Cell phones. Who uses cell phones these days? Pretty much everyone, obviously. Except me. I gave up my cell phone in the fall of 2014; I was leaving BC to go travelling for several months in Europe. I really needed a change, and it was the perfect opportunity to make a complete break from the entire social structure of my life. I came back home but I’ve never picked up another cell phone since. I use a landline and email to communicate with anyone I can’t speak to in person. That’s it. People don’t really like that, and they generally have to get used to the strangeness of the fact that I never answer the text messages that they send me. “You gotta call me,” I tell them.
At Camosun, and pretty much everywhere else you look, people can be seen staring—fixated—at their phones. This is the new normal. It’s also perfectly normal to have to jump out of the way when someone, deeply absorbed in the little device in their hands and oblivious to the world around them, makes quite clear their intention to crash directly into me and my cup of hot coffee. The question, of course, is what the hell is everyone staring at? Is it doing more harm than good? And, importantly: is it damaging Camosun students’ ability to learn?
The student perspective
53-year-old Camosun Community Support and Education (CSEA) student Caroline Larsen says that there is now a compulsion to be in constant contact with family and friends. Current cell-phone usage makes a huge difference in how we behave even compared to 20 years ago, when we’d go probably days—maybe even longer—between phone calls with friends or family.
“It’s a tool for me because it’s how we keep in touch during our day,” says Larsen. “I’m often corresponding with [my husband and adult children] because we are meeting up or there’s an issue at home with the dog or the cat or something. There’s always something—almost daily—that we’re talking about or discussing; certainly this last term it’s been really busy for texting.”
Although his mother emphasizes the importance of maintaining communication with her family, Larsen’s son, 21-year-old University Transfer student Gareth Larsen, uses his phone to browse the web and scroll through social media, including Facebook and Instagram.
“It’s a little bit mindless,” he says. “I’m just scrolling through because I never really interact with social media at all; I just scroll through the feed that other people have posted.”
It’s similar for 22-year-old CSEA student Anna Fenton. Although she spends several hours a day looking at her phone—and that includes reading lots of YouTube comments—she never signs in to leave her own comments and she never uses social media.
“I have an app, like the CNN app, so I read the news a lot. And the BBC. I surf the internet. I watch YouTube. I do have a few games on my phone, too,” says Fenton. “I have a Facebook account, but I haven’t logged into it in years. I made it when I was 13 and I stopped using it when I was in high school. I literally have not logged in for years and years. And I’ve never had Twitter or Instagram or anything.”
CSEA student Jen Blaikie, who is 41, keeps her phone handy in case there’s a call from her eight-year-old son’s school.
“Even though it rarely happens, you just want to be able to respond right away,” she says, “which is kind of silly because we didn’t have that when we were little, and we were fine.”
Aside from being available for her son, Blaikie uses her phone to keep up with work emails, to stay in touch with friends and family, and to learn.
“It’s a tool, man, and to have access to all that information for positive things, it’s amazing,” she says. “When I want to learn how to do something I pretty much watch a tutorial on YouTube, and I do that with my phone half the time. If I’m going to pick up my son and I have just 10 minutes to sit in my car and wait for the bell to go, I can be learning things or calling my mom and connecting with her. Yeah, it’s just such a tool.”
What about the dark side?
Having a pocket-sized computer on hand at all times is obviously useful for keeping in touch and killing time. Reading up on areas of interest no matter where you are—this is a very high quality of life, right? However, there is a growing awareness that our whole-hearted adoption of near-constant tech use might actually have a dark side.
With a background in neuroscience, Royal Roads associate faculty member Paul Mohapel, who has a PhD in psychology and is also a faculty member at the Canadian Medical Association, is able to speak to both the psychological and neurological impacts of tech use on our brains and our lives.
It appears that our growing commitment to screen time is having some serious consequences. According to Mohapel, a 2012 study out of the University of Essex found evidence to suggest that cell phones can put a serious damper on our relationships. Just being in the same room with a cell phone can significantly lower levels of trust and empathy between people.
“When a phone is in the room, even if it isn’t their phone, people would break eye contact and would be constantly looking at their devices or at the device,” he says, “so there seems to be a strong conditioned response when it’s around. We’re thinking about it, we’re looking at it, and that kind of breaks our connection with each other.”
