Negative effects of a 24/7 Digital Life

THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF A 24/7 DIGITAL LIFE

**Most Comments and testimonials have been taken from The Pew Research Center a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. They conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research.

ALONE TOGETHER

The more connected we seem to be, the more disconnected we become from the world around us, friends, and family

ALONE TOGETHER: What people & experts are saying

“The vast wealth of information available at one’s fingertips can have a negative impact on people’s well-being. Several people close to me have developed an addiction, or near addiction, to internet content. They prefer to interact with others via electronic means rather than face to face. They have a fear of missing out on the latest news or happenings in the world, so they are constantly updating news feeds, blogs, etc. One person has exhibited classic signs of withdrawal when forced to abandon internet access for more than an hour. While I work on the technologies that underpin the internet infrastructure, I have made a concerted effort to maintain more personal, face-to-face time with friends, colleagues and family. The above has convinced me that tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs can be abused and cause people to lose the ability to physically interact with others.”

A computer scientist based in North America

“I have seen friends and families where dining together is increasingly rare, even when people are in the same home. It might seem like a media cliché, but even when at the same table people are distracted by their phones and tablets. In the rush for the ‘new thing’ or endorphin-reinforced digital transaction they are forsaking the opportunities to interact with other people. Many of my colleagues are disconnected from those they love by the very technologies they helped to create.”

A senior fellow a major university on the U.S. West Coast

“While it has helped to reach out and has made life easier, it has also reduced warm human context. We communicate through social media rather than spend an evening chatting, building relationships and enjoying company. Increased isolation is a negative effect I feel in my life; the time I spend using digital technologies could well be spent in other more creative and productive ways.”

A retired professor based in India

DISTRACTION

We are bombarded 24/7 with emails, texts, tweets, ticktock and the least is never ending! Our short term memory is being affected like never before, We were not born to be “multi-tasking:

Distraction: What people & experts are saying ...

“A friend of mine, ever the safe driver, was rolling down the road in his favorite old truck, listening to FM radio, when another driver, hyperconnected to digital technology, set about the task of typing a text message, drifted across the center line of the road, and crashed head-on into my friend. The offending driver died at the scene. My friend suffered life-changing injuries, breaking his will and his bank account.”

Author, editor and journalist

“My attention span has been condensed. It’s more difficult to concentrate for long stretches. There is less face-to-face interaction in the home. It’s not good.”

Professor of journalism at the University of Southern California

Being online all the time is stressful and distracting. It has come to feel like I’m performing for the makers of the platform rather than having real conversations. There are too many channels running concurrently, and it’s too hard to keep up. I feel unfocused all the time. Until today, I had three Twitter accounts and a Facebook account and I have been on about a dozen Slack teams. I find being hyperconnected to be time-consuming and distracting. I have read less fiction and spent less time doing personal writing over the last few years. This is largely due to the time I spend on social media. That time has connected me to thousands of interesting people, but it hasn’t brought me closer to any of them. Today, I deactivated one of my Twitter accounts and my Facebook account. I hadn’t been to Facebook in more than a year, and I hadn’t missed it. I learned that my tweets were also forwarded to my Facebook account – a setting I must have made years ago – and that people were responding to them in Facebook. So, to them, it felt like I was present. But I was basically a Facebook bot. So, rather than continue to be rude by not participating in the conversation there, I deactivated the account. By closing the accounts and limiting my time on the internet, especially with social media, I’m hoping for a more productive life and to have closer, more-focused relationships with close friends and family.”

co-director of the Center for Civic Design

“The biggest change to daily life is the difficulty in having a solid block of uninterrupted time in one’s day to think. When communications were primarily by phone or mail – or even when Wi-Fi/smartphones were not ubiquitous and it was easy to get away with a laptop without being constantly connected – it was possible to separate yourself from the digital world. Even writing this, I am aware of my phone next to me and that my email alerts are on, and it is hard to avoid being mentally distracted. Even if I am not looking at my email or my phone, I know they are there and it is distracting.”

