By Jesse Elorm HEYMANN
We live in the most over-stimulated generation in history. A small study by Yeykelis, J.J. Cummings, and Reeves, published in the Journal of Communications in 2014, examined how frequently American college students stay focused.
Researchers installed tracking software on their computers to monitor their daily activities. The findings revealed that students, on average, changed tasks approximately every 65 seconds.
Their median attention span on any single activity lasted only 19 seconds. Another study conducted by Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found that the average office worker remains focused on a single task for only three minutes. The near-ceaseless cacophony of beeps, notifications, and popups has created a commensurate escalation in screentime.
According to a 2019 analysis by RescueTime, the average person spends about three hours and fifteen minutes on their phone during the workday. Research by Insider in 2016 found that people touch their phones an average of 2,617 times every day.
This has decimated our collective attention spans, especially among children. If you are reading this, I am certain you can experientially attest to this in your own life or in the lives of people you know. The area of modern life where this is most manifest is the drop in reading.
The percentage of people who read books for leisure has dropped to an all-time low. According to the American Time Use Survey, which surveys a representative group of 26,000 people, the number of men reading for enjoyment decreased by 40percent from 2004 to 2017, while women saw a 29percent decline.
Gallup polling revealed a dramatic rise in the number of people who report never reading a book in any given year, with this proportion tripling between 1978 and 2014. Today, 57percent of people report not reading a single book annually. For the youth, the demographic of people who are still actively cultivating the habit of handwork, studying and reading for leisure, this is severely deleterious to habit formation and paints a bleak portrait of the future.
At first instance, the solution seems rather simple. Exercise individual agency.
Parents, teachers and guardians should take steps to moderate themselves and their children, limiting screen hours and time spent online. But this is not a scalable long-term solution, in the same way wearing a face mask outside, every day for fifty years does not fix air pollution.
The way these devices work is not some intractable, permanent fixture of nature, like how rain must fall and man must labour to eat. They are systems engineered by humans, and where those systems are no longer serving us, but rather the pockets of the few, the state must act through force of law.
First, let us analyse the perverse incentives underlying the operations of the mega-corporations that birth the apps that capture us.
Digital gold – the price of engagement
Tristan Harris, former Google engineer, narrated this to the author of ‘Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention’:
“…success was measured, in the main, by what was called ‘engagement’ – which was defined as minutes and hours of eyeballs on the product. More engagement was good; less engagement was bad. This was for a simple reason. The longer you make people look at their phones, the more advertising they see – and therefore the more money Google gets… you should always design products that ‘engage’ the maximum number of people, because engagement equals more dollars, and disengagement equals fewer dollars.”
But that is merely one head of the hydra. The other is perhaps more sinister:
These companies are building up a profile of you, to sell to advertisers so they can target you. For example, from 2014, if you used Gmail, Google’s automated systems would scan through all your private correspondence to generate an ‘advertising profile’ exactly for you. If say, you email your mother telling her you need to buy diapers, Gmail knows you have a baby, and it knows to target ads for baby products right at you. If you use the word ‘treadmill’, it knows you are in the market for one, so Youtube pushes you fitness content.
For the same reason, Google Maps is free; so, the mega-corporation can include the details of where you go every day.
When social media sites decide what you see in your news feed, there are many thousands of things they could show you. So, they have written a piece of code to automatically decide what you will see. There are all sorts of algorithms they could use – ways they could decide what you should see, and the order in which you should see them. They could have an algorithm designed to show you things that make you feel happy, or sad, or things that are topical.
One key driving principle is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen. That’s it. Remember: the more time you spend viewing, the more money they make. So the algorithm is always weighted towards figuring out what will keep you looking, and pumping more and more of that on to your screen to keep you from putting down your phone.
Their business model can only succeed if they dominate more and more of your attention.
Sometimes, a few of their specific practices have been banned by law. For example, in 2017 the European Union blocked some forms of tracking of internet users – they cannot scan your Gmail any more in that territory – but the wider invasive machinery rolls on.
