By InfoWise News Team

“The medium is the message,” Canadian philosopher and critic Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed in 1964.

McLuhan had television in mind. The quote, however, underscores the way devices change consciousness irrespective of the content they transmit. By being primary a passive medium, television reinforces consumer culture and perhaps also the drive to consume, influencing mindsets in ways not readily apparent to participants.

Almost half a century later, information technology journalist Nicholas Carr stirred debate with an Atlantic cover story, “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” Carr’s ideas are developed further in “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” The 2010 book chronicles multiple studies from the fields of psychology and neuroscience that document the negative cognitive effects of screen-based reading, communication and interaction.

In a 2020 revised edition, Carr adds a chapter on smartphone use — which he believes is accelerating consumers’ decline in cognitive abilities. He points to a 2017 study by Adrian Ward of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues. Summing up the smartphone’s impact on contemporary life and thinking, Ward and coauthors conclude that mobile devices cause a kind of “brain drain” that diminish “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.” By sucking away attention via the programming of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Tik Tok and others, our ability to consciously act is hobbled — leaving us vulnerable to emotion-based, manipulative advertising and politics.

Ward and coauthors see smartphones nudging users toward shallow “system 1 processing.” In contrast to system 2, which employs actual thinking, system 1 has consumers make decisions based on “the likability of the communicator” and other shallow factors.

This is a dark future, one that empowers celebrity culture while undermining the pay and status of teachers and academics. At least in theory, democracy ends up losing.

Less widely discussed are the emotional messages that accompany the smartphone. Here too, plenty of science is starting to accumulate. Much of it supports Carr’s 2020 conclusion, that “dark things… have happened.” The early optimism that Apple computer’s Steve Jobs shared when he unveiled the iPhone in 2007 has been supplanted by a “less reflective, more impulsive” culture, more easily dominated by an elite that wields “more power than ever.”

Some of the smartphone’s sharpest effects on emotional health may take place as texting replaces spoken communication. While it promises rapid and efficient ties, texting adds ambiguity that exhausts users and undermines interpersonal skills, professor of communication Zack Carter wrote in 2017.

“Attempting to manage, grow, and strengthen a close relationship… through texting, may hinder this process,” Carter writes. “Extensive research suggests that… texting (produces) contradictory consequences for close relationships. More clearly interpreted: texting, instead of a phone call, or… meeting in person with those you’re closest with, increases and fosters an illusion of closeness while actually decreasing relationship stability and satisfaction.”

“Attempting to manage, grow, and strengthen a close relationship… through texting, may hinder this process. Extensive research suggests that… texting (produces) contradictory consequences for close relationships. More clearly interpreted: texting, instead of a phone call, or… meeting in person with those you’re closest with, increases and fosters an illusion of closeness while actually decreasing relationship stability and satisfaction.”

Zach Carter, PhD

To sum up, smartphones may be making us more sad, lonely and less able to consciously interpret or influence our world.

What’s an informed response to this somewhat bleak vision? Not to throw our cell phones away, but to use them less and more deliberately. Each voice call an individual makes to friends and acquaintances, and certainly each letter or email, is an important gesture.

The aim of an informed and clear-eyed citizenry should be less Instagram, less Twitter, less Facebook — and less time on our mobile devices.