Have a Little Cry and Get On With It

A group of people pushing a car stuck in the mud. 1938, Horodenka | Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe | Public domain

Capitalism generates sadness, from which technology extracts the surplus value.
Marcus Gilroy-Ware

The amount of time we spend looking at screens has no more impact on our wellbeing than the amount of potatoes we eat. This is one of the conclusions drawn by academics Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orben after conducting one of the most comprehensive studies on the impacts of screen use among young people. It found that the amount of time spent on social media only clearly explained around 0.4% of depression in adolescents, making it an irrelevant factor when compared to eating breakfast or getting enough sleep. In another study, this one conducted with Matti Vuorre, they compared the adoption of internet technologies among populations in more than 150 countries over the past few years and found no link to changes in trends in psychological disorders.

Not all studies have such optimistic results as these, though few have been as intricate. “The problem is that you can analyse the same data and come up with completely different results,” Przybylski said of his research. It all depends on the intentionality you attach to certain factors. For example, a UNICEF report on the same issue highlighted the fact that the vast majority of young people relate the internet mainly with positive emotions. At the same time, it also noted that the associated rates of depression among those with a problematic use of these technologies were over three times higher than the rest. How can such contradictory and at the same time absolute conclusions exist side by side?

The underlying issue here is that it is not possible to establish cause and effect between the use of a technology and addiction, depression or other disorders. But this does not mean they are unrelated. It is this relationship that is capitalised on by dramatic publications and headlines, with phrases such as “linked to,” “associated with” and “increased cases of.” For example, nighttime exposure to mobile screen lights, which shine directly onto our faces, is not advisable, although it is the resulting sleep problems that influence our wellbeing rather than the device per se. The key is to consider social media-related psychological problems in terms of co-morbidities, i.e. issues that appear together and sometimes even explain each other. What does this mean? It means that no one suffers from depression because they spend too much time on the internet, but that depression can be a factor that prompts us to spend too much time on social media. To this can be added the fact that the architecture of the commercial platforms and their ability to hold our attention does not help us deal with our mental health problems. On the contrary, it can exacerbate them, as we have mentioned before and as long known by the owners of these platforms.

If we want to use social networks to withdraw from our personal reality or to block out our problems, they work as a perfect avoidance strategy. They help us to distract ourselves rather than think about our conflicts. This could be a minor problem (putting off tasks or not allowing ourselves to become bored) or a serious one (failing to deal with conflicts or feelings of anxiety and distress). In reality, any hobby can act as an avoidance strategy, but as the very aim of commercial social media platforms is to hold our attention in order to extract data, they serve this purpose wonderfully. This is perfectly represented in what we call doomscrolling, a term that started trending during the pandemic and which refers to that feeling of being in a rut where we are unable to tear ourselves away from our social media feed even though we do not expect to find anything new or exciting. We might also wonder whether the avalanche of content thrown at us deprives us of cognitive downtime, i.e. whether the inability to become bored might affect our creativity or our mental processes. But we’ll leave that for another book.

In any case, it is important not to approach these issues with an attitude of paternalism or contempt, but to ask complex questions in order to understand the scale of the phenomenon rather than boiling it down to “problems caused by social media.” Social media is home to hate, bullying and triggers of body dysmorphia, but the roots of these evils are individualism, competitiveness, hatred of difference, beauty standards and patriarchal demands.  The internet and mobile phones are, at most, catalysts. During the pandemic, screen use grew in parallel to diagnoses of depression and anxiety. But to blame this solely on the fact that we were spending more time online – without taking into account all the factors associated with the extreme context – would be a distortion of the truth. Loneliness, unemployment, precariousness and lack of future prospects also affect our state of mind. In fact, by allowing us to talk to our loved ones throughout the lockdowns, the internet saved us.

The solution involves avoiding technological determinism. If we consider that a technology will always imply unavoidable consequences, we deny any human agency and capacity for change. Instead, we should consider the design and decisions behind each machine to understand what we can expect from it and what room for manoeuvre we have. Digital power is the power to hack, to study a technology’s codes and understand it, open it up and use it in the wrong way to achieve unforeseen results. After all, the tech oligarchs like nothing better than hearing that their technology is unstoppable and that they have the ability to control and hijack our minds. That’s what their investors and the people they sell advertising space to want to hear.

Cory Doctorow warned that “[we assume] that because advertisers buy a lot of what Big Tech is selling, Big Tech must be selling something real. Both proponents and opponents of surveillance capitalism have assured managers and product designers that if you collect enough data, you will be able to perform sorcerous acts of mind control.” But Big Tech is not selling mind control, however much it would like to. At best, it sells persuasion and deception. The illusion of being able to predict our behaviour and convince us to do something (buy a product, vote for a party, etc.) is the star product of these companies. The media have bought into this narrative of all-powerful manipulators, and this is precisely what is most beneficial for them. They even exaggerate technological determinism and lead us headlong into mystification. There are some media outlets and reporters who have challenged this extremist rhetoric, but unfortunately they are few and far between.

Instead of infantilising the audience and promoting visions of algorithmic omnipotence, it is more useful to understand that certain technologies trigger or predispose us to certain behaviours that we were already prone to. But in no case can they force us to engage in these behaviours. In fact, as Marcus Gilroy-Ware writes, “all the social media companies know that, just as users are free to start using their software, they are also, theoretically, free to stop using it. Why don’t they? […] We would do well to start asking what it is within us that makes us compulsively use a certain technology.” In his book Filling the Void (2017) he suggests that our use of social media is essentially emotional and hedonistic. Essentially, it is a response that is consistent with how capitalism encourages us to behave. The question is not just why we follow social media, but how we might resist its pull. Google and Facebook have become home to our friendships and loves, something that these corporations are aware of and exploit in every possible way to draw us in.

If one end of the issue is technological determinism – casting us as helpless, unwilling puppets or victims, the other is individualism. On the individual level, it is fine to give someone a nudge and draw attention to their excessive social media use, but we cannot blame everyone for doing exactly what the platforms predispose them to do by design. Gilroy-Ware reminds us that “individual responsibility is the sacred preserve of modern economics, justice and ethics,” considering that “the compulsive and highly dependent relationship that many people have developed with social media, while it should not be judged or scorned, needs to be thoroughly understood if we wish to improve it. What this use says about our mental states and societies is not so much a lesson about technology as it is about society and human subjectivity.”

To this end, we must stop viewing social media as being separate from our existence, as inherently toxic, dichotomous and something we must keep away from in order to stay in good health or “disconnect to reconnect.” Penalising and pathologising those who engage in “deviant” behaviour is absurd, because everyone is part of the social, psychological, political and economic structure that builds and is built by the commercial internet. We can improve our health and our relationship with social media by changing our habits, by making mindful decisions about our routines and not letting ourselves be pulled along by inertia. But individual choices are not enough. We need to bring about a radical restructuring of our environment at all levels (work, education, institutions and even family); to place less importance on immediate economic benefit and more on the long-term common good. And this requires collective action.

Not everyone can afford to stop answering their emails, turn off their mobile or raise their children in a screen-free environment, as some of the Silicon Valley millionaires boast of doing. Sergi Onorato, in his book Ayuno digital (Digital Fasting, 2023), proposed that we shift away from the approach of individual self-help and detoxes and start talking about a collective digital strike. If we want to change our situation, we must look beyond what is offered to us by Big Tech, radically transform our online existence and start building the relationship we want to have with technology while keeping our shared needs in mind.