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Social media wants attention, but we shouldn't fall for it

The next time you are tempted to turn to a screen for relief, distraction, curiosity, or entertainment, consider if this is the life you want to be living.

On June 12, 2018, the New York Times headline read "AT&T Wins Approval for $85.4 Billion Time Warner Deal". Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T since 2007, is quoted as having argued during the trial: "We want people engaged with their mobile devices all day watching movies and video." For months I have been mulling over the dangers this goal poses to psychological well-being. Focusing attention on electronic screens and valuing entertainment as a full-time activity each affects people in destructive ways. So where is our attention focused?
Babies find nothing more compelling than a moving image, especially if it includes colours. Our innate impulse to organise our sensory environment so that we can make sense of "the buzzing, booming confusion" of the world outside of the womb, leads babies to focus on what most attracts or arouses them. Depending on temperament of the child and content of the material, moving images provoke the positive emotion of interest. If the images become stable and assimilated and a child can recognise what it sees, these same images can bring joy. Stated simply, my concern is that the human connection that results in a "secure attachment", with its lifelong benefits of health, happiness and the support of social relationships, can be replaced by a relationship to a device, by definition one that a person can control to some extent but not in a truly interactive fashion. 
In the spring of 2018, Yale University sponsored a conversation "Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines". One of the panel participants, psychology professor Laurie Santos, offered a particularly lucid comment. She noted the truth that babies uncritically absorb what they observe in their earliest years. If a caregiver is constantly focused on a phone, why would the baby NOT believe that the phone is the most important target for engagement? A recent report that Silicon Valley mothers are requiring their nannies to sign "no screens" agreements suggests that even those who are most professionally involved in and rewarded by technology understand the damage that replacing live interactions with virtual ones can yield, even if we cannot yet predict exactly how it will manifest. 
To speculate, today we are breeding what a 2011 Museum of Modern Art exploration of the future of electronics, "Talk to Me", labelled "digital natives", children who become confused when a screen fails to respond to their commands. The sense of agency and trust a child develops in a relationship with a human cannot be created with a device. 
Worse, a relationship with a device lacks the human energy of a face-to-face relationship. The support offered by a hug, the invitation in an outstretched human hand, the intimacy conveyed in a complicit wink - all are compromised when stripped of the human energy. 
Dopamine, the "reward" chemical our brain brings us when we feel pleasure, can become addictive. An activity that turns off pain receptors and turns on the reward system is powerfully self-reinforcing. 
Encouraging entertainment can encourage passivity and dependence. Children need to first develop their capacity to care for themselves through play, exploring their environment and acting on it. Both expressive and constructive imaginative play teach adaptation, the first for emotional self-care and the second for problem-solving. Being riveted to an external story with no personal or other human input must lead a parent to ask, "what is my child NOT doing when watching screens?" 
If a child develops an expectation of 24/7 availability, the capacity to delay gratification fails to develop. Worse, expectations of availability lead one to skip over a higher quality or better choice if it is not immediately available. Patience, persistence, and discrimination are not rewarded and thus capacities to discern and pursue quality are compromised.
The role of information in one's life - and lifestyle - can become overblown. Taking the time to verify loses priority. The development of wisdom is suspended, pushed aside by the fallacy that information can guide a life well-lived. As I recently heard someone observe, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad."
The next time you are tempted to turn to a screen for relief, distraction, curiosity, or entertainment, consider if this is the life you want to be living. Do you agree with Stephenson's vision, "We want people engaged with their mobile devices all day watching movies and video"? Or do you believe that other activities deserve priority seating in the theatre that is your life? -Psychology Today 
Roni Beth Tower is a retired clinical, research, academic psychologist based in the US