Research scientist and co-author of the forthcoming book “Politics for a Connected American Public,”

ADICTION

Experts are coming to think that addiction to media can be compared to addiction to cocaine!

Addiction: What people & experts are saying...

“I’m a social media professional/networker, and I noticed over the last five years or so, how much more work I do on my mobile phone. And, that I started to have a behavior addiction in a way to the phone. I was using my iPhone as an alarm clock, but lacked the discipline not to look at CNN or Facebook before bed and first thing upon waking. This happened quite a bit during the election and shortly after it. I found myself not being well-rested, having nightmares, losing ability to focus or concentrate, and wasting a lot of time endlessly scrolling on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I decided to kick the iPhone out of my bedroom and replace it with a moonbeam alarm clock. I also set a goal not to pick up my mobile phone until I had been up for two hours and do offline activities – like walk, read, meditate, or professional writing. I did replace my CNN habit with using Headspace during the day when I feel overwhelmed from using technology. After a month, I noticed a huge difference in my moods, thoughts and productivity. I know that this experiment of one is not scientific, but I do know that there is research that suggests looking at the your mobile phone before bed – which is 7,000 kelvins – is like looking at the sun on a bright day and it tells your brain and body to wake up, disrupts your sleep.”

blogger and speaker based in North America

“My life is more fulfilling since I have fought a battle with internet addiction and won. I have blogged since 2005 and been on Twitter from the early years of the service. My children have grown up with a mom who struggled with internet addiction for many years. There were times I might be busier tweeting than watching the kids make sugar cookies at Christmas. After four or five years, I got a wake-up call. It happened when I saw a woman who was at school helping her son try to fly a kite at the kindergarten ‘fly a kite’ day. The mom had a 5-year-old looking at her, begging, ‘Mom help me fly,’ and the mom had her cellphone in one hand talking to someone about flying the kite as she tried to help her son fly the kite with the other hand. The kite wouldn’t fly. Simply put, the kite wouldn’t fly without her total attention to her son. And as I watched, I saw myself. I saw my own failures. My children needed my complete attention so they could fly. So, that summer, I talked to my husband Kip. I scheduled the tweets for the next two weeks in Buffer and gave Kip my phone for two weeks. I went cold turkey on all social media. At first, it was shocking because I thought of my phone constantly and all those people ‘out there.’ But over the days, I found myself coming back to a healthy center. Since that time, I put down my phone every Sunday. My phone has no place at meal times. When we go on vacation, I will put my phone in ‘airplane’ mode all the time so I can just use it as a camera. I wrote about some of this on a blog post on Edutopia titled ‘Put the cell phone down and be there.’ I used to believe the lie that multitasking is possible. It isn’t. I live life with more intentionality and find myself far more productive than I could have ever dreamed. Instead of getting on social media 20 times a day, I check it once or twice a day and now have a five-day-a-week podcast for educators, blog, speak, joined the choir at church and live life deeper. And as a woman with over 150,000 Twitter followers, it would be easy to live a shallow life full of shallow relationships. But instead I now go deep and am a much happier person. My kids need my full attention to fly. Social media and my smartphone have a place, but not everyplace. I am a human being and not just a human doing. I turn off just about every notification and I jealously guard against interruptions like spam and silly apps that beg for my attention. My attention is finite, and the choices I make about how to spend it are strategic. I take this passion along to help students and teachers understand it but I often feel like it is a losing battle. I see a basketball player brag about Snapchat streaks and wonder what would happen to their game if they did free throws with the same intentionality.”

teacher and podcaster based in North America,

“I fear that as technology is perfected to be more addictive and VR and AR advance to envelope everyone that more and more people will fall into those worlds and not necessarily be able to return to that which we now consider to be real. While digital life is good, the downsides are quite troublesome. My brother spent a period between graduating school and obtaining a job idly watching screens and interacting only via them. He spent all day and into the night constantly immersed in this. The TV was always on in the background while he played intense online video games on his laptop, while also continuously texting or messaging others about the game. Technology became his life. It was difficult to separate him from his virtual world and to interest him in physical human interaction. He became grumpy, began sleeping less and less, and stopped dedicating time to his own physical needs. Although it was a scary time, he was later able to pull himself out of it and eventually reconnect with the real world. While he was lucky to be able to quit, some are not able to do so.”

