All language subtitles for Screened.Out.2020.720p.WEBRip.x264.AAC-[YTS.MX]

(keys clicking) (orchestral music)

- These are changing human relationships,

family relationships, with enormous consequences.

- Technology companies have been very, very opportunistic

about hiring very smart behavioral psychologists

to brain-hack and to make these devices

purposely compulsing.

- What company can say they have billions of subscribers?

Billions of users?

With a B.

- We know what the problems are.

We're living them in our house.

We don't hear about solutions from big tech companies.

We don't hear about solutions from our schools.

- And if Mom or Dad is staring at their phone,

then the kid is gonna say,

"That's the way I'm expected to behave in the world."

- Well, it's very close to an actual drug addiction.

MRI scans, which really show the scan

of a cocaine addict who's high.

- It's an emerging public health crisis

of internet addiction.

(static crackles)

(film reel whirring)

(cheerful, mellow music)

- [Jon] Yup, that was me.

I was never good at sports.

That's probably why I became a filmmaker.

Although I always enjoyed being active outside

and having playtime with my family and friends,

building lasting memories with real people.

That guy with the dad bod right there?

That's me now.

I still like being outside,

but nowadays, I can have most of my interactions

conveniently located in my pocket, on a smartphone.

And, gee, do I love my phone.

However, I think we may all share the same problem.

I look at it all the time.

It's the first thing I check in the morning.

My entertainment while traveling to work.

My conversations with people at lunch.

And it's the last thing I see before bed,

while watching an even larger screen in front of me.

Just like me, my wife also checks her phone

far too often during the day.

Being a stay-at-home mom,

it's how she keeps in touch with the outside world

while taking care of our three busy boys.

We often chat about our phone use

and if we are addicted to our smartphones.

People say, "Oh, I'm so addicted to my phone."

Do you think you're addicted to your phone?

- Yeah.

It's like smoking a cigarette.

When there's a lull in the conversation,

it used to be like, you would be like,

"Oh, I'm gonna go have a cigarette,"

and that would be like something

to get you out of that lull.

Whereas now, if there's a lull, you just check your phone.

- How annoying is it when, 'cause there's so much stuff

to do around the house and I'm looking at my phone?

- Very annoying. (laughs)

- [Jon] And, boy, am I distracted by my smartphone.

It pulls me away from my work,

my children, and my relationships

by feeding me constant updates and notifications,

(smartphone buzzing) usually unimportant,

but it's something I feel I'm compelled to check.

So what am I looking at? (pensive music)

Like most of you, I'm checking emails, news,

but mostly social media.

And we may be looking too much.

According to research, 70% of adults

spend almost three to five hours per day online.

Some may be hitting seven hours.

80% of those hours logged are on a mobile device.

And a recent study shows

that this can add up to seven years of our lives

spent using a smartphone, liking, tweeting,

and taking pictures of our food and children.

And my problems focusing may have long-term effects

because of the smartphone.

A study done by Microsoft

revealed the average attention span

dropped from 12 seconds to eight

since the mobile revolution began,

which makes our attention span second below a goldfish,

which is only nine.

And what about our kids?

While my boys are very active,

adventurous, fun little guys,

the screen devices are a hot commodity around here.

They seem mesmerized, like I seem to be when using them,

and taking them away is difficult.

- The tone and the behavior, as soon as the screen goes on

and has to be turned off, is dramatic.

- Ahh, he's doing all that?

- I hate my life. - I hate you.

Why are you making me get off the screen?

According to Common Sense Media, children up to age eight

are spending up to three hours a day consuming screen media,

children eight to 12 spend closer to five hours,

and teenagers can be more than six

and even up to nine hours.

What exactly are these devices doing

to their long-term mental and social well-being?

And our kids get to watch us all day long

being drawn back into our screens.

What do our behaviors teach them?

We may not be paying attention to them when they need us to.

So I decided to hit the road and get some answers

about what these devices are doing to us

and how they're impacting the younger generation

who's growing up in a fully connected, wired world.

Most people I talked to said they were, quote,

"addicted" to their smartphone

and could not live without it.

So is this real addiction?

And what is an addiction anyway?

- I would say addiction is a loss of control

around a particular behavior,

whether it's ingesting substances or alcohol

or engaging in a particular behavior.

So it's a loss of control

and it's a pattern of having a loss of control

that's negatively impacting your life.

(soft digital music)

- [Jon] So what about looking at our phones

150 times a day?

Is this an addiction?

Are we screen-addicted?

- To us, it really is addictive-compulsive behavior.

Just go to a meeting or go to a restaurant

or go to an airport and look at the people,

and see them glued to their screens

as opposed to paying attention to the people around them.

- It affects our personal relationships.

It affects our love lives.

It affects our ability to concentrate and our personalities

and how we work and, really, who we are.

And I think that makes it one

of the most pervasive addictions

and potentially dangerous ones.

- Ultimately, people have free will.

They have the ability to put down their phones.

But I think these companies are doing everything they can

to short-circuit free will and, in a way,

to make us forget that we ever had it in the first place.

- When we think of addiction, we think of substances,

something that you put in your body

and that changes the way you experience the world.

That's been true of addiction for centuries,

millennia, forever, basically.

But things have changed, so now addiction can also apply

to things that are behavioral where there is no substance.

And that's what I'm interested in:

a behavior that is so well designed,

an experience that is so well engineered

that you can effectively become addicted to that experience

in the absence of any drug.

That's really where screens come in, because most of those,

the vast majority of those experiences that are addictive

happen on screens.

- I think we're actually being too cautious

in recognizing this is a problem.

Think about it very simply.

All of the aspects of gambling addiction are present.

In fact, those are the exact mechanisms

that are being built in.

- [Jon] And this is why checking our smartphones all day

may not be our fault.

In fact, it may not even be the devices, but what's on it.

Most apps we use have been designed

to monetize our attention

and keep us logging on as much as possible.

And what these app companies have learned,

like gambling and slot machines before them,

is that we are not addicted to the tech,

but we are, in fact, addicted to getting rewards.

