival. Bots can flood posts with artificial likes and comments, making something appear more popular than it is. Algorithms can measure what we click, how long we linger, and what keeps us scrolling. Our devices can learn more about us than we know about ourselves.
Behavioral scientists, such as B.J. Fogg, founder of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, have studied “persuasive technology,” or technology designed to influence human behavior. By studying how our brains work and exploiting our vulnerabilities, these technologies can make us more susceptible to manipulation, whether through elections, propaganda, or addictive feeds.
The same brains built for a small tribe, limited information, and gossip around a fire now contain the whole world in their pockets, with a device capable of both informing and influencing us. I don’t think the solution is to reject technology, but I do think everyone can handle different amounts. Really, we should take personal responsibility for how much we consume while keeping technology in healthy check with limits and regulations.
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