A college student

FAMILY AND SOCIETAL CHALLENGES

We dont talk to each other anymore at the table! Everybody is distracted looking at their phones. We even text each other inside our own homes!

Family and Society Challenges: What people & experts are saying

“A negative anecdote: Years from now, filmmakers may portray people hunched over their phones the way they today portray people from an earlier era hunched over their cigarettes. I recently ate at a very high-end restaurant to celebrate a special occasion and the people next to us spent the entire evening photographing their food to post it on Instagram, texting people and looking things up online. One of the individuals had her phone in her hand the entire time. I find similar behavior among many. Mid-conversation at parties I’ve seen people pick up their phones and turn away from others around them. I have seen people sitting with each other in restaurants or cafes and staring at their phones rather than talking to each other, and parents ignoring their kids in favor of doodling on their phones (including at beaches, swimming pools, etc.).”

A professor

“When we are on vacation in the mountains with no internet or cell coverage, the mood of the whole family improves. We are more together and present in the moment.”

A professor in media studies at a Norwegian university

“I recently did some research into the digital lives of parents and teens in Japan to mirror research that was done in the U.S. It is very clear that when you compare these two cultures there is more similarity than difference in the ways digital technology is reshaping our most intimate relationships. In many of the families we heard from, mobile devices and the content on them is a source of anxiety, conflict and concern. Parents are struggling with their own use and overuse of these devices as they are monitoring the use in their children, creating a new parenting challenge. One of the most alarming bits of data from this study was the number of teens who reported that they sometimes felt their cellphone was more important to their parents than they were – 20%. This is just not a message we want to send our children.”

An anonymous respondent

“One of the most palpable changes is how much digital technology has changed the dating landscape and our approach to relationships – especially for those of us who are younger (I’m in my late 20s). We’ve spent most of our romantic lives with online dating at least being an option. Just as having the constant stimulation of social media available makes it harder to commit to something like reading a book, the constant availability of new partners lowers the threshold for starting something new, which makes people less inclined to stick through the hard parts and build something lasting with a partner. It makes our dating more conservative also – we read through each other’s profiles thinking we’re selecting better matches, but in taking the element of chance out of the equation we miss out on the opportunity to date people different from ourselves who could potentially be very good for us, whom we might have unexpected chemistry with, etc.”

A research scientist

Mental Health: Anxiety, Depression, Worry, Low self esteem

With the raise of social media, there has been an outstanding surge in mental heath cases about depression, anxiety, panic attacks and suicide, to name some of the key areas.

Mental Health. What people & experts are saying...

“Anxiety and depression have been on the rise in those within my generation. I was recently diagnosed with mild depression. I believe that being hyperconnected within this digital life could be a root of the issue. I find myself, my mood and thoughts, influenced tremendously by scrolling mindlessly on social media platforms and by the content that I come across daily, even hourly. It has become increasingly hard to not constantly compare the reality of my life with those reflected though my iPhone screen and – even though I am aware of the false reality of the profiles I come across – it is hard not to have my own self-esteem and confidence plummet when I come across a perfectly tailored life. Netflix and all of the streaming sites have proven to be hazardous for my productivity, as I have become effortlessly addicted to them as a means of distraction and procrastination. I also see this constant hyperconnectedness impacting my friends. It worries me, truly does, to see the impact it is having on my family, as my parents are constantly struggling to catch up to the newest innovation that impacts their daily lives, and my little sister has seemingly found life behind a screen. She has adapted so quickly to life with an iPhone that she does not even remember ever playing with the traditional toys she once enjoyed.”