(slot machine chiming)

Intermittent rewards, to be exact.

(soft jazz music) And what the heck

are intermittent rewards anyway?

Slot machines.

What keeps people playing them for hours and hours?

Why don't we stop playing after a win, big or small?

Well, this is because of what psychologists call

the most powerful motivator on the planet:

intermittent rewards.

- Now, you might imagine intuitively

that you want rewards all the time.

You know, you go do something, you get a reward,

you do it again, you get a reward,

and so on until the end of time.

That's actually not that interesting to humans

or any animals, really.

What we like is unpredictability.

We like randomness.

- Many years ago, (playful music)

influential American psychologist, Professor B.F. Skinner,

ran experiments to help us all

better understand our behaviors.

(rat squealing) (electricity crackling)

He used animal subjects,

in this case, a pigeon, (pigeon coos)

and made it peck a button to receive a reward of food.

He found, when the pigeon received a reward every time

or even on a set schedule of every three times,

it would not be as interested in pecking the button

and would burn out quickly.

However, when the food came randomly,

say, every 10 pecks or six, the pigeon became hooked.

It was the anticipation of the reward

that made it peck more frequently

and for much longer periods of time.

(slot machine tinkling)

(slot machine chiming)

- And that's why people gamble for hours.

If you made those machines (unsettling music)

such that you knew when you would be getting rewards

and you'd get small, drip-fed doses of rewards,

people would stop playing.

So it started with these slot machines,

and then video games started to build in

some of these elements.

And so, I think, my sense is the hierarchy

went from gambling to video games,

and now, you can also take it from the world

of social media design.

- [Jon] Every time we remove the devices

from our pocket and scroll, we anticipate the reward.

Every like, bit of information, or message is the payoff.

We then play again for more.

A basic behavioral loop that we are stuck in endlessly.

Some apps, social networks, and game companies

are manipulating their products to keep us in that loop.

In November 2017, at an Axios event,

Sean Parker, ex-president of Facebook,

in a rare interview, broke his silence

and spoke about how they manipulated us all along

into becoming behaviorally addicted to their products.

- That thought process was all about how do we consume

as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.

And that means that we need to sort of give you

a little dopamine hit every once in a while,

because someone liked or commented

on a photo or a post or whatever,

and that's gonna get you to contribute more content

and that's gonna get you more likes and comments.

It's a social validation feedback loop.

They're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.

The inventors/creators

understood this consciously,

and we did it anyway.

- [Jon] And it wasn't just Sean Parker who spoke out.

Investors and contributors who helped create these products

also decided to take a stance.

It seemed as though Silicon Valley was growing a conscience.

Another early ex-senior executive of Facebook,

Chamath Palihapitiya,

speaking at the Stanford Graduate School of Business,

backed up Sean Parker's claim and took it even further.

- We wanna psychologically figure out

how to manipulate you as fast as possible

and then give you back that dopamine hit.

We did that brilliantly at Facebook,

Instagram has done it, WhatsApp has done it,

you know, Snapchat has done it, Twitter has done it.

We have created tools that are ripping apart

the social fabric of how society works.

- [Jon] Even the inventor of the Like button

regretted what he'd helped create.

- My name is Nir Eyal, and, a few years ago,

I wrote a book called "Hooked: How to Build"--

- [Jon] Author Nir Eyal helps design apps

to become habit-forming.

He shed some light on how companies are brain-hacking

into our daily lives.

- [Jon] So you started off

in the video game industry, right?

- Right, I was in the video gaming and advertising industry,

and I learned a whole lot about how these two industries

change consumer behavior.

And so I kinda put these lessons I had gleaned

from working in these two industries

that specialized in changing people's behavior

so that all sorts of industries, all sorts of companies,

all sorts of entrepreneurs could use these same tactics

that Facebook and Twitter

and the gaming companies and Instagram,

the tactics that they're using

to help change people's habits for good.

The core of products that keep you coming back,

that form these habits, (contemplative music)

is what's called a hook.

It's a four-step process that goes from a trigger,

an action, a reward, and finally an investment.

And it's through successive cycles through these hooks

that our tastes our formed, our preferences are shaped,

and these habits take hold.

I'll walk you through them very, very quickly.

Every hook starts with a trigger.

A trigger is some kind of call to action.

It tells you what to do next.

There's these external triggers, like a notification,

an email, some kind of message that says,

"Hey, come check this out."

The action phase is all about the simplest action done

in anticipation of a reward.

And so what we find is that tech companies are in a race

to make the product as easy as possible to use

because they know the easier something is to use,

the more likely you are to use it.

(spaceship whirring)

(tractor beam humming)

Then comes the variable reward,

which is where you get what you came for, right,

where you watch the video, you scroll the feed,

then you get some kind of variable reinforcement

for doing that behavior, where it starts to feel good.

Then, finally, is the investment,

where you put something into the product

in anticipation of a future benefit.

It's where you give the company data or you upload content,

you accrue followers, you put something into the service

to make it better and better with use

so that, through successive cycles through these hooks,

you no longer need external triggers at all.

You're queued with what's called an internal trigger,

and these tend to be negative emotional states.

We use Facebook when we're feeling lonely.

We check YouTube when we're feeling bored.

Without any kind of notifications,

we're using these products on our own.

We trigger ourselves.

(device keyboards clicking)

(pensive music)

- We, as a species, we wanna be connected with each other.

You know, at one point, it was a matter of survival.

We needed each other to stay warm, to get food,

to survive, and to procreate.

So we have a deeply ingrained drive for connectedness.

- What the screen has done to social interactions

is it edited them.

It's interrupted the regular flow of human conversation

in a way that's been incredibly damaging

to our social relationships and damaging to our empathy,

damaging to the way we've learned to communicate

over thousands of years of human evolution.

- We also have a deep fear of intimacy.

And so one of the things

that social media does very, very well

and one of the reasons that it can suck you in

is that it can make you feel connected without risk.

You're safe behind the guise

of the persona you present on social media.

