There has been no more engaged observer of these developments than Emily Bell. First digital editor of the UK’s ‘Guardian’ newspaper, she was wooed by New York’s Columbia University to head its Tow Center for Digital Journalism. She retains her association with The Guardian as a member of the Scott Trust (which owns The Guardian and The Observer). So she spans both the Atlantic and the worlds of old and new media.

When UnHerd was looking to focus on the future of journalism and the impact on it of social media, we were anxious to hear from her. These are lightly-edited excerpts from her interview with Nigel Cameron, our tech editor.    

Recommended reading

Social media. What are we to do?

By Nigel Cameron

Those pre-Facebook days

The dawn of the commercial internet was around 1995 – internet 1.0. Most publishers began to be aware that there was this thing called the internet that would affect their businesses and that they needed to do something about it. In the very early days for journalism it meant that we saw things through a pretty narrow lens. Publisher after publisher imagined a world in which they could just publish more – in other words they thought it would be an expansion of the existing pipes. A way of just pushing more text and still pictures onto the public, because of course that was what we were talking about back then. 

There was a period of around five years between 1995 and 2000 when publishers thought this would just be a big opportunity to basically put newspapers online, almost literally. I remember that the Daily Telegraph was the first – I recall going to the launch at the Science Museum. We watched a video of a newspaper on the internet, complete with the ads placed where they were in the print edition. 

Then we all started to work on what this would really mean. In 1999 my boss, Alan Rusbridger, wrote a piece in The Guardian about how he thought by 2020 we wouldn’t have print any more. A bit of an over-estimate, but the broad direction of travel he got right. 

When readers began to post…

So in the pre-Facebook period that stretches from 1995 to 2005 you had a lot of what now looks like pretty crude experimentation. Some of the more experimental – and I think The Guardian was the most experimental in the world – did begin to add talk threads, for instance, where readers would post things themselves. 

That may seem like very small fry these days, but it was a big philosophical step for a company that had spent over 100 years editing everything that it put under its masthead to allow not merely journalists, but anyone, to post things. It was a really significant change in how we thought about connecting to our readers, and also about taking risks.

But then in 2002-04 web 2.0 technologies started to emerge, and peer-to-peer networks, commenting systems, the ability of anybody to post multi-media from anywhere at any point… That was when the publishing industry started to realise that it wasn’t just going to be a disruption to the form or frequency with which they published, but a complete inversion of the way that people consumed, made, participated in, media. 

Some of us had already realised that this was going to be a really significant change. But we still saw the real-time social web as something that journalists could participate in as long as their news organisations were digitally literate enough – providing new kinds of services and voices to a much broader, often global, public. It was an exciting time, and don’t forget that up until 2005 we might not have been making huge amounts of money but we were certainly breaking even and seeing very good returns on advertising revenue. So when people say why on earth didn’t you all put up paywalls in 2000 or 1996, the answer was that there was a very healthy initial advertising environment. 

Facebook and Google: the advertising revolution

But that was where the real change occurred. The disruption from Facebook and Google wasn’t so much in the creation or distribution of content, but in the advertising model. It was totally re-created through targeting technologies based on people’s behavioural information. 

For broadsheets, broadly speaking, the split of revenue in high-quality news organisations was 70% advertising, and 30% reader or subscription revenue. You could invert that in the tabloid press. But advertising completely underwrote the press, and had done for 150 years. 

We could see that it was going to migrate. First, Craigslist came along with chronically low overheads and a free classified offer. In places like The Guardian that were heavily dependent on classifieds, we realised we had to re-think our own classified businesses. With the passage of time, we came to see a coming exit from classified – which was pretty terrifying for local papers and for big publishers. But we still felt that Google was really bad at delivering what we call display advertising, which would still be a pretty healthy business online if we could connect audiences to products in a slightly more creative way. But then that opportunity disappeared as phones became smartphones and Facebook went public.

The Guardian's modern mission

Will Guardian readers approve of their Editor's mission to understand?

By Tim Montgomerie

Today, in the real-time social web, nearly all social consumption takes place through mobile. Social and mobile are basically the same thing. We might have 30-40 apps loaded on our phones, but on average we only use five or six every day, and the percentage of overall usage is about 30-40%; news and weather apps are about 3%. So if you’re trying to get people to come to your owned and operated property, particularly in the mobile environment which is increasingly where your readership is located, well, you’re playing a losing game. 

In any case, digital for many in news organisations both on the commercial and editorial side always felt like a forced march. Print is a very specific set of skills, and some of them are transferable to digital but some are quite different. The journalists, the reporters, had the easiest time, because really in a way they were the ones least affected by how the format was being changed; and they really liked the idea that you could get stories out to people in different ways, and report them as they happen. But for everybody else, there was a lot of foot-dragging. People were pretty scared. They could see that disruption was not necessarily going to be a good thing for them. 

Facebook’s arrival was not just a challenge to traditional journalism and publishing, but also to a lot of other social networks set up between 2000 and 2010 – they were all swept away by Twitter and Facebook. And back in 2013-14 everyone thought Twitter was going to be bigger than Facebook. But then, through superior strategy, Facebook began to swallow up journalism and swallow up the rest of the world. 