Owen Farkvam is completing prerequisites before entering the Dental Hygiene program; the 20-year-old has been using a cell phone since he was in Grade 9 to keep in touch with family and friends through email, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, but he sees digital tech as a double-edged sword that undermines important relationships.
“The only thing that has a huge downfall for me personally is relationships, and when you are actually interacting with people and they’re still stuck to their phone,” says Farkvam. “Say, at dinner, if you’re with your partner and they are on their phone still—I try and stay away from that. If I’m with my friends I try to put it away, or with family; that’s the only time when I try and stay off of it.”
Farkvam has noticed that a lot of people have a problem with compulsive overuse.
“Even on the ferry yesterday I was studying on my laptop, but the family across from me, the parents were on their cell phones the whole time,” says Farkvam. “The kid was like… I don’t know what he was doing, he wasn’t on anything, but the parents were stuck on their phones. I don’t know; it kind of bothered me a little bit.”
The area of the brain most impacted by screen time is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for our executive functioning. The prefrontal cortex is basically the CEO of the brain; it controls our actions, thoughts, and emotions and is linked to our ability to self-regulate. Mohapel says that tech use requires serious multitasking, which is an especially demanding activity. An extreme example can be seen in gamers.
“Studies with gamers have found that they hyper-excite so much that the prefrontal cortex actually stops functioning for days,” he says. “So if you’re engaged in shooter games for two hours or so—intense gaming—they find that when they look at their prefrontal cortex it actually stops functioning for days. It takes days to recover, suggesting that the activity has exhausted the prefrontal cortex; it can’t even function, like a muscle that’s fatigued, almost like getting a temporary lobotomy.”
It’s a pretty serious buzz that’ll take your prefrontal cortex out for days on end, but you don’t have to be some fanatic in a basement to experience the negative impacts of technology. Take Gareth Larsen, for example—during our interview, he repeatedly states that he does not like social media, and yet he admits to still looking through Instagram and Facebook even though he’s deleted the apps from his phone.
“It definitely interferes with my classes, because a lot of the time when I’m in a lecture and it’s really not that gripping or interesting to me, then I look at my phone and then I can just kind of zone out,” he says. “I’m scrolling through something on my phone and not really paying attention to the lecture.”
Health and wellness
Camosun doesn’t have a cell-phone policy, but it is concerned about student well-being. Camosun director of Student Affairs Evan Hilchey tends to the college’s Student Mental Health and Well-being Strategy as part of his job; he explains that it’s important for students who are experiencing trouble with tech addiction to come forward with their concerns. (Camosun has acknowledged that some students are struggling to control their usage.)
“As a society—and as a college, particularly—we look to find ways to support students with mental health and well-being concerns, and so one of the areas that we provide support to students is through our counselling services,” says Hilchey. “One of the things we’ve done recently within counselling with the intake form is added a presenting concern related to tech usage. So, we’re asking students at the point at when they are seeking support through counselling, is that an area that they are seeking support?”
Researchers at the University of Victoria Digital Health Lab want to use digital technology to promote health, but in order to do that they first have to understand both the negative and positive impacts of technology on our lives. Lab director Sam Liu and his team are currently engaged in a two-year longitudinal survey and study of 600 middle-school and high-school students on the island.
It’s important to begin these studies early in the lives of tech users to get a better sense of technology’s impact over a span of years. We’ve been living with iPhones since 2007. That’s 12 years; given that the average age of Camosun students is 25.7, most of us at this college have been exposed to serious hand-held tech since we were in middle school.
“The original research that came out in this area was mostly focused on adults or people in their 20s, university students,” says Liu, “and those studies found out there was a negative relationship between usage and health and well-being outcome.”
Recent studies, however—including Liu’s current research—are more nuanced. He describes the impact of cell phones on health and wellness as a U-shape. Limited usage is actually showing to be beneficial for learning, friendship, and general well-being, and this is in comparison to people who don’t use cell phones at all. However, Liu’s research also shows that participants begin to experience negative effects when their usage exceeds two hours a day.
“They’re getting less sleep at night; the quality of sleep decreases,” he says. “What we also see is their overall health and well-being score decreases [compared to individuals with either moderate or no use]. And then some of the other things we see include lower physical activity levels, and then the quality of their friendship decreases as well.”
It’s good to know that two hours a day is the magic number. But in an age when, as Mohapel claims, the average adolescent is using digital technology for 11 hours a day, how can we possibly limit ourselves when most of us probably have no idea how much time we actually spend staring at our screens?