Because nobody presents their true selves on social media.

They present the self that they wanna be seen as.

- And so you portray your perfect image

in a Facebook or Instagram setting.

That isn't really what your life is

but what you want other people to believe it is.

That has a big impact on your self-esteem

and your emotional development.

- We know that the more time people spend on social media,

the more likely they are to have psychological distress,

anxiety, and depression.

So this is having an impact on people's well-being.

- These are things that are unintended consequences

of an effort to both make our lives look better

and to deal with the fact that everybody else's life

looks even better than ours.

Media companies have realized there are ways

that you can reinforce that in ways that serve the company.

(mellow music)

- [Jon] I decided to take a break

from my various social networks.

I deactivated all of my accounts

but kept my email and my phone service

so I could work and function.

My wife also decided to take a break

but could not commit to deactivating her account.

It was odd at first.

I felt like I was shutting off a part of myself

in a means to get feedback

about what I was doing in my life.

What would it be like without all these digital connections?

And was I going too far?

Throughout filming, I had many conversations with people

on how we, as humans,

were always worried about new technology.

Were we just being paranoid?

Weren't we warned about the printing press destroying us?

(film reel whirring) And comics?

Oh, and the TV was bad.

(women screaming) And the Beatles,

they were making kids crazy.

- The intention was different.

I think it was essentially to make something

that was engaging first, (pinball machines ringing)

but it was never as mindful as what we're seeing now.

Facebook has been trying to do this for a long time,

trying to hack into your attention.

And that war for your attention, I think,

is something that's very different from anything we've seen

with any of these other products.

And you also see the rate of evolution,

how much data these companies have,

how fast they make changes on the fly,

and the introduction of new small features

like the bottomless feed on all these social media programs.

One company does it, they all latch on,

and all the other companies do the same thing

because it's an arms race.

That, to me, those signs, that kind of copycat behavior,

the development of these new techniques,

all of that is indicative that this is something different.

Nothing like that ever happened with pinball machines

or with TV, so to me it's a different thing.

- It's probably the most vast thing mankind has ever made.

And there's a lot of good that comes from the internet,

and we should expect a lot of bads

that come from it as well.

We're going through this process that always occurs,

which is we adopt these technologies,

we're so excited by them,

you know, we kind of adopt them wholesale,

and then, after a while, we say,

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait.

"There's some bad stuff here, too," right?

We have this reappraisal of what are the real costs

to these technologies we're using.

- [Jon] And I love technology.

I do realize there's the good and the bad,

and maybe we need to figure out where we are going wrong

so we can take it the right way.

(soft digital music)

So I paid a visit to someone who knows a lot

about the history of modern tech and its turning points.

(bird trilling)

Hey, nice to meet you. - Hey, Jon.

How are you? - Good, I'm good.

- It's great to meet you. - This is it.

- Welcome to my play land.

Welcome to the Personal Computer Museum.

My name is Syd Bolton.

What you're about to see is a digital play land

of all kinds of technology (video game beeping)

through the ages.

When people started ditching their old technology,

as people do and are still doing today,

I started rescuing these machines and keeping them

because I wanted to learn about them.

Every single computer had some sort

of redeeming quality to it, and I wanted to try that out.

Bill Gates saw this and talked to his buddy, Paul Allen,

and said, "You know what, we need to make software

"for this machine, and this is what launched Microsoft."

- Aren't you worried about any of these boxes,

just like they're gonna fall

and they're just gonna bury you one day?

- You know, I do worry about that, actually.

Buried in tech is the way to go.

It's very simple.

We turn our phones on, we push buttons,

and they do what we hopefully ask them to do.

These computers all required a certain amount of skill

and work and luck to get them to do anything,

and people felt a real sense of accomplishment

when they got something done, right?

We don't feel that way about our devices today.

We just, we use them, they do what we need to do,

we communicate with others,

and then we move on to the next one.

- It is very hard to look cool

with this thing. - It is.

These would cost $1,500 to $1,800 for the phone

and your monthly plans

would be hundreds and hundreds of dollars,

and you would get very limited amount of minutes with those.

The BlackBerry was the first time that you saw people

looking at their phones all the time.

BlackBerrys did have full keyboards,

and that is where people were able

to communicate more effectively using a mobile device.

And this truly, especially having the email on the go

and being able to respond in a meeting, for example,

to somebody else,

and this is where distraction started to occur,

this is where the immediacy of communication changed.

- We remember the name they used to use for the BlackBerry.

What was it?

- CrackBerry?

The CrackBerry, right?

Because it's so addictive.

- I remember the little red light would flash,

and you'd be like, "I need to go check that.

"Someone has communicated with me."

- That's right, and that's the thing,

because a lot of it is the fear of missing out, right?

If you see that light on,

that means somebody wants to talk to you.

That actually gives us a little bit of a high, right,

and it's almost like a drug,

and we get addicted to that high.

So every time we get a piece of communication, it's a high.

I think people are always scared of new technology

when it first comes in 'cause we're not really sure

what effect it's gonna have on us long-term.

Because of the portability

of the technology behind these phones,

they are different than these other devices,

and I think it's something we should definitely

be concerned about.

- I had to finally delete, not deactivate my Facebook,

because I found myself mindlessly logging into it.

Leaving became a positive thing for me, though.

I was more clear-headed and relaxed,

not constantly feeling the urge to check my phone.

I even started reading fiction again,

which I had not done in years.

My wife, however, was having issues

with cutting back her use

with the out-of-sight-out-of-mind method.

- I've been trying to just be more aware

to not be on the phone as much when I'm around the kids,

and I do really well for a couple days and then I just get

right back into old habits. (pensive music)

I always see something flicking on my phone

or I hear a bing and then I go check it.

It's just this revolving cycle.

- [Jon] If someone is diagnosed with screen addiction,

where can they go?

I traveled to Seattle, home to reSTART,

one of the first internet and gaming treatment centers,

founded in 2009 by Hilarie Cash.

- It's a problem, for sure.