The result is several feature updates that are as inexorably associated with mobile gadgets today but were alien to the tech scene merely 20 years ago. For example, infinite scroll. Online pages about 15 years ago had you reach a bottom, where the user had to elect to continue on. Enter Aza Raskin, former creative lead at Firefox — he designed the pages to load more as you reached the bottom. His idea took off.
At a conservative estimate, infinite scroll makes you spend at least, 50 percent more of your time on sites. Every day, as a direct result of his invention, the combined total of 200,000 more total human lifetimes – every moment from birth to death – is now spent scrolling through a screen. These hours would otherwise have been spent on some other activity.
Another is brightly coloured apps with fruity colours that hijack the cognitive instinct our early ancestors developed to forage for ripe crops. The brighter, the better. The more your brain draws your eyes to it. The more likely the click, the more likely the engagement. This is usually coupled with a frequent flow of notifications from apps; pings, vibrations, rings. Anything to tease out more engagement.
Masterclass in manipulation
These tactics were not arrived at on accident or coincidence. These corporations are applying principles of a psychological field known as ‘reinforcement learning’, popularised in the 40s by Harvard professor, B.F. Skinner. Animals were once thought to be behaviourally fixed. B.F. Skinner discovered that you could train pigeons, crows, monkeys and mice to do a range of tasks from playing instruments to solving mazes and puzzles, simply by rewarding the desired action with positive stimulus.
In the human brain, the reward receptor releases a chemical called dopamine. This produces the pleasure sensation felt when one reaches for their phone at the sound of a ping, for instance. The more the habit is rewarded, the more the human is likely to repeat the action.
As it happens, long tasks requiring deep focus, like reading a book, simply cannot compete. The vivid, rapid sensory stimulation one gets from a snappy TikTok, generates significantly more dopamine from your brain than these ‘long focus/deep work’ activities typically associated with productivity.
The incentive that generates the love for casual reading in a 7-year-old, for example, never gets a chance to take root, because it simply generates an inferior ‘pleasure response’. A couple hundred engineers in Silicon Valley have set millions of our children’s attentions on a railroad to ‘sedation station’, and we have called it fate.
It gets worse.
There is a level above reinforcement learning; something that juices the brain of dopamine even harder than reliable reward: intermittent reward.
As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in his book ‘The Anxious Generation: “It’s best not to reward a behaviour every time the animal does what you want. If you reward an animal on a variable-ratio schedule (such as one time out of every 10 times, on average, but sometimes fewer, sometimes more), you create the strongest and most persistent behaviour.
When you put a rat into a cage where it has learned to get food by pressing a bar, it gets a surge of dopamine in anticipation of the reward. It runs to the bar and starts pressing. But if the first few presses yield no reward, that does not dampen the rat’s enthusiasm. Rather, as the rat continues to press, dopamine levels will go up in anticipation of the reward, which must be coming at any moment!
When the reward finally comes, it feels great, but the heightened levels of dopamine make the rat continue to press, in anticipation of the next reward, which will come . . . after some unknown number of presses… There is no off-ramp in an app with a bottomless feed; there is no signal to stop”
Intermittent reward is the same impulse that fuels gambling addictions, except these triggers to our base natures are not tucked away behind the 18+ walls of a casino, they are trafficked into children’s hands through in-game stores in video games played by millions of children like Fortnite or Call of Duty.
These game mechanics are deliberately designed to appeal to the same impulses you get from a Vegas slot machine (tap to spin/activate an object on the screen to stand a chance of winning a prized pick, which is brought before you with a fanfare of stimulus; flashing lights and a trilling jingle).
Again, engagement is the lifeblood of these apps. Every pixel and line of code is optimized to keep you coming back. It can be something as simple as the ‘Refresh’ click, which in most apps is designed, not subtly by the way, to mimic the motion of cranking a handle of a slot machine.