Instagram and IPO: Facebook’s brilliant strategy

The two things it did that were absolutely genius moves in the market, which people underestimated at the time, were purchasing Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, which seemed an absurd amount of money, and pivoting into mobile; Instagram gave them a hinge. So pre- the Instagram purchase, and pre- the Public Offering, people thought that Facebook didn’t really get mobile, didn’t feel like a mobile site, and they were pretty stuck in their tech. Post- the IPO and re-investment in mobile with the purchase of Instagram, things started to look really different. 

And that’s when journalists began to really think, hang on a second, if this platform grows at the rate it’s growing at the moment… The thing about Twitter is it’s a broadcast platform – composed of links back to our world. Facebook has become much more of a walled garden. They have your identity, they publish long posts and pictures, and it’s very clear that they are encouraging you to do that regularly. I think 2013-14 was when people in the publishing industry really started to see Facebook as a revenue generator – that they might be able to reach a different audience on, or that could very easily take their business away overnight.

In 2014, I gave the annual lecture at the Reuters Institute, which was entitled prophetically “Silicon Valley and Journalism: Make-up or Break-up?” – in which I described the fraught nature of this relationship. Silicon Valley companies, especially Facebook and Google, and to some extent Twitter, were taking on some aspects of being publishers without picking up on the responsibility or the real cost of creation. And, therefore, it was beholden to the news industry and the Valley to work out what that relationship really meant, particularly since these platforms are not very clear about their intent. They don’t see themselves as publishers, or certainly didn’t in 2013 or 2014, even though those of us who study publishing do see that that is very clearly the direction of travel.   

The feeling that they could sidestep their responsibility by just insisting that this was a mutual technology was so patently not going to hold.

Facebook goes after the old publishers . . .

From 2015 we saw this rapid roll-out of new products aimed specifically at publishers. These were from Facebook, from Google, from Apple, from Twitter, all designed to capture more of your content and more of your audience’s attention and time and keep them within whichever app it was they were on. The idea was that it would be good for publishers, because there would be a beneficial financial relationship that would formalise the somewhat scrappy and somewhat adversarial relationships of the past. 

But the money just didn’t move quickly enough to the publishers, and in some sectors – particularly local journalism – the devastating effects of having two players (Facebook and Google) in the market mop up 90% of the growth, particularly in mobile, meant that local newspapers started to close. 

. . . and sees off the new?

And in the last year we’ve seen the digitally native companies that everybody thought would be the new institutions – the Buzzfeeds, the Voxes, and so on – beginning to fail. And they’ve begun to fail because they don’t have a model that can survive outside the patronage of something like Facebook, and Facebook is not going to pay Jonah Peretti (Buzzfeed CEO) enough to maintain a 2,000-person creative workforce around the country when Facebook can actually be doing that and making bigger margins on it for itself. 

Interestingly, right now, having a legacy brand is not necessarily a bad thing. There are reasons why companies like The Washington Post and The New York Times and even maybe to some extent The Guardian and the Financial Times and so on are weathering the storm, while all the VC-backed, advertising-based new players in the space like Vox and Buzzfeed are all facing bigger challenges than traditional publishers are. 

Impact of the 2016 US election

The game-changer in 2015-16 was the US election. It was about that point that people began to realise that the way to reach big audiences really was through Facebook. We at the Tow Center did a report on this, recently written up on Gizmodo, that the sites on the Right were being disadvantaged. 

The point was, this publisher wasn’t being honest about its effect on the news sphere. The 2016 election result, combined with Facebook getting rid of its curators, a series of disclosures about “fake news” and then Buzzfeed’s sensational series on it post the election, meant that things really changed. 

Facebook’s experiment with six fragile democracies

Facebook began to panic: how could they deliver good quality news to populations without being accused of spreading fake news? So they decided to run an experiment in six small geographically disparate markets – all with fragile emerging democracies – in which they re-adjusted their news feed. Editors in these markets began to notice that they were losing 60% of their traffic. These countries didn’t really have an established legacy press, so issues of media and news literacy were being learned by populations coming online through mobile and into an environment controlled by Facebook. 

We’ve been tracking that at the Tow Center, and some of it is definitely true. But most of that drop happened before the changes were announced. So we think that Facebook implements changes, then announces them, rather than the other way around.  

The shocking thing was the lack of notice. Facebook did this completely experimentally; they didn’t warn any of the news outlets in these territories, didn’t work with them, and then post hoc said that they were dropping the experiment. 

Inside Facebook they’re saying that what they’re trying to do is ensure that good journalism does better. That over time what they are trying to do is essentially the thing that they have always pretended they wouldn’t do, which is pick winners in this market and create a set of machine-readable standards through which certain types of publishers will do better. 

The overall effect is that the fake news and the spam sites and the viral sites are meant to be less prominent in the news feed, and higher quality news more so. The problem is we just don’t know how that’s going to play out, and I don’t think Facebook knows either. 

The need for regulation

But we do know that for publishers Facebook is this (sometimes but not always benign) dictatorship. And we know that the political conditions for living in an autocratic, repressive, regime are that you don’t have due process, and you can’t predict what’s going to happen tomorrow – the rule of law is flimsy or non-existent. And in a way that’s what Facebook has imposed on the publishing world: an opaque dictatorship with no real rules in terms of your own agency, and where you have no foresight or insight into changes it’s going to make. 