A pre-law studentCEO

“Reading Twitter at times makes me almost clinically depressed. I have done what I can to try to break the habit with only marginal success to date. Frequently it feels like I am drinking from a fire hose of polluted water.”

Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and longtime technology writer at The New York Times,

“I have shifted from reading news stories about a wide range of topics in a small number of publications to obsessively following a few breaking stories on many media platforms, most of which basically repeat the same information. This shift heightens my anxiety, limits my learning and wastes time. Although it’s my own fault, the new digital media landscape enables it.”

Associate dean of Tisch College at Tufts University

BULLYING IN SCHOOL

Media has unable bullies to go after their victims like never before! MAJOR issue specially in school but not limited to schools and children. Adults are also being affected by it!

“While bullying existed long before the internet, the rise of smartphones and social media has brought a new and more public arena into play for this aggressive behavior.” (From 2022 report on teens and cyberbullying)

Bullying: What people and experts are saying...

Nearly half of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 (46%) report ever experiencing at least one of six cyberbullying behaviors asked about in a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 14-May 4, 2022.1

The most commonly reported behavior in this survey is name-calling, with 32% of teens saying they have been called an offensive name online or on their cellphone. Smaller shares say they have had false rumors spread about them online (22%) or have been sent explicit images they didn’t ask for (17%). Some 15% of teens say they have experienced someone other than a parent constantly asking them where they are, what they’re doing or who they’re with, while 10% say they have been physically threatened and 7% of teens say they have had explicit images of them shared without their consent. In total, 28% of teens have experienced multiple types of cyberbullying.

Large majorities of teens believe permanent bans from social media and criminal charges can help reduce harassment on the platforms. A

Age and gender are related to teens’ cyberbullying experiences, with older teen girls being especially likely to face this abuse

Black teens are about twice as likely as Hispanic or White teens to say they think their race or ethnicity made them a target of online abuse

Roughly three-quarters of teens or more think elected officials and social media sites aren’t adequately addressing online abuse

HEALTH AND SLEEP DISORDERS

The fact that many people sleeps with their phones by their beds and checks their phone right before going to bed, has caused an alarming increase in sleep disorders

Health & Sleep Disorders: What people and experts have to Say

“I exemplify the hyper-connectivity of knowledge workers. At this stage of my career, where I network internationally with colleagues, work with dozens of students at a time, and administer multiple projects and people, I simply cannot be disconnected. I feel this emotionally and bodily every single day. My wrists hurt frequently from ongoing carpel tunnel syndrome; I suffer from chronic back pain that we colloquially call ‘academic back.’

Professor of information studies and digital design at Aarhus University in Denmark,

“There is a loss of, and interruption of sleep. There are conflicts over failure to respond in what is now seen to be a ‘timely’ fashion. There is increasing personal impatience. The effects are especially strong on teenagers.”

An attorney based in North America

TOXIC SOCIAL MEDIA

The over exposure to social media and personal data has caused an alarming raise in all types of abuse, Physical, emotional and psychological abuse.

TOXIC SOCIAL MEDIA: What people and experts are saying...

“Digital technology has greatly enhanced my life over the past decade. Just over 10 years ago, I was living abroad for the first time and began to use blogging and nascent social media platforms as a way to connect with my friends and family back home. This led to surprising connections with individuals all over the world and friendships that last to this day. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to account for all of the friends I’ve made – and later met ‘in real life’ – through social media, nor the career and other opportunities that have unfolded for me through these mediums. My life, my career, wouldn’t have been possible before the age of digital connectivity. All good things must come to an end, however, and those social media environments that once led to beautiful opportunities and friendships have now become toxic. In spaces where I was once likely to receive positive feedback, I now face threats and harassment on a daily basis. I’m still unsure whether it’s us, or the architecture of these spaces, or perhaps, that they’re simply not scalable.”

