From Goodreads
Our attention has been hijacked by the tsunami of devices, games and social media which now dominate our lives. This new technology brings efficiency, cost-savings and instantaneous information. But when our attention is the currency being traded by big tech firms, what price are we willing to pay for convenience?
Addiction, anxiety, depression, loneliness, low self-esteem, empathy development, troubled relationships, fake news, propaganda and even threats to democracy are just some of the challenges new technology presents. Antitrust law has failed to prevent the emergence of a few dominant big tech platforms and regulation has not kept pace with surveillance capitalism. The internet was created on the assumption that all users are equal, but children and the vulnerable are not.
In Born Digital, Robert Wigley distils the mountains of available research on the subject and brings to bear his wealth of institutional experience to present a roadmap for society to radically and urgently reset its relationship with technology - for the sake of future generations.
About the Author
Robert Wigley backs young entrepreneurs in cutting edge technology businesses and Chairs UK Finance. He sits on the UK's Economic Crime Strategic Board chaired by the Home Secretary and the Chancellor. He spent a career in finance rising to be EMEA Chairman of Merrill Lynch and a member of the Board of the Bank of England during the 2008 financial crisis. He was Chairman of the Green Investment Bank Commission and wrote the seminal report Winning in the Decade Ahead on the future of London as a global financial centre for Boris Johnson when he was Mayor of London. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, a Companion of the Chartered Management Institute, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland, Visiting Fellow of Oxford University's Said Business School and an Honorary Fellow at Cambridge University's Judge Business School. He is an Officer of the Order of St John. Born Digital is his first book.
Info and extract
Today is my stop on the blog tour for this book. As part of the blog tour I am posting an extract of the book taken from page 85-87, which covers the start of Chapter 5.
Chapter 5
‘Come on, Ruben, come on, Ruben, fire you idiot! RUBEN!’ shouts my youngest son, who is engrossed in a video game in the family room, wearing headphones, at the top of his voice. Given how the noise permeates the house, we might as well all be playing the game. I appeal for some quiet whilst on a Zoom call with 10 Downing Street. Later I am told, ‘Nobody gets me. I can’t see my friends due to lockdown. At least this way I get to play with them.’ ‘Why don’t you call or better Facetime them if you want to see them and have a proper conversation?’ I suggest, digging myself deeper into the hole and displaying a lack of parental empathy with the sixteen-year-old mind.
Baptiste says, ‘There is a misconception that phones and their ability to allow communication prevent people from being lonely and it is a particularly important point now at the height of the Covid-19 crisis. In my experience, the ability to communicate to anyone at any time over your phone does not prevent loneliness, rather it facilitates it. By relying on your smartphone to stay in contact with friends/family etc., you are reducing face-to-face contact with people. This is so important, as it allows that human connection to be understood in a conversation. If you can’t see someone’s face or hear their voice when communicating, it reduces the ability to gauge the situation, empathise or react accordingly. Instead we are now reduced to showing our emotions through emojis, “haha” or, worse, “LOL”. This lack of face-to-face contact makes it really hard to fully involve yourself in a conversation.’
Cigna, the health service company, found that loneliness had already reached ‘epidemic levels’ in a pre-Covid-19 study, with 48 per cent of Generation Z (aged eighteen to twenty-two) reporting experiencing loneliness, higher than any other generation included in the study. Sixty per cent of those surveyed reported feeling shy and isolated from others, noting that no one really knew them, and that whilst there were people around them, there was no one really with them. Those who reported higher rates of in-person interactions reported the lowest loneliness.(1) The Children’s Society’s ‘Good Childhood Report 2019’ revealed 132,000 children aged ten to fifteen in the UK had no close friends.
Longer screen times and increasing loneliness – exacerbated by our recent Covid-19 lockdown – have in my opinion contributed to a rise in social anxiety. In Social Chemistry, Yale professor Marissa King, who has studied how people’s social networks affect their personal relationships, says the fear of strangers and social anxiety are common. ‘As social animals, we are wired to want to be accepted,’ she notes. ‘The fear of not being accepted, which is heightened when interacting with strangers, is at the core of social anxiety.’(2) King observes that 13 per cent of people suffer from clinically diagnosable social anxiety, making it the third-largest mental health problem in the US.(3)
Szalavitz and Perry suggest ‘that concurrent advances in technology, the high mobility of our populations, ongoing instability of families and communities, and compartmentalisation of educational, work, and living environments have contributed to a reduction in the number and quality of human interactions below that which is necessary for the full development of our capacity for compassion’.(4) More connection generated by technology does not automatically mean good connection, nor does it cure the lack of direct human interaction.
Nobody Gets Me Social health writer Julia Hobsbawm notes in Fully Connected that ‘we do not yet have a system of any meaningful kind around good connectedness, and nor are we yet acknowledging the scale of the problem of what happens to the health of a society when overload is unchecked’.(5)
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