And whether or not you call it an addiction

or you don't call it an addiction,

at least let's call it a problem, which is what it is.

We're right now at Heaven's Field,

which is the Fall City campus

for the adult program, phase one.

They spend time getting healthy while they're here.

They're away from screens

so they can go through that detox process.

We have a fitness program.

They're out in nature.

They're in a safe, social environment.

They're getting lots of psycho-education.

They're getting individual counseling.

I mean, we are human animals designed, obviously,

for our brains to respond to pleasurable things,

and that's a dopamine response.

There's nothing wrong with having a dopamine response

and experiencing pleasure,

and life would be horrible if that weren't happening.

But when there's an overstimulation,

it's too much of a good thing,

and the brain has to down-regulate in response to that,

that's when it crosses the line

into an addiction. (rain spattering)

- My main issue was my phone screen, mainly,

and a few of the PC and Xbox consoles.

It affected school life very heavily.

I know I didn't do too well in college.

I dropped out the first semester because of the addiction.

It really, really brings down on your whole life.

(rain spattering)

- Squandering a lot of opportunities

to really grow emotionally

because I was substituting video games and technology

for meaningful interactions with people.

And I found that, for me, there's a lot of stressful factors

that, when you actually dive into what addiction looks like,

the same things that people talk about,

going through withdrawal for tobacco or alcohol,

I go to those meetings and I feel those exact same things

about my use of tech.

- What companies want is our attention,

because if they hold our attention,

then they can sell us stuff.

You can't hold people's attention

if you don't design it to be addictive,

so the two go hand in hand.

- I didn't know how much

I was just looking down at the world.

I was looking down.

I wasn't, you know, you miss out on so much.

Now that I'm not really, I don't use anything,

I can see everyone and what they're doing,

and you can see them on it all day long.

- I think we are entering a health crisis

and we're asleep at the wheel.

The evidence is actually really strong

that, in early childhood,

interactive screens are absolutely mesmerizing for children,

and interactive screens are the ones

that have the highest potential for addiction.

- I won't argue

about what Hilarie's adult patients are doing.

What I am concerned about

is that the moment you use the word addiction,

98% of parents are going to say, "That's not my kid."

And they're gonna let it go until it ends up

to that final common pathway.

I wanna get to that kid when he's having problems

because I want to help that parent recognize

that this is not just their kid being a pain in the butt.

This is their kid who's really struggling

with the ability to regulate his or her behavior

in the digital environment. (mellow guitar music)

- [Jon] I was worried about my kids,

so my wife and I decided to limit screen time

to just the weekends.

At first, the kids were not fans.

But when confronted with not being able to go to the screen,

something wonderful happened.

Boredom took over.

And a child never really sits still.

They start to create, play,

and let their imaginations run wild.

- It turns out that psychologists and neuroscientists

who have studied boredom have found out

that, actually, our brains do an awful lot of amazing things

in those moments when we're not concentrating

on anything in particular.

Psychologists call that mind-wandering.

And I think that one of the things that we risk

when we eliminate boredom

is that we actually eliminate a lot of opportunity

for thinking about the future, for making sense of the past,

and we crowd out a time that can be

some of the most innovative and creative times in our lives.

Even people like Albert Einstein or Pablo Picasso

or Charles Darwin were very conscious

about how some of the best ideas came to them

in these long periods when they let their minds just wander.

- [Jon] Dr. Nicholas Kardaras

has been studying children and screens for some time now,

so I met up with him in New York at one of his speeches

to get his take on what effects these apps and games

were having on our kids.

Why did you get into this?

What brought you into looking into smartphone addiction?

- I was working as an addiction psychologist,

working with substance addiction, primarily,

and then I had a young man

who seemed to have a psychotic break

that was related to video game addiction.

That was an eye-opener for me.

And then that's when I started digging.

And then, as a parent,

I started becoming really more concerned,

and more angry, quite honestly.

I started seeing that this was not addiction by accident.

This was addiction by design.

It's changing your kid's brain.

It's rewiring your children developmentally, neurologically.

It's clinically impacting your kids in ways

that you and I never even suspected 10 years ago.

So it's damaging. (somber music)

We're creating a generation

of predisposed, addictive young people.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be towards screens now,

'cause now they're wired for dopamine hits,

so they can be predisposed now towards substance addiction.

But we're also developmentally damaging those kids,

so we're seeing that their creativity,

we're seeing that their attention abilities,

we're seeing that their cognitive abilities.

So we're damaging them on the front end

and we're priming them for addiction lifelong.

That's what we're doing.

We've been asleep at the switch,

so we've let five-year-olds have it.

We wouldn't let five-year-olds gamble.

We wouldn't let five-year-olds do cocaine.

But because we've been under-aware,

we've exposed this whole generation

to this highly compulsive and habit-forming,

addictive experiences.

Sean Parker, the original founder,

or president, rather, of Facebook, I mean, he said it.

"We did it by design.

"We knew what we were doing."

And he said, quote, "God knows what this is doing

"to children's brains."

But God and some neuroscientists,

we do know what this is doing to children's brains,

and it's not good.

(pensive piano music)

- My lab focuses on children birth to five,

and what are actionable strategies

to optimize children's cognitive,

social, and emotional development.

One of the things that we know is that children that age

spend about five hours a day with media of all types.

And keep in mind that children that age

are only awake for about 12 hours a day.

So they're spending about 50%,

40% to 50% of their waking hours

somehow engaged with screens.

We've seen the age

at which children begin to use screens go down

and the amount of time they spend go up.

You'll see that they're already developing

what we might call a compulsive use if not an addictive use.

If I take a high chair

and I put a six-month-old on that high chair,

and I put a few toys on that,

on the table in front of the high chair,

what's the first thing that child's gonna do?

They're gonna push that over

and they're gonna delight in it.

They'll laugh because they made something happen.

And then their parent will come and they'll put the toy back

and the child will do it again.

What's being triggered there is what we call

the dopamine reward pathway,

which is to say that they make something happen,

it gives them pleasure,

and their inclination is to do it again.