Director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Family members, especially children, are addicted to their devices. In some cases, the lack of social skills is evident. The adults in my life are also hyperconnected and are on their devices right before sleep and upon waking up. The decrease of human interaction is evident. I try to stay as disconnected as possible. I am much happier when I am not on Facebook. When I do check it (it is handy for keeping up with people) I am compelled to continue to look through it, and I spend too much time on it.”

An associate professor at a U.S. university

II feel increasing pressure – as well as a lure – to build my international reputation as a social and digital media expert through intensive connectivity, continuous publishing and strategic self-branding on multiple platforms. I feel like this is an all-or-nothing situation. Sometimes I just feel exhausted. Other times, I feel like one of thousands of ants trapped in a barrel filling up with water and we’re all clambering on top of others to keep from drowning. In the early 2000s, I could ask my media students to disconnect for one week. Around 2012, I could get them to disconnect for 48 hours. Now, maybe one in 20 will be able to disconnect for 24 hours. As more services enter the electronic-only sphere, people are required to be connected, to know how to access and use these services effectively. It means being online. Those of us who have been obsessively online for 20 years may be accustomed to an always-on lifestyle and have learned how to live with it. But knowing how to deal with hyperconnectivity is not the same as being unaffected by it. We – and by that, I mean myself and many of my friends and colleagues in the knowledge or tech industry – pay a heavy price. Sustained stress leads to chronic health issues. Continuous exposure to millions of people personally reacting to crisis after crisis on Twitter leaves many of us feeling sad, angry and hopeless. But we seem unable to stop checking our newsfeeds.

Professor of information studies and digital design at Aarhus University in Denmark

Research scientist and co-author of the forthcoming book “Politics for a Connected American Public,” wrote, “The biggest change to daily life is the difficulty in having a solid block of uninterrupted time in one’s day to think. When communications were primarily by phone or mail – or even when Wi-Fi/smartphones were not ubiquitous and it was easy to get away with a laptop without being constantly connected – it was possible to separate yourself from the digital world. Even writing this, I am aware of my phone next to me and that my email alerts are on, and it is hard to avoid being mentally distracted. Even if I am not looking at my email or my phone, I know they are there and it is distracting.”

Research scientist and co-author of the forthcoming book “Politics for a Connected American Public,”

“A young person I know began cutting himself when an online relationship with a girl suddenly ended. This was a person he had never even met, nor did he really know that anything she posted was real or truthful. Yes, lies can happen in the real world, but such lies are much more difficult to continue than those that are shared online.”

An instructional designer in Australia

NEVER ENDING WORK /ALWAYS IN DEMAND!

It seems impossible to get away from work with emails coming in all the time and reaching us 24.7. In Some nordic countries there has been legislation created for this! just for the sake of respecting workers right to disconnect from work after work hours.

Never ending work, always in Demand: What people and experts have to Say

...“The promise of digital technology was to make our lives easier, freeing our time to do the things we wanted to do. My reality has been the opposite. There is so much more than I ever imagined that I still want to learn, research and do. Also I spend a ridiculous amount of time learning how to set up a blog, upgrade memory in a laptop, take better pictures, write meaningfully in 140 characters, learning how to use new apps, writing comments and feedback, and reading millions of pages of content. I was spending a disproportionate amount of time using the internet and interacting with people online more than I did with my husband, daughters and friends in real life. As this realization has slowly dawned on me in recent years, I’ve set timers to limit my time online when my family is around and when anyone needs me, I immediately shut down what I was doing online to give them my full attention. I turn off my phone regularly when I’m hanging out with my friends and family in real life (which annoys people trying to get in touch but it’s my life).”

An entrepeneur based in North amaericaAn entrepreneur based in North America,

“I’m not sure that email is such a great thing. One colleague doesn’t use email and seems to be extremely productive. I spend half the day on it. Much of that half would have been spent on productive thinking or teaching in the old days.”

a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania