hey everyone thanks for coming back to Seeker Plus today I am trace this is
episode 2 of 3 in our new series on internet obsession but really
information obsession in general I'll explain why later make sure you
subscribe for more episodes and also you can find an audio version of this story
and all of our other stories down below in the description there's a link but
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at-tracedominguez okay enough of that today we're gonna
talk about how our obsession with information is changing the world out
here I'm talking about the stuff that you do on your phone and how it's gonna
be changing everything else that you do when you're not on your phone we're
gonna talk about the history and engineering and politics of information
obsession and so much more again make sure you subscribe let's kick into it
okay so at the end of Act one we were talking about getting obsessed
and how they get you obsessed they with the quotes around it but does that
matter what could it possibly do and what could that do to us is an
interesting question right but first we have to understand how many people are
actually out there on the Internet internet usage has exploded the
International Telecommunications Union found in 2000 that there were seven
hundred and thirty eight million people on the internet all over the world
that's not very many relative to the world population of six billion or more
right that's it just seven hundred and thirty eight million people in 2015 it
was 3.2 billion people that's like half of every human that we know exists in
the universe and they're all on the internet you know maybe there are other
humans somewhere else I'll have to wait till Daniel figures out the Stargate to
do that but whatever on average Americans spend ten hours a day staring
at their screens and that's at minimum for me it's a lot more because you know
I'm staring at screens for you all what we wanted to know is what all this
screen time is doing out in the world is it really changing things not just in
the Estados Unidos you know we're changing the infrastructure of countries
all over the planet in response to us being obsessed with sucking information
out of the internet but let's be clear this is not the first time this has
happened so before we get to the actual infrastructure and the changes let's
address history here because this is seeker plus
and we love it when we get to do some history in the 1700s books finally
became affordable for the average person you could just go out and buy a book and
this changed the world now we had something called reading mania people
were really upset and scared because all these people they weren't talking to
each other they weren't walking around the town square I mean I don't actually
know that maybe they were but they were reading books they had their heads down
reading a book remember the opening lines of Beauty and the Beast this was a
real problem that people were worried about it was derided and feared by the
1880s the New York Times wrote that novels were unwholesome books were
unwholesome they were unwanted by the media elite they wrote the novel reader
quote detests stories in which the interest is not exaggerated and pulled
up ten times as high as the interests of ordinary life they exaggerated normal
life in these books and ah who would want that they called it unhealthy they
called reading spasmodic action of the imagination it would affect our
imagination hmm that sounds so familiar like perhaps our imaginations would be
affected by the media around us and we would have shorter attention spans this
was in the 1880s today we have the Journal of Neuroscience which did an
fMRI study where again they look at blood flow to different parts of the
brain they also added something to that to study what happens in our brains when
we read eye tracking so that way when they were looking at the fMRI they knew
exactly which word people were looking at while they were reading they called
this new system the fixation related fMRI or fire MRI which just sounds
awesome their hypothesis was that when you read you're associating real actions
in real life in your brain that's represented in their research as well
the brain area is dealing with manipulation of objects and carrying out
physical actions would light up when people would read words on a page words
translate in our minds in our imaginations to
real actions so if you're reading a story about a wizard and you know living
in the UK or whatever you're picturing those actual actions when he grasps his
wand you're picturing him in your head grasping a wand another study done with
18th century literature specifically found executive function also lit up and
our old friend the pleasure center so not unlike social media today reading
helps give us reward in our brains we like reading things we like social
interaction we like understanding we like being entertained and we wanted
more of it so you know what we did we learned to print and write and create a
whole supply chain to provide us with that entertainment in this case in the
1880s it was with books we changed the world around us to suit what we wanted
eventually we started creating other things to do that same thing I'm gonna
fly through a few of them really quick just to give you the idea I think you
probably get it but you know we're gonna go Malcolm Gladwell and I'm gonna kick
the dead horse on this telephone's think of all the pop culture there is around