The anticipation of ‘I might get the next best video or the next best meme pop up next’ triggers a dopamine release. Even if what pops up at Refresh does not live up to your expectation, merely thinking ‘it might’, cranks out more than enough dopamine to keep you repeating the habit.
Even grown men with developed reasoning and discipline faculties fall prey. We have done to children the social equivalent of setting smallpox loose on Native Americans with no natural immunity in 1482.
The next psychological tick these developers exploit is investment.
Social-psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains; “Humans can be offered ways to put a bit of themselves into the app so that it matters more to them.”
If a young girl has already filled out her profile, posted many photos of herself, and linked herself to all of her friends plus hundreds of other Instagram users, or a boy has spent hundreds of hours accumulating digital badges, points, rewards and other investments in video games, at this point, after investment, the trigger for the next round of behaviour becomes internal.
The notification sounds need no longer instigate their indulgence. They have formed an identity with the platform; ‘I wonder if that new pic got more likes’, or ‘I wonder if I can ascend nother level of the game leaderboard’.
Teens’ decisions and behaviour are mainly driven by emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward. While these all seem positive, they make teens very vulnerable at the elevated levels they operate on. Especially in the absence of a mature frontal cortex to help restrain their passions.
One could argue that children since time immemorial have had the proclivity to be easily distracted, but they have never had a portable drip feed of dopamine that fit in their pockets everywhere they go, twenty-four seven.
The effect is an unprecedented degree of attention fragmentation, as addiction researcher Anna Lembke explains in her book, ‘Dopamine Nation’.
The harms to mental health are more insidious, yet just as bad.
According to a Millenium Cohort study, teens who are heavy users of social media are more depressed than light users and nonusers, and this is especially true for girls. For girls, there is a larger and more consistent relationship. The more time a girl spends on social media, the more likely she is to be depressed. Girls who say that they spend five or more hours each weekday on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as those who report no social media time.
The better angels of our nature
If there is anything as true, as foundational as time and space itself, it is that we are creatures of habit. A man who steals 99 times is more likely to steal the 100th time. The role of the state is not just to protect against external threats, but also to incentivize their populace to aspire to higher and better virtues and habits, especially in the youth. As Abraham Lincoln put it “…to appeal to the better angels of our nature”. This is why states regulate hard drugs, or alcohol, prostitution, gambling and so on.
Not the total elimination of individual freedoms, but making the climb steeper, the friction greater, for persons seeking to over-indulge in behaviours that historically produce worse outcomes.
After all, we are fundamentally, social creatures. We do not exist in isolation, and a huge part of our socialization is from the incentives our surroundings feed us. Incentives dictate results. These incentives are not entirely deterministic, like the hand of God or fate, they can partly be a product of policy, history and material conditions. Words of scolding to these mega-corporations will simply not suffice, for the same reason that a storm is never persuaded to quench itself.
There is too much money at stake.
As researcher Johann Hari explains; “To give you a sense of the money involved: the personal wealth of Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, is US$102 billion; his colleague Sergey Brin is worth US$99 billion; and their colleague Eric Schmidt is worth US$20.7 billion. That’s separate from Google’s wealth as a company, which as I write stands at US$1 trillion.
These three men alone are worth roughly the same as the total combined wealth of every single person, building and bank account in the oil-rich country of Kuwait, and Google is worth roughly the entire wealth of the whole of Mexico or Indonesia. Telling them to distract people less was like telling an oil company not to drill for oil.”
Other countries have already taken steps in this direction.
Australia passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill, 2024 in November last year, which among other things, included provisions to ban youth under 16 from using social media, as well as to penalize corporations up to US$49.5 million for breaches. It also introduces additional privacy measures to prevent the overcollection of information by social media platforms, effectively combating the two arms of revenue (engagement and data harvesting).