(chuckling) And, in fact, they would do that infinitely.

That game only stops when the parent decides

we're not putting the toy back up there anymore;

we are gonna move on to something else.

We see the same kind of experience with an iPad,

except an iPad doesn't set conditions on which we...

We don't have stoppage rules around it

unless parents impose them.

So the experience a child can have

of pushing something and making something happen,

it's incredibly gratifying.

What we find is that many of these games

activate that same pathway quite deliberately,

and they can do it in excess,

and they can do it without consequence.

And that is the basis for developing

behavioral, habitual addictions.

At least compulsions if not true addictions.

- [Jon] Most things in our lives have a natural endpoint.

When we read a book, there are chapters and paragraphs

and ideas that end.

(audience applauding)

When we watch a show, film, or theater, it comes to a stop.

In life, these are known as stoppage cues.

- They actually are very good for us.

We need those cues to tell us

that it's time to interact with your loved ones

or go outside, do some exercise, do something different.

The companies that make the experiences we engage with today

are excellent at eradicating stopping cues.

Basically, you are not getting any of the feedback

that says it's time to move on.

- [Jon] The feed on social networks is bottomless.

The video games our children play can have no end in sight.

An open-ended experience that can go on forever.

(somber music)

- I decided I will never interact with experiences

that have no end in sight.

So I don't even start, right?

I'll watch movies 'cause I know the movie's gonna be

an hour and a half, two hours.

I know exactly how long it's gonna take.

But I don't start these experience

that I know are designed to keep me coming back

again and again and again and again.

Why, because I don't wanna invest in them

with no end in sight.

- [Jon] For us parents,

this is why the screen is the great pacifier.

Whenever we need a minute or an hour,

we can turn it on and get things done.

Our children are instantly hooked

in the endless stimulation it provides.

- What we've done is we've fallen into the easy solution

of the screen as keeping the child quiet and engaged.

One of the interesting things you wanna look at is,

what are the guys who are engineering this

doing with their children?

Right.

Steve Jobs never gave his kids iPads.

There's a reason for that.

- A lot of the tech giants

are much more careful about what they do at home

than what they're suggesting people should do publicly.

The Waldorf School,

known as the Waldorf School of the Peninsula,

which is in the Bay Area, 75% of the kids there

have parents who are Silicon Valley tech execs.

This interesting thing about this school

is it's a school that says,

until kids are about 14 years old,

we don't introduce them to screens at all.

- [Student] 263.

(students giggle)

- 279?

(students laugh)

- [Student] Oh, that's it, isn't it?

- Several of my class, actually,

(children chattering) are children of parents

who work in the major tech companies.

What the tech folks realize

is that, in order to be a good creator,

you have to have had a lot of experience doing that.

As I think about what it is

that the Waldorf School does very, very well

is that we are living and we focus on the young child,

the child as being a living, growing organism.

They need to move.

They need to feel.

They need to grow, to change.

They need to be exposed

to incredible variety of experiences.

And we try to do that in everything

that our school is all about,

so the children are able to live fully.

- A lot of people in the tech industry

send their kids to Peninsula School

because we really pride ourselves on preserving childhood.

We have a natural campus.

Kids can climb trees here.

They have a lot of choices throughout their day.

We really pride ourselves also

on those authentic interactions.

So I think we're really unique in Silicon Valley.

And I think, because we don't have that screen time,

that parents send their kids here

because they want that interaction,

they want that authentic interaction

and they want that face-to-face interaction for their kids.

(children chattering)

- Tech, of course, wants to build

a future consumer for their products.

We have to stand up and say, "That's fine.

"You can sell computers to our children

"when they get to be 14 or 15

"or however old we decide they should be.

"But our children, our young children are going to learn

"through doing, through being with human beings,

"through being active in the world,

"and that does not involve screens right now."

- [Jon] My kids will be teens one day.

And if they end up acting like I did, I'm already terrified.

It's been one year and 20 years since I was a teen,

so I'm pretty sure I'm out of touch

with the digital world they are growing up in.

So I talked with them and professionals

to gain a better understanding of this world.

- All they talk about at lunch is,

- Is Fortnite. - "Oh my gosh,

"to get to level," yeah, Fortnite, this game.

It's a really bad game.

- Everyone's addicted to it. - I think it's 18 and up,

but you know kids don't listen

to that kind of stuff. - But it's free also,

so if you have, what is it on, Xbox?

- Yes, Xbox. - If you have an Xbox,

you have it.

The game comes with it. - Mm-hmm.

And that's all they talk about at lunch,

like, "Oh my gosh, I just got to level 24."

I was like, "Do you have a life?"

(blonde girl giggles)

- My name's Jean Twenge.

I'm professor of psychology at San Diego State

and the author of the book, "iGen."

- I loved your speech, and I love the title of your book.

Maybe you can tell me about, you know, what's iGen.

And then you got some good

and you got some bad in your title

so if you can elaborate - (chuckling) Yeah.

- on that a bit? - Yeah, iGen is the generation

born 1995 and later.

They're the first generation

to spend their entire adolescence with smartphones,

and that's had ripple effects

across many areas of their lives.

On the upside, they have a very strong work ethic,

they're very practical,

and they're very good at keeping themselves safe.

It's good that iGen teens are safe,

but it also means, as some have argued,

they might be too safe.

They might not be having those independent experiences

which can help them as they grow to adulthood.

- The screens are not neutral,

that they are gonna affect your child.

So we know that if they're on a screen

for even five hours during the school day,

that, when they get home,

there really isn't room for any more screen time.

My oldest son, Adam,

when he was in middle school and high school,

he became addicted to video games right under my nose,

and I didn't even know it was going on.

We didn't see it coming.

There's no way.

So we started Families Managing Media

as a direct result of that experience.

I have a nursing degree from Emory,

I used to do a lot of research,

and what I see my goal

is to take all that medical information

and put it in a simple format so parents can understand it,

and, quite frankly, it's what I wish I had known

back when I was trying to figure this out.

It causes brain changes, (pensive music)

and that's not to be sensational or scary.

