A 2018 study recorded at least 259 selfie-related deaths internationally between 2011 and November 2017.
Two accidents in Australia recently include a 38-year-old mother who died at the Grampians in Victoria while trying to get a selfie on an overhanging cliff and a 21-year-old English beautician who died while taking a photo at Diamond Bay in Sydney.
Death by selfie is an extreme example of the harm that can come from chasing online approval and, much like death by video game, these events are very rare. Yet their rarity does not diminish their tragedy. What is it about the digital world that drives such extreme behaviour?
In 2016, a male Instagram influencer likened his relationship with social media to addiction: “Say I’m smoking crystal meth, and I take a hit and it feels really good … it’s similar to that feeling when you post a photo and you’re getting all these ‘likes’. You’re like, ‘Wow, this is great.’ Then your photo starts to lose engagement. Then, the next day, it’s like a lull in your validation. And the lowest you will ever feel is right before you take that next hit. Right before you post that next photo.”
In the season of new year’s resolutions many of us will be reflecting on our relationship with the online world. Some of us may have full-blown addictions to tackle, while others just may want to reduce the amount of distractions we are subjected to. Wherever we sit on the spectrum, almost all of us can relate to the feeling of being more scattered and more anxious as a result of the ubiquity of digital technology.
While being active in the digital world can be a boon for business, the downside is the impact of technology on our brains. Scrolling and posting can sap our attention and make us jittery, stealing our presence of mind and ability to focus. This is, in essence, an argument for getting out of the digital world and into our real lives.
And while we do not have to shut down our online identities altogether, we can learn how to relate to technology differently to stay in control.
Take the big one: social media. These platforms are designed to be addictive and to keep us scrolling for as long as possible. For many, quitting social media altogether is impossible for professional and/or personal reasons.
But there are ways to drastically reduce one’s use. Writing in Atomic Habits, James Clear describes locking himself out of Twitter from Monday to Friday, and allowing himself to use it on the weekend.
In The Atlantic, Caitlan Flanagan reports that she hands control of her Twitter account over to her adult son, who allows her to log in about once a month.
Notifications on our phone can be another incessant distraction, draining us of productivity and focus. Cognitive psychologists know that multi-tasking is a fool’s errand: every time we pick up our phone to check an app because a notification has alerted us, we switch the focus of our attention. When we try to switch back to the task at hand, we have to recalibrate, leaving us more depleted than we were before.
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, sets his phone to flight mode in the morning or whenever he is trying to get focused work done. He receives no notifications whatsoever, a drastic but necessary strategy for the modern world.
In The Organised Mind, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin argues that we are living in an era of information overload and that “our brains have the ability to process the information we take in, but at a cost; we can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired … Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.”
If we aren’t careful we can become addicted to this information overload. In Dopamine Nation, psychiatrist Anna Lembke argues that increased access to addictive substances – including social media and the internet – is the biggest problem facing people today. While our ancestors lived in environments of scarcity, where the next meal was not always guaranteed, today we live in an environment of abundance.
Like those who can control themselves around sugary and fatty food, those who can switch off their phones, unplug their devices and stay grounded in the material world may have a competitive advantage in the coming decades. In a world in which addiction and attention deficit is widespread, the future belongs to those who can turn off, tune out and drop in.
Claire Lehmann is founding editor of Quillette, a platform for free thought.
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