Even if, as techies say, screens are going away and we’ll be living with ambient media and different types of wearable technology in the future, it doesn’t mean we won’t have the same big data-aggregating companies controlling most of what you see and do and buy. And really only regulatory intervention will stop the landscape being completely dominated by the people who are currently dominating it.

I do think we will have this period, a bit like we did after the industrial revolution, of social and governmental reform and regulation. We have to decide whether or not it’s right for large pan-national organisations like Facebook to be the United Fruit of the 21st century – going into new territories, harvesting data (not bananas), perhaps causing democratic upheaval, and not paying the price.

And the future?

So I think in the future publishing and journalism will split between those that have the ability to aggregate audiences and reader-centric revenues offline, or in any case away from the big platforms, and those who can use the distributive super-powers of Big Tech to their advantage. 

We can expect to see a smaller number of bigger publishers, and we will we have to see a much bigger move toward civic media that is not dependent on the free market. Europe already has this through public-service broadcasting and public media traditions. In America there’s much less of it. But I don’t see how otherwise we’re going to replace local reporting, as it just isn’t going to be profitable in the environment we’ve created. 

Some have pretty much given up on trying to find a way through. Their commitment to the priority of the human experience, and the logic and sweep of their critique of the tech world, can be very powerful. One example at a more theoretical level would be Evgeny Morozov; at a more practical level, Jonathan Taplin. On the other side, there are those utterly immersed in the technosphere, yet thoughtfully so; Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine, stands out.

But I find three other kinds of people especially interesting. First, those who have one foot firmly inside the tech arena, but only one. Second, those who have made distinguished contributions in other fields. And third, those who, well, don’t live in their parents’ basements; they’ve put the pieces together and built a 21st-century life.

Tiffany Shlain is all three. As founder of the Webbies, the “Oscars of the internet”, her street cred with the tech community is unimpeachable. She’s also an award-winning film-maker – Connected explored the future of technology – a mother, and a wife. But while she is, effectively, at the very heart of the tech world, what does she really think about it? She can’t surely buy into the naive idea that it’s all just wonderful?

“I’m somewhere in the middle of it all,” she says. “I call myself an opticist – an optimist grounded in a healthy dose of scepticism.”

It’s important, she thinks, for individuals and families to keep things in proportion. Easier said than done. I had just met Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT in Boston, who has spent much of her career asking hard questions about the human side of technology. Most people seem to be just on the run – they simply haven’t thought through how best to use these technologies in their families and their social lives. How do “opticists” like Tiffany make it work?

The social media conundrum

Social media. What are we to do?

By Nigel Cameron

“My family and I have had this practice which has been very life-changing … we are in the ninth year of doing it,” she explains. “We unplug every Friday night, and are off all screens until Saturday night. We’re Jewish but we’re not religious, but we love this ritual of Shabbat. It’s by far the best thing that we’ve ever done. We’re so much more grounded and connected in a deeper way. Having a whole day off, I feel amazing to be going back on again. So it has this dual effect.”

Our conversation is timely because, after years of practice of “technological Shabbat”, Tiffany is producing a book. “There’s an urgent need,” she says, “for something that’s not a ‘quick fix’ like a detox. Not a kind of fad diet, but a lifestyle change in how we relate to the technology.”

The detox parallel, or non-parallel, is intriguing. Detoxes are everywhere – from clinical processes for those with addictions to fad diets. People tend to go for a fad detox when they know they’ve got a problem but aren’t wanting to make long-term changes. It’s the long-term that Tiffany has in mind.

It can’t be easy, then, for her children to shut down their digital lives for the half of the weekend, every weekend.

“I have a teenage daughter who is almost 15, and one who is almost nine. Seeing how much the Tech Shabbats have influenced their mindset and use around technology is very interesting. I do think it makes them have a healthier relationship with technology. When you do something once a week for nearly a decade it changes you in small and big ways.”

Peer groups are an issue, though. Parents are bound to think that the idea is fine in theory, but in practice their children will want to meet their friends, who are glued to their phones. So how do Tiffany’s children feel when, like all kids, they spend so much of their lives among their peers?

Further social media reading

We CAN act to reduce the damage screens do to our children

By Susan Linn

“My oldest daughter, the teenager, she just handles her cellphone in very different ways from many of her friends. She’s a much more balanced way of using it. She’s had all these years of seeing a boundary around it. It’s not like every part of her existence is there. It’s just this thing she uses. She’s not as addicted as I think most teens are. It just changes your whole way of thinking about it.

“A lot of people contact me after I give a talk about it,” she adds, “or they see one of my films. People hear about what we do and they start doing it themselves. It happens a lot on social media – spreading the word, as there’s an urgent need in society right now.”

Not everyone agrees, but there’s a growing consensus that all is not well. And there’s a dearth of middle-ground, practical books for parents and families.

“My book is obviously going to look at our practice a bit, but it’s also going to take a bigger look at technology and society. I do some futuring in it too about what it will be like when we’re all connected, and how much more important it will be to have this space without technology.”

As the role technology plays in our lives ramps up, as Moore’s Law makes us more and more connected, it will be much more important to cherish this space. Which is of course the ancient Sabbath/Shabbat principle. A space without the quotidian not because the quotidian doesn’t matter, but precisely because it does. A space to get it in perspective. Week by week.