It just does.

It stimulates the limbic system.

It stimulates the amygdala and the fight/flight.

It stimulated all that.

It falls under that electronic screen syndrome.

And what makes it a syndrome

is when the child depends on this for their daily routine.

- Time online among teens has doubled since 2006,

and if you total the amount of time

that teens say they spend

texting online and on social media,

just through activities and just during leisure time,

not counting homework, it adds up to six hours a day.

That's just through activities, though.

More comprehensive surveys have concluded

it's more like eight or even nine hours a day.

Depression, suicide, self-harm,

all of them started to increase right around 2011 or 2012.

That's exactly when the smartphone became common,

so the time sequence lines up.

- It is part of them, it is part of them.

And when you speak to them and ask them, you know,

what it's like when they don't have their cell phones,

they say, "I feel lost.

"I feel disconnected.

"I don't know what to do with myself."

It's an ongoing issue that we discuss regularly

in staff meetings.

Teachers are frustrated.

We're not sure what to do.

- Oh, if I were to get off of social media,

I feel like I would be spaced out from all my friends

and I wouldn't be connected with them

as much as I could be with the phone.

Which I know is bad to say, but it's true.

- Everything is on the phone.

If you wanna plan something, it's already on the phone.

If you wanna watch something, it's on the phone.

So you don't need to go out when it's already there for you.

(pensive music) - There are some people who,

since between 6th grade and now,

they've become so more socially awkward

since they started using social media

and have distanced themselves from a lot of people.

- It's common to see five or six students

hanging around, socializing with one another,

but not speaking to one another, not looking at each other.

They've got their earbuds in their ears

and their eyes on their phones,

and they're essentially ignoring one another

in their presence.

- Today's kids may grow up not knowing

how to just interact (chuckling) face-to-face with people

in an authentic way,

and to be able to read other folks' facial expressions

or even the way that they wanna communicate.

- When the kids come to see me, they're on their devices

six, seven, eight, nine hours the day,

and their parents aren't parenting them,

and so they have unrestricted access to whatever,

meaning their hours aren't set up.

The characteristics that these kids feature

is that they can't make the eye contact.

Their body language is really all closed off.

A lot of them don't have true relationships

outside their devices.

- When they wake up every morning,

they are building their brand.

They're thinking 24 hours a day

about what their brand is

to their friends and to their public.

A child really believes that their biggest goal in life

is to be (laughing) famous.

They wanna be famous and they wanna make money on YouTube.

Those are the two things they're really concerned about.

- They wanna fit in so badly

that they'll change themselves

to become someone who they're not on social media,

so it is like forcing them to grow up.

- It's just like a pressure to be perfect all the time,

which is just false.

Like you have to have the perfect picture,

the perfect place.

You always have to be doing something.

- It's not that important to look perfect on Instagram.

I just, I want to look good on Instagram.

(laughs)

- They're worried about all their selfies.

They're worried about how this is all being presented

to their social media platform.

This is a very stressful way to live.

- My internet persona, which was everything's fine,

I look happy, I look healthy, I'm happy with who I am.

But then there's the real part of me

that was depressed, anxious all the time, barely eating,

doing things to myself that I never thought I'd be doing,

thinking that I wanted to die,

and just things that you would not see

in an Instagram picture.

- I think they're overwhelmed,

and I think they don't know it.

I think they are so connected all the time,

they don't know how to relax.

- Some days, if I'm doing homework

or if I'm just reading a book for English class

and I get a text, put the book down, answer that real fast.

Then I try to read again

but another text comes in right away.

- And then you're on other things and you get off-task

and you just never go back to it.

- You try to have two conversations at once

and see if you can remember everything that's going on.

You can't.

That's what multitasking is.

- When you're doing two things at once,

two visual tasks at once,

what your brain is doing

is oscillating between the two of them.

And the young, nimble mind can do that quite well,

in a way that seems as if they're simultaneously

doing their homework, checking Facebook,

and updating their Instagram.

But, in fact, they're doing it at a cost.

It's inefficient to switch back and forth that many times

between that many different processes.

- I think they're really having a hard time

getting done everything that is expected of them to get done

and stay connected 24/7.

'Cause they are connected 24/7.

If you were to teach a first-period class,

the amount of kids who are late regularly

because they've slept in,

because they were up all night on their phone, is enormous.

(pensive digital music) - I'm always on my phone

at night just to stay on it and be on it for no reason.

Like the other night, I was just on it,

just looking at pictures till three in the morning,

just 'cause I couldn't go to bed.

You just are scrolling and people are still up

and you just look at pictures.

- Sleep is just crucial for mental health

and for physical health,

and teens need more of it than adults do, not less.

They need about nine hours a night.

And fewer and fewer are getting the sleep that they need.

One reason is because a lot of them

are looking at their phone right before they go to bed.

But, even more serious, some of them

are looking at their phones in the middle of the night

or staying up late or staying up all night

because the phone is so tempting and they can't put it down.

- Each night, I try to go to bed around 12 o'clock

because homework will keep me up

and then just other things I need to do.

But then maybe I'll go on Instagram

for, like he said, five minutes, 10 minutes,

thinking that it's only gonna be

for five minutes or 10 minutes,

but there's just this constant flow of new information,

information that really doesn't matter,

but that just keeps me hooked

and I stay up later than I should.

And then I wake up the next morning

(laughing) regretting it, and then I do it again that night.

- They feel anxious.

If we have a student who is in need of some help,

they might wait weeks to see a school social worker,

and that's only because their case loads are so large.

- I don't think parents are aware

of the amount of cyberbullying that goes on with it

and just pressure, all the way around pressure

from social media.

- Cyberbullying.

People can say anything they want online

and don't have the guts to say it in face-to-face.

- There's also things like Photoshop

that can help you turn into a completely different person,

so there's people that catfish other people.

- If you don't do this, then I'm gonna do this.

I'm gonna capture some pictures from you,

I'm gonna get you to give me some videos,

and then I'm gonna blackmail you.

