06-25-2022 - The Live Addiction Test - Self Study Entry 1

 

The New Tech Experiments We Do

We never stop to ask if we should do a thing. As teachers, we experience this every day. New policies and procedures, programs, and mandates. But it is a larger problem than that. It's a human problem.

We experiment without a control group. We get a new technology and we just start using it. 

We just do it. We just adopt new tech and think it's the best thing ever, and we don't stop to think of the consequences. Marshall McLuhan was writing and speaking about this phenomenon for years. He discussed the tetrad of new media and how it was a blessing and a curse. 

New tech always makes life better, it always replaces and obsolesces something, and it calls back to an older tech. But the biggest part of this is what I mentioned in the previous paragraph. It is a curse.

Image: Columbia.edu

We never stopped to think about cars, factories, suburbs, pesticides, coal, or cellphones. 

Let's stop and look at one long-ago example, to illustrate the point: Coal.

Coal fired steam engines powered the industrial revolution. Did we ask questions about the effects before we jumped down the coal mine shafts? No. What was the result? The Great Smog of London, killing around 12,000 people. 

How did smog cause so much death? According to the UK's Met Office, "On each day during the foggy period, the following pollutants were emitted: 1,000 tonnes of smoke particles, 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, 140 tonnes of hydrochloric acid and 14 tonnes of fluorine compounds. In addition, and perhaps most dangerously, 370 tonnes of sulphur dioxide were converted into 800 tonnes of sulphuric acid." (The Great Smog of 1952, n.d.)

Beyond that, we can see through climate data, that global temperatures began to rise around the time of mass  coal adoption, which powered big industry. "Human activity has rapidly increased the emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. According to the NSW government website: "Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, in about 1750, human activities such as burning fossil fuels, including coal and oil, have increased greenhouse gas concentrations in our atmosphere."

The point is obvious. We are experimenting on ourselves and the world and that has more specific implications for education. 

What about Cell Phones?

We introduced cellphones into our lives without a second thought. They enhanced our lives, freeing us from the tether of the office phone, and making our work portable. It was a gift. 

Then smartphones came on the scene and gave us little pocket computers, and we went along without questioning. 

"What a great little gadget!" We said. 

It gave us a camera, a media player, a way to email and search the web. How marvelous. And then came apps...

What we didn't realized is that we were giving ourselves a new addiction. We felt free, and didn't see the chain that was slowly closing around our wrists. In classes we see it everyday. Distracted students, choosing likes, tweets, snap streaks, and Instagram followers over an education. They play Clash, and Hayday, and any other new game that comes out; competing for trophies that are time sensitive, they need to bury themselves in their screens.

But it isn't just teens. Twenty-six percent of doctors are suffering from severe cell phone induced anxiety. (de-Sola et al., 2017). It is a much larger issue than we realize. It is considered by some researchers to be the addiction of the 21st century. (Shambare., 2012) And that fact becomes increasingly clear, the more we look at our habits. 

Watch the CBC documentary, "Addicted to Your Phone?", (CBC) and it becomes all to clear. 158 million people are on Snapchat every day. That's just one app, and the extent of the addiction is scary. One person in the documentary says that she has exchanged pictures with the same person for six-hundred forty-three days in a row. She hasn't missed a day. 

That's the key to this addiction. Apps are designed to make you check them, every day, many times a day. That's how they make money. 

With this information at hand, I had to look at my own statistics. How addicted am I? How many hours am I tied to my phone? 

As of 9:45pm, I am at 2hrs., 3 min. And most of my time is spent on Facebook. It's a bit hard to see that I've spent that much time, but I think I must still be below the average. The mother in the CBC documentary I mentioned above? She's on her phone about 3.78 hours. She will lose 8.8 years, if she keeps this habit. And her daughter? 30% of her day! That's 9.5 years of her life on her phone. Their son will lose 15 years of his life, because he spends about 9 hours a day. 

The fix? Real life activities. Maybe that's why my number is a bit lower. I spend a lot of my time being active. But 2 hours is still too much.

I'll be adding some time limits to my phone. In my phone's settings, there is a section called, "Digital Wellbeing and parental controls". I plan to use it well. I also plan to get rid of the least used social media apps - the one listed in other - Instagram. I use it about 5 minutes a day. And I think that if I limit Facebook and Reddit, while deleting Instagram, then I might save an hour a day. That is definitely worth experimenting with. We are in this social media, technology experiment anyway. I might as well do some experimenting of my own.