telephones the sense of connection there are not a lot of studies about this
telephone addiction kind of idea but I'm sure we all know of people obsessing
over being connected about feeling anxiety about missing our calls and we
can feel that and the New Scientist had an op-ed in 1986 where they had
something that they dubbed the Tell ahall ik which was a person who would
use the telephone for long periods they could have 8 to 10 people on a single
call that was especially common with teenagers and they were dubbed
antisocial and psychologically imbalanced they were called sad bad mad
and shy sound familiar of course it does you've probably heard
that about your social media use in 1980s as well New York Times writer
Trish Hall wrote the u.s. is becoming addicted to telephone chatter some
people have as many as two telephones for a single person can you believe it
there were also fax machines one guy was called out which was a low mean for
faxing his girlfriend in Japan what are we doing with ourselves they were asking
in the late 80s do young people have no inhibitions seriously seriously they
were asking that people took this thing that
and they started putting it around telephones were everywhere we got them
at home we got them at work we got them in airplanes in the 1980s and the media
kept commenting about how tella holics were the reason we were doing this there
is some science behind this science Reports has a study about social
interaction and how it gives people meaning and it lights up in the ventral
striatum which you probably already have guessed is part of the reward system our
good old friend what about television addiction of course that exists as well
we've all heard and talked about that in 2003 a Scientific American piece wrote
about people who watch a lot of television potentially having some kind
of substance dependence it was very similar to drug uses what they were
trying to say you could have repeated unsuccessful attempts to stop watching
TV and then you would get withdrawal from the entertainment that you would
get while watching the Journal of behavior addiction in 2013 did a
literature review of all of the different studies around television
addiction and found the first mention of it being back in 1954 televisions then
were much smaller black and white it's very different time and they found that
it was addictions not unlike gambling and substance abuse that most mirrored
television addiction and there were behaviors that were involved as well
they called it food for the senses and they said it was very shocking quote TV
addiction might be expected particularly among persons experiencing inadequate
turnover of mezzo limbic dopamine that's right
the reward system back again little dance break so New York Times writer
Roland Neth away actually called television quote an opiate for naive
children that was a headline we began to change the infrastructure of the world
for all of these different things books and telephones we crossed cables from
coast to coast we built dishes we launched satellites we bounced the
signals off those satellites all to satisfy this craving for information for
connection for social interaction right and yes we haven't even gotten to the
internet yet this was all before that dating back hundreds of years what I'm
trying to say by going through all of these different things is we build the
infrastructure to serve what we want the infrastructure doesn't just happen to us
and then we react the world adapts to us we are not
victims of our infrastructure books gave us unprecedented access to power
newspapers gave us unprecedented access to power radio television cell phones do
remember the CrackBerry those of us who are a little older yeah the CrackBerry
was what they called the blackberry because people were just on it all the
time and now there's the internet we adapt the real world to once over time
nearly 90% of American teens report being active users on social media the
youth have continuously outpaced other age groups in adopting new media that's
according to Leonard in 2015 and the examples of how the infrastructure has
changed outside of you know building cable lines and launching satellites to
communicate better and there are some examples of how we've changed
infrastructure outside of launching satellites and building cable lines and
such we physically changed roads and sidewalks after the inventions of cell
phones for example in 2014 China added a sidewalk lane in one of their cities DC
actually had one first here in the United States as a joke but it was
copied around the world some people actually thought maybe this is a good
idea to put people who are staring at their cell phones in a separate lane in
the sidewalk as people who are you know walking with purpose if you will I
couldn't actually find any follow-ups on the original flurry of articles about
this in 2014 so if anybody knows if those sidewalk lanes are still there if
they're used please tweet at us at seeker there are people who are trying
to fight this around the world to make sure that people aren't just looking at
their phones and walking around with explicit infrastructure like in
Singapore where they're putting traffic lights embedded in the sidewalk so you
know you're looking down at your phone you can see the traffic light down there
and you know not to walk into into traffic and hurt yourself they literally
have green and red signs embedded under the sidewalk it's amazing there are