I'm gonna post them, I'm gonna repost them.

The way that children use this as a weapon

is astounding.

(somber music)

- We're seeing this confluence

of events, right, where smartphones,

there's just more and more of them everywhere

and teenagers are using them more and more,

and we're also seeing

some troubling data on teen depression.

Something's going on there because the uptick,

it's been only in the past four or five years

but we're starting to see that it's at higher levels

than it has been for a couple decades.

- Most concerning of all is that the suicide rate for teens

has roughly doubled over this time period.

- It was so scary moment for me.

I think I wanna lose my life there when I,

because it looks like she has serious plans

to jump from the window.

(contemplative music) (father sighs)

- I just got addicted to the screen

and just always looking at other people's lives

and just kinda getting jealous of them.

Just saw people and how nice their lives were,

their nice houses, cars, and how much money they have.

They were basically, I guess, rich,

and that's what I want in life.

Sometimes, I don't get any sleep.

Instagram is always on my mind now.

- She start to spend

long, long periods of time on the phone.

We trying to cut it off a little bit

but we're busy, we're so busy all the time.

We leave it a little bit and troubles came up.

- I was on Instagram

and I searched up #depression,

and I found all these depressing quotes,

and just, they got to me.

Eventually, I opened my window

and I was standing on the ledge.

But my dad was in the balcony

so he saw me and he told me to stop.

- I wish that treatment center help a lot.

- They told me at the treatment center

that social media

is, I guess, addicting,

it's really bad for your brain,

and we could have so much more in life.

While I was away from social media,

I kinda learned more about myself.

I guess I'm talented

and there is some (chuckling) self-confidence in me.

My parents tried giving me a flip phone

and taking my phone away and hiding it and lying to me,

but I just kept on begging them for my phone.

- She was basically dying to have her phone back,

so we did, but we put those little conditions.

I know still she can do stuff,

but we normally check a little bit.

- My friends did think that I shouldn't have my phone.

Some of them were saying,

"I'm gonna tell your dad to take it away."

I was like, "No, that's not good." (laughs)

Instagram gave me a lot of pain in my life,

a lot of insecurity.

- [Jon] But yet you have it back on your phone again.

- Yes, I still have Instagram. (chuckles)

I don't think I'll ever be able to get away from the phone.

- [Jon] How does it make you feel hearing her say that?

- Oh, it's sad.

But I believe we have to work on it together.

We need to find a way to keep it away

from the smartphone or the social media.

- One of the really interesting things

that I'll do with my patients

is I'll ask them, "What can Mom or Dad do better?"

when Mom or Dad is out of the room, right?

More than half of the responses I get from kids is,

"Pay more attention to me."

They're off doing their thing,

whether it's staring at their phone

or answering an email or just keeping up with life.

I think that, not only are we not being mindful

about what our kids are doing

or teaching them how to be mindful

in their use of these devices,

we're not mindful of what we are doing

and what we are modeling when we do it.

- I see so many parents in the park,

we call it distracted parenting,

where they're kind of pushing their toddler on the swing

and simultaneously checking their Facebook.

That toddler is, in many cases, preverbal,

but they're already picking up on the lack of social cues.

And when they're a little bit older,

they're already thinking that they wanna have a cell phone

like their mom or dad does,

and they think that this is totally acceptable behavior,

that you're not socially engaged

with the person that you're with.

- Every time you hear your phone buzz,

you're gonna be alerted.

You're gonna get that little dollop of dopamine.

You're gonna be wanting to go check it.

It's gonna be really hard.

So, as parents and as adults

who have fully functioning frontal cortex,

we need to realize

this is not a neutral activity for us either.

- Watching your child learn to swim

is an agonizingly boring thing.

There's really nothing else to do but look at your phone.

Your kid's been looking up at you for two minutes,

trying to get your attention to show you what they can do,

that they can finally hold their breath

underwater for a few seconds,

and you've missed it because you're checking your texts

or checking Twitter or just looking for something other

to hold your attention for a few seconds.

And that's a terrible feeling.

- Are we not talking to our child or our romantic partner

because we're staring at our phone

to get the latest tweet from the president?

What is going on?

And so we need to be very thoughtful and mindful

about the way we integrate this into our lives.

- The real message to parents is to look in the mirror.

Consider yourself, what you are:

your kid's most important role model.

You have to walk the walk.

You can't just talk the talk.

- How does it make you feel when Mommy and Daddy

are on their phone and not listening to you?

- Sad.

- [Jon] Why does it make you feel sad?

- 'Cause I can't talk with you for a little bit.

- What could we be doing better

than spending so much time on our phone?

- Um...

- Spending a little bit of time.

- Spending more time with us and outside.

- [Jon] Doing things that are not on phones?

- Yeah.

- Doing thing that aren't on screens.

- We're the largest organization,

not just in the United States but in the world,

that focuses on media's impact and technology's impact

on kids and families. (pensive digital music)

And we did the pioneering research

on tech and media addiction a few years ago.

That actually came because,

as a parent of four kids myself, I watch my own kids,

and as an educator, watch all the kids I teach

be constantly glued to their phones

in a way that made TVs and video games seem quaint.

The silence from Silicon Valley is deafening.

It's a no-brainer, if you will,

that brains are being affected by technology,

and specifically by devices.

It's clear that's happening.

And do I believe that some of the companies

are intentionally designing products and software

in order to make them more addictive?

Absolutely.

Does the sun rise every day?

Absolutely.

The reason is 'cause of their business models.

Because their business models are dependent on that usage.

Particularly advertising-driven business models.

- You and I don't pay for Facebook.

We're not Facebook's customer.

So they aren't beholden to you and I.

You and I are the product Facebook sells.

'Cause they give you and I the service for free of Facebook.

But they own our data and they own our eyeballs

and they own our attention span

and, increasingly, our brand preferences.

You and I are the good being sold.

- It's also why they've eviscerated

so many privacy standards.

Getting consumers to give up

their personal private information

so that a company like Facebook can have this mass database

of all your preferences, et cetera,

and send you targeted ads.