“What I love about Shabbat,” Tiffany says, “is that it’s lasted thousands of years through all sorts of technologies. It’s an interesting concept to think about again, of one day of nothing – to have the perspective to be able to create culture and to think about it. So I spend a lot of time in the book looking out into the future – and the past. To understand how we really need to be a witness now, in the present.”

Also from our social media series

Test article

By Tom Chivers vs Nigel Cameron

Witnessing to our times – understanding that we can live with these technologies, and yet also stand back from them to hold them in perspective – is a powerful idea. Especially at a time when some people want to repudiate them and most people are so immersed that they seem unable to gain any perspective at all.

“It’s ironic,” she replies. “When I was starting the Webby Awards over 20 years ago I was clear this technology was going to change absolutely every aspect of how you live, work and play. But I think the problem now is it’s so intertwined we forgot to value what is being displaced – being connected one on one, with no screen. I just knew this wasn’t good – everyone on their screens all the time. Not good for anyone!”

People from the early days of Google and Facebook are now emerging and telling us that their whole idea was to capture our eyeballs and get us hooked. How will that play out as tech gets increasingly pervasive and powerful? The recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal has highlighted Mark Zuckerberg’s extraordinary influence.

“Well, Mark Zuckerberg now has children,” she points out. “He’ll be awakened to how difficult it is when kids are on technology too much. It’s a fight for our attention.”

So does she think that when his older child is six he’ll regret having launched Messenger Kids – Facebook for six-year-olds?

“Oh yes! I think things will change as he gets older. Just as when you get older you begin to think about time and how you’re spending it. You start asking, What are we all doing here? Who knows how long we have left? You have to spend it in a way that feels good to you. And to reclaim owning your attention.”

I’ve been mulling over that phrase, “Owning your attention…”. Facebook and Google and the rest of them are all after our attention. And they have it for a big slice of every day. But it’s “our” attention. We’re responsible for what we do with it. And Tiffany’s solution is a seductive one:

“Our Shabbat is a most beautiful day. There is no-one to interrupt our attention. No outside input. It’s: how are we going to spend the day? A special time each week when you’re not responding to anyone but yourself and close people around you.”

Tiffany Shlain writes a quarterly newsletter called “Breakfast @ Tiffany’s.” You can find out more about her work at tiffanyshlain.com and follow her on Twitter here.

On a Thursday, in early March, Casey Hopkins decided that it was time to bite the hand that fed him. Hopkins, co-founder and CEO of the design company Elevation Lab, wrote a long, righteously angry blog post describing how Amazon.com had repeatedly allowed counterfeiters, probably based in China, to sell knockoff copies of brand-name Elevation products through the site. A counterfeiter had, most recently, created copies of The Anchor, Elevation’s popular headphone hook, using a poorly-cast mold and photocopied box graphics. For five days, Hopkins wrote, the counterfeiter had stolen “all” Amazon sales of The Anchor by undercutting the price of the genuine article.

Moreover, Hopkins said Amazon was “complicit” in the problem, because it profited from the copycat sales, and wasn’t doing much to stop them. Amazon has sold knockoffs of a plethora of innovative, niche products – from phone cases to bedsheet helpers  and baby clothes. Each product was crafted with thoughtful attention to an unaddressed need, and in each case, an imitator quickly stole the idea, along with as much as 90% of Amazon sales.

Introducing our social media series

Social media. What are we to do?

By Nigel Cameron

Of course, these niche products and companies might not exist in the first place if it weren’t for Amazon. The retailer’s ability to connect customers to the precise product they want – whether hipster baby clothes or a hook for headphones – is exemplary of the rise of the data economy.

In his new book, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger says data-rich marketplaces, such as Amazon, are making commerce drastically more efficient by using trackers and algorithms that predict consumer desires. But Mayer-Schönberger and his co-author, Thomas Ramge, also warn that the nearly-inevitable concentration of digital marketplaces and advertising channels is making society more vulnerable to market breakdowns.

The logic of algorithmic targeting also drives online media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube, though they’re selling targeted advertising rather than hawking products directly. That slight distinction is what makes the problems of these social media sites more attention-grabbing than Amazon’s counterfeit epidemic.

In building systems that let them find the perfect customers for a headphone hook, social networks also gained the ability to push the specific rage buttons of narrow, vocal social groups. And just as Amazon isn’t structurally punished for selling counterfeits from China, Facebook doesn’t care much if the content demanding user attention is coming from Russia. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dragged his feet over any admission of flaws in the platform, moving towards reform only after a massive post-election backlash.

Fraud that exploited data targeting would be a minor annoyance at worst, of course, if the malefactors were tricking one or two online outlets out of 20 that were equally popular. But Amazon, Facebook, and Google overwhelmingly dominate their sectors. Google answers 90% of all search queries. Amazon generates nearly half of all online sales. And for niche products, Amazon can generate up to 90% of sales  – making its tolerance for counterfeiters a systemic menace.

Of course, Amazon was a pioneer of ecommerce, so maybe its market share is just a product of first-mover advantage. By standard economic logic, its early lead should now be slowly eroding under competition from new entrants. After all, anyone can start a website – right?

But no – Amazon gained 5% more market share last year alone. That’s because the pathway to market dominance has changed since the age of railroads and telephones. Those systems benefited from ‘network effects’, with each new node making the whole operation more appealing for new customers, and eventually eliminating healthy competition. Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge argue that the combination of data-gathering and machine learning instead leads to what’s called a ‘feedback effect’ – which is something like a network effect on steroids.

