Kids, Phones, and Celling your Soul
“I believe that before we teach our children how to talk to a million people in a fraction of a second, we should first teach them how to talk to just one.”
Media and social science Professor Joni Siani encourages you to consider the role that your cell phone plays in your day to day experience in her book Celling Your Soul: No App for Life and the film that soon followed, Celling Your Soul.
Siani wonders why it has become so hard for people to live without their phones when we were able to exist without them for years. “We’ve become conditioned,” says Siani. “Our digital connectivity is aligned with our pleasure senses. It’s emotionally based. And, when it comes to pleasure, emotion outweighs logic every time.”
As a college professor on the front line during the digital revolution, Siani observed students in her classes becoming physically anxious when asked to put their phones away for short periods of time. She began asking students to interpret their own relationships with respect to their phones. “The kids get it,” says Siani. Most students came to an honest and similar conclusion: “I’m addicted.”
Celling Your Soul documents the experiences of a group of young adults who agree to put away their phones and restrict internet use for a one week digital cleanse as part of their final project for Professor Siani’s college communications class. The effort is not a challenge to see if they can simply get by without using technology. The point of the digital cleanse is that it affords participants the opportunity to take an introspective look at how they are socially, emotionally, and biologically affected by technology and then reflect on that experience. After a week of recording their observations, all of the volunteers come to a similar result, “I have a problem.”
Taylor O’Malley, a student who took part in Siani’s digital cleanse, was open about her inability to deal with authentic human interaction. “I get too scared. I can’t answer the phone,” says O’Malley. “I will not even order pizza or anything unless it has an on-line option.” O’Malley’s reliance on her phone has become prohibitive. “I need it. I need it,” says O’Malley. “I sleep with my phone in my bed. I need my charger with me at all times.”
Siani’s findings are not a surprise. Our current generation of youngsters has no template for what life was like before the existence of cell phones. But simply acknowledging the residual effect is not going to do us any favors moving forward. Carl Marci, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of the book, Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age, reminds us that the cell phone experiment “has been going on for about 15 years and there’s no excuse for ignoring the lessons those years have taught us.” The reality is that most young adults would have trouble getting through a day without their phones. “As humans, we’re hard-wired to bond with one another and in the digital age we turn on our devices,” says Siani. “We post, we tweet, we text hoping to make a connection but we end up getting sad when we’re ignored. So we try again. When we get a response, our brain actually kicks out happy chemicals called dopamine. It’s the same principle as playing a slot machine. We think if we keep playing, we’re going to get a pay-off.”
Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital whose focus is children and media, along with Dr. Carl Marci reinforced Siani’s findings in a 2022 report by Boston Globe correspondent, Kara Miller. “Much like slot machines, e-mail and social media apps offer intermittent rewards. Sometimes you get a message from someone you really like, or your boss. The feeling of victory when you do get one of those prized messages is fleeting. And, just like in a casino, in the long term, the house always wins.”
“Research is now revealing that our reliance on digital technology has actually altered the development of our human apps which has resulted in unintended consequences,” says Siani. Health experts have warned that reliance on technology has led to increases of addiction, stress, anxiety, panic attacks, attention issues, narcissism, self-centered behavior, and even suicidal thoughts coupled with decreases in empathy, self-reliance, self-esteem, and the overall ability to develop the social skills necessary to successfully navigate through life. Dr. Marci has witnessed a trend in which he sees kids losing significant amounts of sleep due to phones. “Having a phone available all night is an almost irresistible temptation.” He delivers a common message to all parents, “If there was just one rule, if you’re going to institute one recommendation, it would be: Take the damn phone away at least an hour before bedtime.”
Dr. Marci believes that phone use is “altering kids’ brains long-term, particularly the prefrontal cortex, which helps - among other things - exercise impulse control and good decision-making. Until your mid-20s, your prefrontal cortex is still developing, and multitasking (a huge piece of what we do with our phones) puts an enormous strain on the prefrontal cortex.” It is of note that Steve Jobs did not let his own children use an ipad and Chris Anderson, Chief Executive of 3D Robotics (a company that makes drones), keeps “parental control of every device in his home.” Says Anderson, “I know the dangers of technology first hand. I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”
Along with his pediatric work at Boston Children’s Hospital, Dr. Michael Rich serves as Director of the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders and recognizes the dangers of kids having phones at early ages, according to the Globe. “The wireless companies, quite honestly, are always trying to expand their market,” says Rich. “They are pushing deeper into childhood.” Dr. Rich, who sometimes refers to himself as a mediatrician, believes that in order to gain a competitive hand, carriers “try to convince parents that phones offer children a measure of safety” as an added selling point. It is no coincidence that at the time of Siani’s book release in 2015, forty percent of twelve-year-olds had phones. That number has since grown to over seventy percent according to a report by Common Sense Census. “Our society-wide experiment with kids and screens is anything but safe,” reiterates Dr. Marci.
A day or so into Siani’s digital cleanse, student Lorand Moore began to experience anxiety without his phone. “The day is just gloomy because I feel something is going to happen and I’m not going to have my phone and I’m panicking.” Siani believes this process of withdrawal is important. “What is it doing to your head? Let’s see how it feels to go more authentic with our one on one communication rather than focus on our digital devices to connect. When we start communicating with our thumbs we’re in trouble.”
For Siani’s students, the digital cleanse proved to be a valuable reflective experience. “When you step out of that box,” shares Morgan Brown, “you truly see how much it consumes you.” Steven Gage decided that he “wanted human connection again.” Originally, Jacquelyn Cifarelli didn’t think she needed the digital cleanse, but realized that her reliance on technology was much greater than she had originally thought. “I didn’t think I was connected to my phone.”
“Our society is being hijacked by technology,” says Siani. The reality is that kids already understand the effects of phones. The results of our 15-year-old experiment with kids and phones are becoming increasingly clear. Kids know it, and so do we.” Dr. Michael Rich explains, “Parents should think of phones as tools. They should ask their child why they need a phone, what purpose it will serve for them. You wouldn’t get your kid an electric saw - a different kind of power tool - without making sure they knew what they were doing with it.” Dr. Marci warns, “We’re rewiring a generation of humans in an uncontrolled experiment with technology that is having significant consequences. Since the iphone’s introduction in 2007, we have been faced with the rise of depression, anxiety, ADHD, substance abuse, and suicide. We’re more distracted, divided, and depressed. We need to pause.”
Siani claims that the message she intended to convey in both her book and her film was meant to be a positive one. “It’s not anti-technology,” says Siani. “It’s pro-human. It’s about connecting on an authentic level. The unfortunate message this generation is getting is that they can’t connect with somebody without the use of some device. The data is clear. It’s not feeding the soul in the way that humans are supposed to connect,” says Siani. “I believe that before we teach our children how to talk to a million people in a fraction of a second, we should first teach them how to talk to just one.”
