Litter pickers and learning to love the digital grey
As it stands there are 5.35 billion people with access to the internet. The average internet user spends six and half hours online a day . Using these numbers it can be said the human race spends a cool 3.9 million years worth of collective consciousness online each day. With this in mind I don’t think it’s too much to say that we’re fairly fond of the web.
To be fair to Humanity it’s a pretty fantastic tool, since the world wide web’s birth in 1989 the population at large has gained free and instant access to one of the largest libraries on earth in Wikipedia , a face to face chat with any loved one through Zoom and 18 plus million videos of cats on YouTube. As with any major technology this has fundamentally changed how we engage with each other and the world around us, especially as the line where the internet ends and reality begins starts to blur.
Constant access to the internet through phones has changed the way the world around us is designed. Small things like looking at a menu or getting information on an event have been shifted away from physical menus and posters to websites accessed through QR codes. Even paying for things has been moved onto our phones (with services like google and apple pay) with 46% of stores in the UK moving to cashless. The trend is clear with a self-reported 89 million people using a QR code in the US in 2022 and 33% smartphone users using proximity based payments (Apple and Google pay) people are more than willing to embrace engaging digitally.
This however, has led to an expectation that everyone is constantly online otherwise you risk being isolated and unable to interact with the world around you. This isolating effect has only been worsened by the prevalence of social media. When 93% of all people with access to the internet are using social media to engage with each other is it any wonder people start to view the world through the lens of their phone.
Companies have begun to take notice of this trend as well and are increasingly trying to make products that allow the user to disconnect. BeReal, the social media company aiming to give its users a “daily dose of real life” gives a system where users make a single post a day at a random time designated by the company. Humane is another company aiming to help you disconnect with their AI pin, a device that clips to your clothes acting as a replacement for your conventional smartphone through voice commands and next generation AI. The pin boasts the tagline “Important rings. Fewer pings.” with the pin aiming to utilise AI to decipher what notifications are truly important to you.
These solutions have (unsurprisingly) had mixed efficacy with BeReal users often feeling the need to constantly check their phones incase they’ve missed their daily notification (among other privacy concerns) and the Humane pin encouraging users to utilise the pins camera and it’s AI to constantly scan the world in front of them for information (so it’s AI model can be trained on said information).
Having all this technology so seamlessly integrated into our daily lives has had a quantifiable effect on the world. A 2021 study of the Chinese population showed that 36.7% had internet addiction with a separate study the same year showing a positive correlation between internet addiction and social anxiety in college students. This has further been confirmed with another similar study in India drawing the same conclusion.
It’s not just affecting social anxiety, 23% of Brits claim to have been cyberbullied, 3.8 million Brits suffer from chronic loneliness all the while studies show that 30% of internet users don’t think social media is good for us at all. If there is all of this doom, even when we know what is causing it, what can be done?
In 2021 a study was done on London litter pickers assessing whether their “expert tool” (in this case a litter picker) registered in their brain as an extension of their body. This was done as a literal test for the design adage “A tool is but the extension of a man’s hand…”. The study found that experts in a tool don’t actually think of it as a physical extension of themselves but instead the brain builds this new expertise in a different part of the brain. When asked about the purpose of the work the author of the study said “I think a potential problem is that designers are very much enchanted with the notion of embodiment”.
While that study was on prosthetics I believe it’s analogous to how we’ve begun to treat the internet as less of a tool and more of an extension of ourselves. This line of thinking may be what has caused it’s oversaturation in our daily lives. By moving back to viewing the internet as a tool instead of a natural extension of ourselves we may be able to reduce the amount of time spent scrolling aimlessly and start seeing all the good this technology has brought us again.
It’s not just me that thinks this way. The UK government has launched an inquiry into screen time and how it affects wellbeing and education, both Apple and Google have released digital well being tools for their phones and (as mentioned earlier) 30% of people know that social media is bad for them. Hopefully this means that change is coming and people are becoming increasingly aware of the effects of the internet and we can alter how we design our surroundings to reflect this.
The Digital Grey
There are a lot of things that can scare you at the moment. There’s the threat of the ever present AI being brought up on questionable ethics , smart cities furthering an already prominent digital divide or (as previously mentioned) the isolating effects of the internet in a digitally designed world.
But for every evil AI there’s an AI model for more accurately detecting breast cancer , smart cities can be designed with improving quality of life as a focal point and the internet has created a vast amount of opportunities and technologies to improve society.
Coming into this module and looking at the topics that were going to be covered I thought I knew exactly how I was going to feel about each one. But as the course progressed I was shown more and more examples as stated above that showed these topics to be far more nuanced than I originally thought.
This was actually fairly anxiety inducing. I study a branch of electrical engineering called mechatronics which focuses on robotics and the integration of a variety of systems so I should have had a pretty good grasp on many of the topics covered in this course. Ultimately I’d only ever looked at these things from an engineering perspective which can often disregard the human element of technology. Having nothing be cut and dry but instead coated in this vague digital grey made things more difficult, it’s never particularly fun to have to reevaluate your life choices.
What this course went on to teach was how to not take an article or study at its face value but to really read into it. To break it down into its core components and critically analyse each one on not just the idea presented but why that idea may be presented in that way and where the evidence for it has come from.
In taking the time to analyse these things you get a greater understanding of a problem as a whole, not just the headlines. Being able to more fully understand these topics relieved some of the anxieties I felt in being overwhelmed by the depth of them. I’ve taken this practice onto my degree trying to take a more holistic approach when attempting research projects and thinking not just about how the technologies I study work but how they may affect the wider community around them.
I’ve also started looking at technologies more critically in my day to day life questioning the media I see and trying to see the good and bad of all technologies. I’ve learnt to take comfort in the ambiguous grey of modern technology as the greyer it looks the more fully you understand it.