As they collect data and refine their algorithms, those such as Google and Netflix pull ahead in the race to predict consumer desires – which helps them win more customers, and in turn more data, until they can’t be overtaken. Because of the resulting concentration, any flaws in the algorithms used by Amazon and Google have immediate and widespread effects. In another alarming example, an unknown group has successfully gamed YouTube and showed algorithmically-generated, often violent videos to millions of children.

But these problems don’t need to be caused by fraudsters, cheats, and counterfeiters. Alex Jones’  Infowars channel was recently censured by YouTube after nearly a decade of spreading dangerous conspiracy theories there. Jones is an American who seems to at least partly believe what he is selling – and has made millions of dollars not only for himself, but for YouTube too. Systematic harassment on Twitter doesn’t necessarily come from the Russians. Amazon could be misreading consumer preferences in ways that are unseen, but have vast distorting impacts on the market. We don’t know because we don’t have access to its data or algorithms.

The only way to preclude such deep distortions of our social and economic systems is to let companies try to out-predict each other – to create competition at the level of the algorithm itself. Because of the nature of machine-learning feedback effects, though, there are big barriers to new entrants. A startup social network has neither Facebook’s current audience, nor its historical trove of data about how audiences in the abstract behave. Without that data, a Facebook competitor can’t hope to train its own system to be nearly as effective at keeping users’ attention, and selling ads against that attention.

There are a number of policy recommendations on the table to encourage competition among data-driven companies. Some have suggested forcing transparency of algorithms themselves, but that wouldn’t give competitors the training data they really need. Chicago Booth School of Business Professors Luis Zingales and Guy Rolnik have proposed that individuals should have a property right to their own data, creating smooth portability between platforms. That might make switching social networks much easier, perhaps applying pressure on Twitter et al to curb abuse.

But those individual data rights wouldn’t create the critical mass of data to let an Amazon or Google competitor come up with new and better ways to match audiences and buyers with creators and sellers.  For that, Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge say we need what they call a “progressive data-sharing mandate”, which would force companies to share their data with smaller competitors in proportion with their market share.

So, for instance, Amazon might be mandated to share half of its current consumer preference data (anonymised, of course) with smaller competitors. Of course, data isn’t sufficient to build a viable Amazon competitor, but it might very well be necessary. Competing startups might apply different insights to raw data gathered by the giants in their field, or simply structure their offering in a different way, or impose different policies – such as more closely scrutinising low-cost Chinese resellers.

For Casey Hopkins, a viable alternative to the Everything Store can’t come soon enough. Amazon pulled the counterfeiter that had squatted The Anchor’s product page within hours of Hopkins’ blog post going viral – but just three days later, another one had taken its place.

More from our social media series

We CAN act to reduce the damage screens do to our children

By Susan Linn

Babies and screens

While there’s scant evidence that babies and toddlers benefit from screens (the exception may be the family bonds strengthened through long-distance video chats with beloved relatives), children as young as preschoolers can learn from thoughtfully created television and digital content.  Older children and adolescents can benefit even more.  But, despite the potential benefits, the increasing prevalence of screen technologies in the lives of children is not benign.

Beginning in infancy, children around the world spend an inordinate amount of time with screens. In the United States, 37% of babies under two watch television every day. On any given day, those who watch average almost one and a half hours. In Australia, 40% of 18-month-old babies spend more than two hours a day with screens. In 2014, an international study of 9 to 11-year-olds found that they spend an average of 2.6 hours a day with screens, with children in Brazil spending the most time (3.5 hours) and children in India spending the least (1.8 hours)[1.  Allana G Leblanc, Peter T Katzmarzyk, Tiago V Barreira, Stephanie T Broyles, Jean-Philippe Chaput, Timothy S Church, Mikael Fogelholm, et al. “Correlates of Total Sedentary Time and Screen Time in 9-11 Year-Old Children around the World: The International Study of Childhood Obesity, Lifestyle and the Environment.” PLoS ONE 10, no. 6: e0129622. Accessed March 6, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0129622]. On average, preschool children in the United Kingdom spend more than four hours a day with screens, including television, online media and games.  In early adolescence, that number rises to about seven hours per day[2.  Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2017, November 29, 2017. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/media-literacy-research/childrens/children-parents-2017. Accessed March 7, 2018].

Developmental and health problems

These hours become more worrisome as evidence accumulates about  the addictive properties of digital media[3.  “The Problem.” Accessed March 8, 2018. https://humanetech.com/problem/.] [4.  “Think Differently About Kids.” Accessed March 8, 2018. https://thinkdifferentlyaboutkids.com/index.php?acc=1].  A 2018 literature review in the journal Environmental Research identified several evidence-based, child-related concerns about addiction to video games, social media and the internet.  New brain imaging techniques suggest that screen technologies can change the actual architecture of the brain[5.  Lissak, Gadi. 2018. “Adverse Physiological and Psychological Effects of Screen Time on Children and Adolescents: Literature Review and Case Study.” Environmental Research 164 (July): 149–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2018.01.015].