China’s National Press and Publication Administration issued a regulation in 2021 that kids under 18 in China will only be able to play video games for one hour a day and only on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This comes after a 2019 ruling that banned kids in China from playing after 10:00 PM and only allowed them to play 90 minutes a day, except on holidays they got three hours. They also curtailed kids in-game transactions, the stuff that often normalizes the psychological impulses of gamblers with impressionable children.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (2022) protects minors online by prohibiting platforms from using targeted advertising based on the use of minors’ personal data. It also imposes certain limits on the presentation of advertising and on the use of sensitive personal data for targeted advertising, including gender, race and religion.
In Canada, four major Ontario school boards are taking some of the largest social media companies to court over their products, seeking about US$4.5 billion in total damages from Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc. and ByteDance Ltd., which operate the platforms Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok respectively, because “these social media companies … have knowingly created a product that is addictive and marketed to kids,” said Rachel Lin, the chair of the Toronto District School Board.
In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation in 2024 to combat addictive social media feeds and protect kids online. The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) For Kids Act to require social media companies to restrict addictive feeds on their platforms for users under 18, and the Child Data Protection Act to prohibit online sites from collecting, using, sharing or selling personal data of anyone under the age of 18, unless they receive informed consent or unless doing so is strictly necessary for the purpose of the website.
Debate persists over the efficacy of these measures, but it is a step in the right direction. The singular advantage Ghana and Africa at large have is our extraordinarily youthful populations that can produce the next Nkrumahs, the next Mandelas and the next Chinua Achebes. All that might come to nothing if they grow up sedated and drug-addled by screens.
Article 28(1D) of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana states;
- “(1) Parliament shall enact such laws as are necessary to ensure that …
(d) children and young persons receive special protection against exposure to physical and moral hazards.”
Section 3 of the Ghana Health Service and Teaching Hospitals Act, 1996 (Act 525) also states;
“3(2) For the purpose of achieving its objects, the Service shall perform the following functions…
(g) promote health, mode of healthy living and good health habits by people.”
- Section 2 of the National Commission for Civic Education Act, 1993, Act 452 states;
“(2) The functions of the Commission
The functions of the Commission are…
(e) to formulate, implement and oversee programmes intended to inculcate in citizens an awareness of their civic responsibilities and an appreciation of the rights and obligations of citizens as a free people.”
When the country dealt with cultural and disease crises like low girlchild education, HIV/AIDS epidemic, littering, even the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the first step to consolidating national focus was with public education. This created a groundswell of attention, to usher in legislative change and government programs to fix these problems.
That same force in public education must be brought to bear on this matter by all relevant government stakeholders and civil society. Parliament must lead by considering laws that address addictive design in technologies.
Some pragmatic, balanced legislation on this might look like;
- Disabling ‘infinite scroll’ on minors’ accounts;
- Doing ‘batch notifications’ (scheduled pinging in bulk) on minors’ accounts instead of a constant flurry;
- Disabling data harvesting and recommendation algorithms on minors’ accounts;
Hefty fines can be placed on social media companies that desist from complying, such as initiatives the government has taken in making sure companies like Instagram, Facebook and Airbnb, crack down on tax evasion by online entrepreneurs.
There are also further penal measures, such as requesting that Internet Services Providers (ISPs) block selected apps or sites, and petitioning the various app stores to restrict access in the jurisdiction. There are some workarounds to this, such as getting a VPN, but usually, the risk of losing a large user base such as Ghana is incentive for these corporations to negotiate ways they can meet compliance.
There are plenty of precedents of something becoming so widespread in society before we discovered its harms and the legislature reigned in the large corporations that propagated these harms: CFC gas, cigarettes, lead paint, leaded fuel etc.
We know how to do this. We have done it before. In this case, it only takes editing lines of code on a screen. We can save millions of toddlers, teens and adults, from turning into yet another set of sedated slaves to the tiny glowing rectangle: the almighty screen.
>>>the writer is a lawyer at Koranteng & Koranteng Legal Advisors
Contact: [email protected]