other places that do this as well the Netherlands has crosswalks that are
built to keep you from using your phone in Germany they have train stations that
are designed to make sure that people using their phones don't get hurt and in
Thailand they also have mobile phone lanes where people can walk and use
their phone at the same time it's pretty amazing the Ohio State University has a
study where they talked about distracted walking and they found that 1500
pedestrians were injured in 2010 alone and that has doubled since 2005 and is
not just silly academics talking about this the National Safety Council that
monitors all of this stuff found in 2017 there were 6,000 fatalities related to
people being on their phone and not paying attention in Honolulu they're
actually making it illegal to look at your phone while on a crosswalk you can
get a ticket for that and it's an expensive one in the developed world
we're not changing the infrastructure quite as much as in the developing world
mainly because we already have a lot of it built but now that cell phones exist
the developing world is seeing a lot of infrastructure change or maybe not
change that we would have had to do let me give you an example
we built telegraph lines phone lines cable lines and cell phone towers that
have cable and microwave connections to each other in Nigeria everyone had a
cell phone but they probably didn't build all of the infrastructure that we
built to get there they built mainly cell phone towers right they didn't
necessarily need to build telephone and telegraph lines to get information to
every single person's house everywhere in the country the problem was they
didn't have internet access to Nigeria the big back channel so that the
internet uses the big cables that are underneath the water that ship it across
the world those didn't connect to Nigeria so boom K o PK I don't actually
know if that's how to pronounce her name but she is awesome she started a company
and got access to the Internet in Nigeria through a backhaul service and
they got access to an undersea cable and now people in Nigeria don't need cable
modems they can just use their cell phones and access the Internet who needs
wires you know there are also all these other plans to get Internet to places
without building all of this infrastructure and you could argue that
these plans are infrastructure in themselves balloons from Google
satellites from all sorts of different companies drones from Facebook and a
whole bunch of other crazy ideas to try and deliver Internet to people around
the world all in the feeding of this information obsession over time we've
slowly demanded this stuff from ourselves and there are people who are
legitimately addicted to their devices to television to radio to
News but there are also millions more who aren't addicted and are using these
services and with the internet just like with telephones and letters and
newspapers they're pretty ubiquitous so the point of this whole exercise is to
say a couple of things one information obsession is not an internet thing it's
a human thing we've always had internet obsession let's go back to reading mania
just for a second one quartz piece by charles chu found when he did the math
that the amount of time we spend on social media is equivalent to reading
about 200 books a year we could read that in the same amount of time which is
pretty incredible but does that mean things are worse now I mean if you had
reading mania couldn't you just read 200 books a year right
maybe it's the same maybe they were reading 200 books a year and that was
freaking people out in the same way that now we're reading our time lines all the
time and that's freaking people out maybe they're the same I am not the
person to ask if it is you'd have to ask scientists and researchers while
researching this piece there was a really great piece on timeline comm it's
by luis anslo you can check the link in the description it's really really cool
he did a lot of the research into newspapers and headlines claims have
been made about addiction to various technologies that we didn't get into
including comic books video games the Internet of course and virtual reality
in a coming addictive way so this is definitely a problem we're gonna keep
seeing but we've got the Internet now it's it's on 3.2 billion people's phones
or computers right what happens when it gets to everyone should we change how we
think about the internet and internet obsession and information obsession
should we change that because in light of what we learned earlier with people
taking advantage of our psychology and our reward systems aren't we just giving
another 3 4 billion people up to this problem shouldn't we fix it I don't know
how to do that maybe you have ideas you can tell us in the comments do you even
think this is a problem you can tell us that too maybe it's just something we
haven't gotten used to yet I don't think there are people out there saying you
read too many books right so maybe we just haven't gotten
used to this one yet we'll see what comes next thanks everyone for watching
seeker + this week I'm trace you can find me over on twitter at trace
Dominguez you can find us at seeker you can find the third episode of this
series next week here on the YouTube channel so make sure you subscribe you
can also find audio podcasts of all of our stories over on Apple podcast
SoundCloud iTunes you name it were there again thank you we'll see you next time