Excessive screen time is a factor in a host of problems for children and adolescents.  For children younger than two, it’s a factor in delaying language development[6.  Duch, Helena, Elisa M. Fisher, Ipek Ensari, Marta Font, Alison Harrington, Caroline Taromino, Jonathan Yip, and Carmen Rodriguez. “Association of Screen Time Use and Language Development in Hispanic Toddlers: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Study.” Clinical Pediatrics 52, no. 9 (September 1, 2013): 857–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/0009922813492881] [7.  Media, Council on Communications And. 2016. “Media and Young Minds.” Pediatrics 138 (5): e20162591. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2016-2591].

Time with television and digital media are linked to childhood obesity[8.  Robinson, Thomas N., Jorge A. Banda, Lauren Hale, Amy Shirong Lu, Frances Fleming-Milici, Sandra L. Calvert, and Ellen Wartella, 2017. “Screen Media Exposure and Obesity in Children and Adolescents.” Pediatrics 140 (Supplement 2): S97–101. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2016-1758K] as well as sleep disturbances from infancy to adolescence[9.  Cheung, Celeste H. M., Rachael Bedford, Irati R. Saez De Urabain, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, and Tim J. Smith. 2017. “Daily Touchscreen Use in Infants and Toddlers Is Associated with Reduced Sleep and Delayed Sleep Onset.” Scientific Reports 7 (April): 46104. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep46104] [10.  Hale, Lauren, and Stanford Guan. 2015. “Screen Time and Sleep among School-Aged Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Literature Review.” Sleep Medicine Reviews 21 (June): 50–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2014.07.007]. For teenagers, time with social media is correlated with depression and anxiety[11.  Twenge, Jean M. 2017. “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” The Atlantic, September 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/].

In addition, much of the content children encounter on screens can be harmful. Video game violence is a risk factor for increased aggression[12.  Greitemeyer, Tobias. “The Spreading Impact of Playing Violent Video Games on Aggression.” Computers in Human Behavior 80 (March 1, 2018): 216–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.11.022]. Viewing sexualised media can cause body dissatisfaction in girls as young as five[13.  Slater, Amy, and Marika Tiggemann. “Little Girls in a Grown up World: Exposure to Sexualized Media, Internalisation of Sexualisation Messages, and Body Image in 6-9 Year-Old Girls.” Body Image 18 (September 2016): 19–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2016.04.004].  Children’s exposure to advertising contributes to the acquisition of materialistic values — the belief that the things we buy will make us happy[14.  Kasser, Tim, and Susan Linn. 2016. “Growing Up under Corporate Capitalism: The Problem of Marketing to Children, with Suggestions for Policy Solutions.” Social Issues and Policy Review 10 (1): 122–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/sipr.12020].

A role for governments?

Evidence of harm, or potential harm, points to the need for policies that protect children from overuse.  Government regulations can prevent media and tech companies from marketing directly to children, require that they provide evidence for educational claims, and hold them accountable for potential harms.

Governments can’t, and shouldn’t, legislate when, whether, and how parents expose children to screen technologies. They can, however, fund training programmes for health professionals, educators, and child development specialists to provide parents with evidence-based guidance about the potential benefits and harms of children’s time — and on how to set limits.

Concerns about the impact of screen technology on children — including the marketing it purveys so well — has for too long been the purview of concerned parents and a relatively small cadre of advocates. But that’s no longer the case.

Critique from industry – and investors

Today, public critiques of tech companies come from within the industry, citing concerns that the seductive, purposefully addictive products they create are hurting children. Two of Apple’s major investors are publicly urging the company to help parents to reduce children’s screen time. Concerned tech innovators and creators recently launched the Center for Humane Technology. In their own words, they’re taking a stand because “what started as a race to monetise our attention is now eroding the pillars of our society: mental health, democracy, social relationships, mental health, and our children”. It’s no accident that when Steve Jobs was asked what his kids thought of the iPad, he said: “They’ve never seen one.”

Love of the analogue 

The way to help children flourish in the digital age is to ensure that they develop a solid grounding in, and love for, the analogue world. They need time to form powerfully deep attachments to people and connections with the rest of the natural world. To develop a healthy sense of themselves children need satisfying experiences unmediated by digital devices. They need to explore with all of their senses, and have chances to become bored enough to generate their own amusements and interests.

Proponents of a laisser-faire approach to children’s use of technology argue that we live in anti-regulatory times. Yet social movements have a long history of changing entrenched policies. They say that it’s impossible to help parents reduce children’s screen time, and all that can be done is to create ‘good’ media content. Yet research shows that interventions can help to reduce children’s screen time[15.  Yilmaz, Gonca, Birlik Mahm and Kahire Cad. 2015. “An intervention to preschool children for reducing screen time: a randomised controlled trial.” Child: Care, Health and Development 41 (3): 443-449. https://dx.doi.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1111/cch.12133].

It’s not going to be easy to stop tech and media companies from hijacking children. But given what’s at stake it’s essential that we try.

Also from our series on social media

Test article

By Nigel Cameron and Tom Chivers

We take our smartphones for granted (I know I do). Yet we also know that the extraordinary convenience they bring to our busy lives – from real-time public transport info to restaurant reviews to photos of our children to chat with loved ones – can come at a social cost.