Fenton can’t really answer the question of how much time she spends on her phone. Maybe two or three hours a day, she thinks, although I’ve personally witnessed her using her phone before class, on breaks, at lunch, and at the bus stop, and she admits that she takes it to bed. Blaikie, on the other hand, can’t put a number to it, but she knows for sure that her usage is excessive.
“I don’t do that much on social media,” she says. “I have a Facebook account and I’ll post some stuff usually in the summer, and a Halloween costume, but I’m not too crazy with it. I use it more to research things and watch things. I don’t know, but I use it a lot. And just for emailing; I’m constantly emailing on my phone when I have a spare moment. I think I use it a lot.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) just released recommendations in April regarding children and digital technology. According to WHO, kids under one year old should have no screen time, while kids under 4 should be limited to less than one hour of sedentary viewing. These are babies, right? It makes sense to me to want to protect their tender little selves from adult pursuits, and yet even just a quick scan through the news shows a ton of pushback against these recommended limits.
“When we say, ‘I don’t think there’s much harm,’ we haven’t followed these kids,” says Mohapel. “The prefrontal cortex keeps forming in our brains until our mid 20s, so we don’t know yet. To say, looking at a child, ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any big issues here,’ when someone says, ‘Oh, it’s safe’… You need to follow this for a few years. You can’t say you did one cognitive test and it’s fine. Every paper that shows no issue, there’s a paper that shows an issue.”
Could this be addictive?
“With technology addiction, there’s a few specifics about it, but more than anything else it’s connected to the same kind of addictive behaviour as anybody using alcohol or cocaine,” says Bill Caldwell. And he should know: Caldwell is the director of special projects at Cedars, an addiction treatment facility in Cobble Hill. He’s also a counsellor who’s been working to treat addiction for over 14 years.
“There’s individualized things about tech addiction just because of, for want of a better term, the delivery mechanism,” he says, “but the bottom line is that the thinking and the obsession and the behaviours are very similar.”
Although excessive use of digital technology is not yet officially recognized as a disorder, there is a growing body of literature on the topic because in recent years it’s been recognized as a significant problem.
“When you feel like, ‘How do I know if I just really like games and I’m playing games a lot?’ or, ‘How do I know if I’m on the internet or on my phone a lot?’ versus an addiction, I would say the primary thing is to be aware if the behaviour is causing problems in your life,” says Caldwell, “and that could come in the way of problems at work or it could come in the way of deteriorating relationships with people around you.”
Gareth Larsen didn’t get his first phone until he was 18. Growing up healthy in rural Sooke, Larsen was pretty sheltered from contemporary pressures. As a teenager, he thought people with cell phones looked silly, but that perspective has—obviously—changed quite a bit.
“Yeah, I would say I consider myself addicted to my cell phone,” he says. “Not just to the cell phone, but to technology. The only time I’m able to easily ignore my cell phone is when I’m on my laptop or watching TV or something.”
His mother, Caroline, mentions that he can often be found multi-tasking tech with a laptop open and his phone in hand while either watching TV or playing a game.
“There are issues that I have that frustrate me with Gareth because if he is engaged with technology, he’s not listening even though he has automatic responses,” she says. “He’ll often say to me, ‘You didn’t talk to me about that,’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh yes I did, and you actually responded,’ so it’s often better for me to actually text him even if he’s in the house.”
And it’s not just the youngsters, either. For Fenton, the roles are reversed. Although she depends on her phone for some solid entertainment, she still feels in control. The way her mother and the other middle-agers in her life behave with their phones is a different story.
“I’d say they are more addicted than I am,” says Fenton. “I’d say my parents both have issues with their cell phones, and the staff at my practicum all have cell phones and many of them are older—at least in their 40s, quite a few of them—and they all pull out their cell phones a lot too. But my mom in particular is always on her phone. Always always always. She’s on Instagram. She’s really big into Instagram. She’s always checking her phone.”
19-year-old University Transfer student Rachel Morton has been using a cell phone for about six months. Although her phone is useful as a watch and for keeping in touch with friends, Morton also describes her epic YouTube binges as a serious waste of time, and she has strong opinions on why people are so willing to overuse their tech toys.
“It’s this cycle where people can spiral downwards, just escape further and further, and they don’t have to address problems,” says Morton. “Especially social media echo chambers and whatnot, using the phone as a substitute for friends and family… Phones themselves aren’t bad, but I definitely feel they aren’t used as effectively as they could be used.”
