When Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people”, he was clueless. Social media did not yet exist. Now we all know how hellish other people are, no matter how heavenly their Instas. And we know not what we do. Or at least that’s how the internet is still spoken of, as something newish, out of control and worrying. The gnattish attention spans of adults, the limited vocabulary of children, social isolation, Trump, eating disorders, the “alt-right”. All of these are because of the damned old internet. Limiting the time your kids spend online is now a signifier of middle-class parenting is now limiting to limit the time your kids spend online. Really? This is like buying them wooden toys they never play with.
We still seem to have no real handle on how we talk about the online world apart from this narrative of fear, addiction and excess. At this stage of the game, I wonder how useful this is. A nine-year-old girl has reportedly been put into rehab for an Xbox addiction so bad that she would rather sit in her own urine than stop for a toilet break. A mother of a 15-year-old boy is fighting for the NHS to diagnose internet gaming addiction, as her son’s life is being ruined by it. The World Health Organization has classified internet gaming addiction as a mental health disorder.
On Twitter, people are always boasting about how their time away from Twitter made them feel so much better. I am no better or worse than them. Lily Allen has said she spends five hours a day on Twitter. I can see that lots of journalists doing morespend more time on there than that. If this is addiction, is it the same as addiction to a physical substance such as nicotine? Surely this is about impulse control, a need to feel connected that then has negative consequences in real life, if we’re still operating in this real life v online life binary? The internet is just a medium that delivers feelings. And phones make them deliverable everywhere.
Whether it’s a compulsion to shop, gamble or be liked, those feelings existed anyway. Experts will argue over what classifies addiction, but it matters because if the first step of the 12-step programme is to admit our powerlessness, then we completely individualise the problem into that of people making poor choices. It may indeed feel like that, but a huge cultural shift has occurred that affects our democracy.
Distraction is a personal but also a political issue. So is polarisation: the lack of nuance, the tribal anger and the reduction of dialogue to babble is alarming. One solution from a tech pioneer such as Jaron Lanier is to break the bars of the cage that goes everywhere with you, and just stop. Delete the poison. Go cold turkey. A more realistic approach is surely that of Jamie Bartlett, who writes about how we could be more alert citizens online, how we could refresh democracy. This means planning our time online, teaching critical thinking so we can navigate the internet sceptically and safely, and taking responsibility for ourselves rather than outsourcing every decision to Google.
It is not about how much we are online but how we behave there. There has been a concerted political failure to think about how this now old technology has allowed fake news to flourish, data to be missold and democracy undermined.
Am I in denial about my own dependence? Probably. I waste hours looking at all sorts of rubbish. I avoid intimacy by having conversations that I know I can leave. But I also learn – and I don’t want to go to rehab. No. No. No. I just want us all to have more control, more say, more understanding of the systems we are operating in. I make no distinction between real life and online in this desire. Do I need to?