The couple on a date who peek at their phones while the partner isn’t looking. The families who gather for dinner, yet each member distracted by a buzz and a screen. The business meetings in which no-one is ever sure of anyone else’s attention. The people who walk across busy roads fixated on a screen. And, of course, “cell yell,” as it has been called – less prevalent now, though far from extinct. Otherwise thoughtful people whose shouted conversations dominate railway carriages and restaurants and airport lounges. The teenagers whose lives seem to revolve around the latest social buzz. And adults also are the victims of “FOMO” – “fear of missing out”. It’s a long list, and we could all make one of our own.

Houston, we have a problem

I’m wary of the pseudo-medical term “addiction” but we all know it can be hard to put these intrusive things in their place. We also know that the mega-companies who run the services we use know that too. Indeed, it’s at the core of their business model. They need our eyeballs, and they need them as much of the time as they can get them.

We’ve all heard the saying that “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.” Social media and search and other internet-based efforts are enormously profitable for this single reason: you hand over vast quantities of information, so they know a lot about you; and they use what they know to advertise to you. We’ve always had ad-supported businesses – such as newspapers, where the price only covers part of the cost, and ads cover the rest; and commercial television.

But there’s a reason why advertisers have been placing 98% of new online business with Facebook and Google rather than, say, The Times or USA Today. The tech platforms can offer precise targeting that conventional publishers cannot match and they can only deliver that precision because they know an awful lot about you. For example, if you ask Facebook to send you everything they have on you – something a good number of people have been doing in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations – they are obliged to do so. It will typically run to more than 1,000 pages. Maybe you didn’t think your life was all that interesting but it is to Facebook and Google – because of what it means they can offer to the world’s other big businesses.

Is there a solution?

Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t just put the clock back – and un-invent the internet, un-invent GPS, un-invent all the other key components that enable our smartphones and leave us with this dilemma.

If there is a solution, it lies in critical thinking. About the business models of the companies whose products and services we engage. About the regulatory environments in which they should operate. And, critically, about how we use our own mobile devices. In our families, in our businesses, and in our personal lives.

That’s the spirit of this UnHerd Deep Dive.

Connections

As we criticise social media, it’s worth recalling how much personal and professional benefit we have received from it. If I review the contributors to this Deep Dive, I am reminded that, of our seven contributors/subjects, I first met two through Twitter and two through Facebook. Here at UnHerd we’re as wary of knee-jerk Luddites as we are of naïve techno-optimists. We like people who think for themselves. And we’re therefore delighted that a range of people who do think for themselves have agreed to help us think all this through.

• Emily Bell was first digital editor of The Guardian newspaper and now leads the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Effectively providing a guide to how we got here, she reviews the impact of social media on the news industry, from pre-Facebook days to what lies ahead.
• Sherry Turkle is a distinguished MIT professor – and psycho-analyst – who has spent most of her professional life researching the impact of the internet on real people. My meeting with her in Boston in December to discuss her work was published last month as part of UnHerd’s profiling of ‘Free Minds’ series but was originally intended to be part of this series.
• Jean Twenge teaches psychology at San Diego State University. Her cover article in the storied U.S. magazine Atlantic caused a furor by arguing that smartphone use could lead to teenage loneliness, and even suicide. The UK’s BBC public broadcaster recently discussed her controversial claims and I assess their assessment.
• Susan Linn, Harvard psychiatrist and founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-free Childhood (and also, famed ventriloquist!), reviews the research on children and screens.
• David Z. Morris, Forbes business magazine columnist, looks squarely at the business model. The private info of users (you and I) becomes the basis of the mega-profits of mega-corporations. He suggests potential policy solutions.

And by way of framing some of the pros and cons Sally Chatterton, UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, recently acted as umpire in a fifteen minute debate between yours truly and Tom Chivers. Tom, who takes a more upbeat view of new tech’s impact, has also been writing a little for us. Here’s the link to our friendly discussion – face-to-face encounters are nearly always happier things than Twitter debates.

The series will continue tomorrow.

When you stop by her office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, doesn’t wave you to a seat in front of a mahogany professorial desk. She offers you your choice of her comfy couches (and, at least in my case, she offers you coffee). For she isn’t simply a sociologist and ethnographer and anthropologist. She’s also a psychologist and psychoanalyst. And while much of her life has been devoted to studying digital technology, her first book was actually about Sigmund Freud. If ever we mere humans needed an advocate in the face of the technological-industrial complex and its devices, we’d hope for someone like her.

1984: Orwell, Turkle, Zuckerberg

There were a mere ten million computers in the entire United States when Sherry Turkle, already a professor at MIT, staked her claim to be the champion of human questions in the dawning digital era. Back in that haunting year, 1984. Back before any one of the companies that dominate today’s internet had yet been heard of. Even before Tim Berners-Lee had come up with the World Wide Web. Somewhat curiously, it was also the year Mark Zuckerberg was born.

In her prescient book The Second Self, she reviewed the rapid spread of what she called the “computer culture,” and reflected that – even then – “in one way or another” it “touches us all.” Grasping in a single phrase what many would come to see as the core question of the 21^st century, she subtitles the volume “Computers and the Human Spirit.”

Reading The Second Self a generation later is an eerie experience.

Take children, for example.

Long, long before Mark Zuckerberg launched Messenger Kids to bring six-year-olds into Facebook, before Mattel launched Hello Barbie, their chatty robot doll, Sherry Turkle was studying “children’s relationships with computers.”