Liu’s research into student use has shown that in addition to time spent, the other indicator for negative impact—and in fact this is the strongest variable—is social-media use. As a part of Liu’s study, the research team distributed questionnaires to diagnose self-reported addiction levels in participants. Criteria included being physically anxious when separated from your phone, negative feedback from friends about your usage, and feeling left out when not on your phone.
“What’s interesting is that when individual data are being diagnosed as being addicted to cell phone use,” he says, “we definitely see that there is a negative outcome in terms of their health and well-being score compared to those that are not addicted, but then what we are seeing in our survey is that individuals that are moderately addicted—so they’re not at the very very high end, they’re kind of in the middle, but they are not diagnosed with being addicted to cell-phone use—those individuals already have a lower [health and well-being] score.”
Hilchey says that Camosun students who want help overcoming a tech dependence can access specialized resources and organizations at the college and in the greater community by making an appointment with the counselling department.
What to do?
When everyone you know—including your grandma, your coworkers, and your job-market competition—is on a phone, how do you break your dependence on the device? Especially when it’s obviously one of the best ways to keep in touch with your friends?
“It’s super difficult, very difficult, but no different from people with eating disorders, no different from people with sex addiction,” says Caldwell. “It’s not realistic for people to avoid food and sex for the rest of their lives. If you go without food for too long, you’re going to die anyhow. There’s a lot of questions around, ‘How do I limit it? How do I know that I’m doing it in a healthy way?’”
Interestingly, Caldwell describes using a drug of choice, whether actual drugs or technology or some other substance or behaviour, as a coping mechanism to deal with a host of problematic thoughts and behaviours. Even after an addict has survived a lengthy detox, that person can continue to exhibit the obsessive behaviours we normally associate with active addiction.
Liu also describes addiction as a compulsion that can sometimes act as a Band-Aid solution to underlying problems. Maybe there’s a broken home or financial stress and, as a consequence, college students will immerse themselves in a digital reality every spare minute of their lives. Another way to think about tech addiction is to think about the devices themselves.
“Last year one of the engineers at Apple who designed the notification system has admitted that they were actually studying people’s brains to see what was the most addictive way to get the right quality of light and sound that caused the greatest response in people’s brains,” says Mohapel. “They were actually looking to make it addictive.”
Mohapel describes three factors that either cause or intensify addiction. The first is the involvement of our senses. The more senses involved, the more highly addictive the substance or device. The second is access. Of course, with tiny computers in everyone’s back pocket, we have non-stop access; we can grab our phones and look each and every time we feel even the slightest urge to do so. The third factor is social reinforcement. I don’t think we need any convincing to believe that social reinforcement might be an issue when it comes to tech addiction.
“The IT sector, they started a non-profit called Information Overload Research Group that actually studied solutions,” says Mohapel. “Some of the things that have come out of their work that seems effective is restricting the amount of time you’re on your screen. That’s the best thing to do. They say you need to take about four hours off, consecutive hours in your waking day with no screen time whatsoever, to give your prefrontal cortex an opportunity to restore itself. No screens whatsoever.”
Liu is actively limiting his own access by going on a 30-day social media diet. He’s deleted the Facebook and Instagram apps from his phone and only checks his accounts on his desktop.
“It’s always good to limit cell-phone use or social-media use during certain instances,” says Liu. “When you’re hanging out with your friends, it just makes you a little more present, because sometimes when you pull out your phone, you’re, like, totally gone; you’re in a different world. So, try to be more present and live in the moment.”
Blaikie has come to realize that all the answers aren’t found on a phone.
“It’s so interesting, because when I go camping there’s no Wi-Fi and I love it,” she says. “You just kind of forget about emails and all that stuff, but the interesting thing is that as soon as I get home or get to a coffee shop or something where’s there’s Wi-Fi, I go, ‘Oh,’ and I check my everything just to see what I’ve missed. That’s so lame that that’s one of the first things I do when there’s Wi-Fi. It’s funny, right?”
I can’t really end this article without a little honesty on my part. I don’t use a cell phone, that much is true. I can spend all day away from home and never once check my emails or the updated real-estate listings I’m ardently following. But when I get home… oh, when I get home! I hate to admit it, but opening up my laptop and typing in the password is like sinking into a warm bath. There are some days when even my dog has to wait. I just want to stare at the screen.
At least I know I’m not alone.