No, we are not addicted to smartphones

Every 12 minutes. People look at their smartphones every 12 minutes, so they’re addicted to the things. We’re a nation of addicts – that was the media’s chief inference from Ofcom’s new report on the UK communications market.

OK, about 40 per cent of Brits now look at their phone shortly before or after a night’s sleep. But that’s a minority. More important, in 93 pages and 129 footnotes, Ofcom never uses the word addiction. It does say we have an ‘obsession’ with smartphones. A press release does trumpet our ‘decade of digital dependency’ around smartphones, and whoops that 71 per cent of UK adults claim never to turn off their phone, and that 78 per cent claim they couldn’t live without it. Typically enough, however, these figures turn out to apply only to 25-34 year olds, not to the UK’s adult population as a whole. For the latter, the percentages are a much less alarming 62 and 55.

Infatuation with the behaviour of young IT users isn’t new with Ofcom. Yet younger mobile users are far from addicts. A sizable 46 per cent of 18-34 year olds told Ofcom’s researchers that consulting a phone during meals with others was unacceptable, and a big 72 per cent of the same group held that talking on the phone during mealtimes was also unacceptable.

But never mind what Ofcom actually said. Once, mobiles were supposed to make some people addicted to email; now, they commit the cardinal sin of giving us social media. Thus one liberal sage has called for a general ‘digital detox’, observing that ‘addiction was built into social media’s design from the start’, and that, worse, ‘all this is before you get to the proven, documented abuse and manipulation’ of people perpetrated by Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.

Why is there this trend to target IT in general and smartphones in particular with the dual label of ‘addictive’ and ‘manipulative’? We certainly need to remember that anti-growth, anti-monopoly impulses have for years pervaded the Western middle-classes, making assaults on Big Tech and Silicon Valley a big pastime nowadays – especially among print media. But we might also ask: why do people so readily associate smartphones with addiction, exactly? As we’ve seen, even young adults disapprove of excessive use of the phone; well, fair enough. But why do commentators rush to cast the loudmouth with a phone and bad manners on public transport, for example, as an addict? Why do they turn what can be an occasional annoying habit with a handset into unalloyed, uninterrupted mass addiction?

Part of the explanation must be that, for decades, elites have had a general disdain for democracy. So, in their desire to belittle the man or woman in the street, they tend also to medicalise and personalise problems that are at bottom social, rather than medical. Altogether, then, the doctrine that nearly anybody can be addicted to nearly anything is very congruent with the elitist worldview. Elites have played up addiction, variously, to energy and transport (1974), oil (the Economist, after 11 September 2001), computer games, work, shopping,  technological fixes, roads and speed, food, chocolate, caffeine, oil again (presidents Bush and Obama), exercise, news, and of course, sex, sex and sex, money, love and fame (1798, 1998 and Russell Brand, 2018). Indeed, the more elastic the concept of addiction, the more useful it is to elites who, consciously or unconsciously, are concerned to disqualify the public from playing a role in the future development of society. That’s why the American Psychiatric Association’s influential but profoundly flawed 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5) both includes gambling as one of its ‘behavioural’ addictions, and has initiated widespread debate about whether IGD – Internet Gaming Disorder – can, despite the evidence, be classed, like gambling, as an addiction, alongside to plain old substance addiction.

It can’t be many years before new editions of DSM are tempted to embrace smartphones as addictive.

On the other hand, only some elite operators prefer to drone on about the symptoms of IT addiction (‘behaviours’). Others, by contrast, find, in the advancing penetration, capabilities and intensity of use of smartphones, a chance to air prejudices in the name of neuroscience, and of the mechanisms invoked by that still nascent discipline. In this complementary account, a pair of dark, mysterious and largely invisible millstones – the circuitry and software of IT, and the reward circuitry of our brains – grind together as mechanisms to turn us, in fatalist style, from being autonomous individuals into incapable automata, subordinate to forces that are quite beyond our control. Thus, according to not just one, but two Facebook chiefs-turned-whistleblowers last year, hits from the neurotransmitter dopamine have brought havoc everywhere. In his just-published Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier, a much lauded guru from Silicon Valley, largely agrees about the pernicious role played by dopamine.

No wonder mobile users vote Brexit, or Trump! In a striking mix of bullshit electronics and biology, such aberrant behaviour, it’s now believed, is ‘hardwired into the DNA’ of the ignorant hoi polloi and all those who do not qualify as People Like Us. The human subject is a prisoner of his unchecked and uncheckable consumption desires, mediated by neurotransmitters.

In January 2018, major US investors in Apple attacked it for encouraging children to be addicted to their iPhones. Yet when laid at the door of smartphones, the charge of addiction does not stand up. Yes, smartphones absorb time and money, involve social bonding around tables and selfies, cue users with pings, and produce fairly obvious downsides (aching thumbs, for one). But they disrupt normal behaviour – a key aspect of genuine addiction – only a little. Similarly, we do not build up a tolerance to mobile phones, one that makes us use them more and more. Such withdrawal symptoms that accompany being stripped of one’s mobile phone are modest. Anyway, they no doubt reflect our perfectly reasonable desire to stay up-to-the-minute with friends and ageing relatives, with a jobs and business landscape that seems less secure than that of the past, and with a news cycle that is certainly more tumultuous since Brexit and Trump.

So we’re not addicted. We run smartphones much, much more than they run us. To reduce addiction to its behavioural symptoms and neural mechanisms doesn’t just efface the social roots of addictions, real or hyped. To do that also effaces our human capacity to think and act for ourselves, to change our habits and to change the world.

Millions gave up the cigarette; many more millions will have no trouble, switching off their phones.

Ironically, elites never interrogate their own ‘addiction’ to… the metaphor of addiction. That kind of addiction isn’t rooted in technology, or in brain chemistry, but in the elites’ increasing distance from the people.

We know that. They don’t know that. Good news!