“I found three stages …. First there is a “metaphysical” stage: when very young children meet computers they are concerned with whether the machines think, feel, are alive. Older children, from age seven or eight on, are less concerned with speculating about the nature of the world than with mastering it.” And in adolescence “computers become part of a return to reflection, this time not about the machine but about oneself.”

What distinguishes Turkle’s work from so much commentary on the rise of the digital world is its basis in research. Her observations are rooted in something other than opinion and anecdote. “This work is a field study based on many thousands of hours of interviews and observations,” she writes.

And she’s continued asking questions about the digital revolution and the human spirit ever since – and seeking answers grounded in sober facts and analysis.

Let’s talk

As Carlos Lozada in the Washington Post notes in reviewing her latest book[1.  From “The book that will have everyone talking about how we never talk anymore her latest book”, Washington Post, 1 October 2015: “We think our devices deliver comfort and efficiency, but, in Turkle’s telling, they offer loneliness and disarray. “Every time you check your phone in company,” she reminds, “what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.””], Reclaiming Conversation, it would be a mistake to lump it together with the stream of “tech-skeptic manifestos.”  “This is a persuasive and intimate book,” he writes, “one that explores the minutiae of human relationships. Turkle uses our experiences to shame us, showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends and co-workers, even from ourselves.”

The situation is one familiar to all of us. In Lozada’s summary:

“You’re at the dinner table, or in a meeting, or at a baseball game, or in the classroom, or in your bedroom, or at a bar or, yes, in the bathroom — and you’re on your phone. You might be talking, but more likely you’re texting, posting, swiping, liking, tweeting, buying, browsing or, in my favorite metaphor of digital existence, “refreshing,” as though life’s staleness can be washed away with every new, fully realized screen.”

A super-abundance of conversation, surely!

Closely related...

How smartphones make our young people unhappy

By Peter Franklin

And yet:

“This is the world of incessant connection, and for all the communication it supposedly provides, it’s destroying one essential thing: open-ended conversation. “We are being silenced by our technologies,” Sherry Turkle warns, “in a way, ‘cured of talking.’” And that silence means our ability to relate to others is disappearing, too. “We face a flight from conversation that is also a flight from self-reflection, empathy, and mentorship.”

Three strikes…

While Sherry Turkle’s early work focused on humans and on computers that actually looked like computers, the context today can be summed up as the conjunction of three factors:

1. First, the basic inter-connectedness of the internet, which was dramatically enhanced by the invention of the Web (1991);
2. Second, the development of social media (Facebook was founded in 2004, though AOL, 1985, and MySpace, 2003, were the pioneers);
3. And, third, the near-miraculously explosive deployment of smartphones (iPhone: 2007), putting super-computers into our hands and pockets.

We have become so used to these little devices. It is sobering to be reminded of the impact of “Moore’s Law” – the principle that computer power keeps doubling as the price drops. The numbers are truly astonishing. In the past sixty years, computing power has increased by a factor of one trillion. An iPhone 4, if you can still find one, has the same power as the Cray super-computer of 1985[2.  Read Maddie Stone on The trillion-fold increase in computing power, visualized].

It is these technical developments that have created today’s social media/smartphone challenge.

For great and small, we members of Homo sapiens are rarely far from our smartphones. The single most startling story of the digital revolution is the staggering speed with which the “mobile device” has spread into the hands of billions.

A decade after the launch of the iPhone in 2007, the numbers are stunning. According to a recent Pew study[3.  Among ten findings about smartphones by Pew: “Overall, 12% of U.S. adults were “smartphone-only” internet users in 2016 – meaning they owned a smartphone but did not have broadband internet at home.”], in the United States three-quarters of adults own a smartphone – including 64% of those living in a household with an income of less than $30,000. Half of young adults live in a household that owns three or more of them. As smartphones get cheaper, their global spread continues. One projection is for six billion to be in circulation by the year 2020.

Real life

Over the years, Sherry Turkle has deployed her incessant questioning on several fronts. She has written about simulations, about our capacity to adopt alternative personalities online, about the loneliness that bizarrely can so easily be the concomitant of our endless engagement in digital communication. But it’s here, in her beguiling advocacy of conversation – packed with telling observations and haunting incidents – that her campaign for the human spirit comes to a head. In the words of novelist Jonathan Franzen, she “serves as a kind of conscience for the tech world.”

And in a remarkable tribute, technology icon Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and as far from being a Luddite as one can get, has this to say:

“Smartphones are the new sugar and fat: They are so potent they can undo us if we don’t limit them. Sherry Turkle introduces a lifesaving principle for the twenty-first century: face-to-face conversation first. This heuristic really works; your life, your family life, your work life will all be better. Turkle offers a thousand beautifully written arguments for why you should lift up your eyes from the screen.”

The bottom line

“Why a book on conversation?” asks Sherry Turkle. “We’re talking all the time. We text and post and chat…. Among family and friends, among colleagues and lovers, we turn to our phones instead of each other.”

She begins her book with a quote from Thoreau’s Walden: “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

It actually ends, on the back cover, with a review from the Boston Globe: “Talk is cheap, but conversation is priceless.”

***

MORE ON TURKLE, MORE BY TURKLE

FROM TED TALKS, 2012

As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication — and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.