Are Social Media Apps and Sites Weapons of Mass Distraction?

As I walked to a medical appointment a few days ago without ever looking at my smartphone or listening through earbuds to a music app, I could hear the sounds of the city and nature around me. There were squirrels chucking and cardinals, orioles, bluejays, starlings and sparrows all making their contributions amid the noise of traffic and the distant sound of a subway train.

But I believe I was the only one on the street cognizant of all of this going on around me because everybody I encountered had heads down looking at screens, or were clearly caught up with listening to the piped-in sounds of smartphone-delivered music or podcasts.

It’s not the first time I have observed this. Pre-pandemic which was the last time I took public transit, as I looked around on the bus and later on a subway car, most around me were cocooned within their own smartphone universe and almost oblivious to the real world around them. Occasionally someone would look up to check on where they were so they didn’t miss their stop.

It isn’t hard to conclude that humanity’s love affair with technology is trapping us in an alternate universe. Maybe that’s why the virtual world of games and the metaverse have such appeal.

It wasn’t that long ago, 1999 in fact when I was the keynote speaker at a telecommunications conference in Toronto where I spoke about the convergence of a number of technologies that would soon alter our perception and how we interacted. That day I came on stage ensconced with a pager, a Palm Pilot, a flip phone, a digital camera and a large rubber band. I described to those in attendance a near future in which all of these devices would be integrated into one. I didn’t have an MP3 player like an iPod because it hadn’t yet been invented. The first model came out two years later.

So as I spoke I took the rubber band (we call them elastic bands in Canada) and wound it around all of my paraphernalia. When done I held up the bundle and said, “See all these devices. Within the next decade, one compact device will replace all of them and will begin the next stage of the 21st-century telecommunications revolution.”

At the time I was just starting my work with clients to develop the architecture to support future generations of wireless and broadband telecommunications. We were still a bit away from smartphones but I could see them coming soon. What I didn’t predict was the app ecosystems that Apple and Google launched with tens of thousands of programs that could be downloaded from the Internet and installed on ever more powerful devices. And I also didn’t anticipate touchscreens replacing physical keyboards like my Blackberry. It took me a while to move away from those tiny keys to tactile displays.

Today, I am onto my third-generation of Android smartphone. This one is over three years old so in another year or two, I will probably get a new one with more than twice the memory, twice the processor, twice the camera, and built-in augmented reality and AI. Once more the technology will move me to further separate myself from my reality to an alternate one. Once more I will be tempted to make the smartphone the centrepiece of both my digital and real-world existence.

But what I refuse to do is let the phone become “a weapon of mass distraction.” I borrowed this phrase from a recent article I read in The Economist which described how the smartphone app TikTok was taking over our universe. The Economist may have unknowingly borrowed the phrase it used from an old TV football movie that came out in 1997.

Obviously, the magazine was making a play on words based on the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” which refers to thermonuclear bombs. The question it made me ask was is distraction worse than destruction? Obviously not, but when you are watching a bunch of nearly brain-dead zombies shuffling along while they stare at tiny screens while wearing earbuds that block their auditory senses, or sitting entranced on a subway car oblivious to the world around them, it can be a bit of a fright.

By now most of you know of TikTok. Developed in China, it is a short-form, video-sharing app where users can create and post 15-second video clips on anything. Cats, birds, dogs, people dancing, making funny faces, throwing pies….you name it, and TikTok has it. It is also filled with hate images and messaging that is downright frightening. If you are familiar with the expression “15 minutes of fame,” well, TikTok has distilled that number to 15 seconds.

How pervasive is the app on smartphones and other digital platforms? Today it is the fastest-growing social media app in the world. It is the sixth most popular based on digital surveys but I am convinced it has supplanted Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and many more. So maybe, sixth is not an accurate read. Active TikTok users will reach 1.8 billion by the end of 2022. It has been downloaded more than three billion times. More than 20% of Internet users are on it every day watching 15-second video clips. Traffic amounts to more than one billion views daily. The energy consumed to interact with it makes it a key contributor to environmental pollution and climate change.

So this is our new reality, a world of people walking along or sitting with heads down watching 15-second video clips. As pedestrians, they seldom look up as I walk towards them. I’ve learned to say “Heads up. Incoming” and still step to the side to avoid head-down, head-on collisions.