So it's not because they're evil people.

It's because they want your information

or they want your to be constantly checking your screen,

'cause they make more money when you do that.

It's that simple.

And the way to do that

is to get you to give up your information

and get you addicted to your device.

- We're screwed because the average person

doesn't have the same power that these companies do.

Aside from me, the average Joe doesn't have

a social behavioral scientist

walking around with them, saying,

"No, I don't think you should do this; you should do that.

"No, I don't think you should do this; you should do that,"

like these companies do.

- They know everything about you.

They know exactly how much time you spend

looking at this page versus that page,

whether you like cute puppies or cute kittens.

Their whole business model is predicated

upon providing you more of what you've liked in the past

so you will keep coming back.

- It is a little bit reminiscent of what people once said

about smoking, which is to say that the industry insisted

that there was no evidence of addiction.

- Cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet

the classic definitions of addiction.

There is no intoxication. - We'll take that as a no,

and, again, time is short.

- [Jon] With chilling parallels to the tobacco industry,

Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress

and denied manipulating their products

and making them addictive.

- We're almost at time so I wanna ask you one more.

Do social media companies hire consulting firms

to help them figure out

how to get more dopamine feedback loops

so that people don't wanna leave the platform?

- No, Senator.

That's not how we've talked about this

or how we set up our product team.

- They sat on that research and they sold it to us anyway.

They made money hand over fist.

The big tech, social media, and video gaming,

they know that this is addicting,

they know that it's problematic, and they didn't care.

Sean Parker said that "we did it anyway."

- [Jon] How long before tech and gaming companies

become too powerful to stop?

A country that understands this well is South Korea

where internet and gaming addiction

have a stranglehold on the country.

They have more than 400 internet

and gaming rehabs operating presently.

It got so bad, a law had to be passed,

known as the Cinderella Law,

which will prohibit children from playing games after dark.

- I have to say, for me,

that's like treating a drug problem in a culture

by punishing the end user instead of punishing the pusher,

the person who actually makes this product

and decides that it should be distributed.

So I think it's a short-term solution.

But it shows the severity of the issue.

I think it's a really powerful illustration.

- It is common sense.

Why they should not ignore their duties, their product?

It is very unethical attitude.

- [Jon] In 2010, a three-month-old baby

died of starvation while her parents played for hours

at an internet gaming cafe.

They were ironically nurturing a virtual child

while their real baby starved to death.

They were let off easy by the judge,

as he said they were addicts and did not understand

the consequences of their actions.

In China, the social networks working with the government

have now implemented a social credit system

where your life will be rated by how you act online.

Like a scary science fiction story, with a bad credit score,

you can be refused travel and stay in certain hotels,

held back from getting a better job,

not allowing your children in good schools,

and being publicly shamed as a bad citizen.

How long before these social ratings

spread across the globe?

- You know, the last time Congress

passed an important piece of legislation

around privacy or regulating technology,

Mark Zuckerberg was in first grade.

So Congress has had a disgraceful performance

in the United States, largely 'cause, I think,

they accept large contributions from the tech industry.

- [Jon] In 2017, the tech industry spent

a record $50 million lobbying powerful people

on both ends of the political spectrum,

making them the largest lobbyists in Washington DC.

- I think if you're trying to do something

that is bad for your consumers

but is good for the bottom line,

there is no other way to look at that other than to say

that is not what a company should be doing,

especially when it has an audience of a billion-plus people.

(contemplative music)

- One of the things that we give up

when we are in front of a screen

is that ability to look inward, to process,

to be reflective, to synthesize what's coming in.

Understand that our mind is important,

and mindfulness

is the opposite of mindlessness.

All of these algorithms

that are built into the echo chambers,

that are built into these interactive apps

are about us using them mindlessly

and following the path that they've laid out for us,

right to the profit centers that they want to.

- Who should have the right to interrupt you

is really important in figuring out how to fight back

in a world that will take your,

will take as much of your attention

as you're willing to give, and then some.

- We're quick to say, "Okay, put down your phone.

"Remove the screen from your life."

Well, then what?

And I think it's that fear of missing out,

and the fear of what happens in that silence

when we put our screens down,

that cause us to quickly go and pick them again, right?

It is the sense of loss

and a sense of missing out on something.

- One of the things we teach here is mindfulness,

and it's all about being able

to sit with yourself in the moment and observe,

be tuned into and observe what you're experiencing

physically and emotionally and cognitively,

just being really aware, self-aware.

- If you are trying to break a habit or break an addiction,

you have to learn to separate yourself from that activity

that you're habitually caught up in.

But, to do that, you have to have a sense

that there's an alternative.

The reason why people develop addictions

is because, you know, from one point of view,

they really want to be happy.

If you can tune into that in meditation

and actually experience it,

then you can feel happy.

- When you develop the capacity to just sit with yourself,

you can allow, for instance, a craving to pass.

A craving arises, you observe it,

and if you wait, it will actually pass.

- If someone walks into a room

and they're totally stressed

and agitated and all strung out,

everyone in the room will feel that.

If you've had a good meditation in the morning,

feel really peaceful and abundant, positive,

you are gonna improve people's experience wherever you go

just by virtue of that energy that you have in your mind,

and people will feel that, and that's good for you.

- I'm an advocate for scheduling time for focus.

We literally need to put in our day, I have it every day,

from eight o'clock to 10:30 is my focus time.

I turn off all notifications,

I use apps to block the internet,

so that that is my focus time.

And so we have to schedule that in.

That is not something that is going to happen on its own.

- No matter where I am, no matter who I'm with,

what I'm doing, when I have dinner, it is tech-free.

Even if I'm alone, I don't use my phone.

And it's just an attempt to carve out some of the day,

to keep some of the day sacred,

where I'm either interacting with people

or doing something that's in the here and now

in the real world.

- Having tech-free time in the home,

whether an adult or a young person, a parent or not,

having time that you've decided

that you're not gonna use tech,

whether it's for two hours on a Saturday,

after a certain time at night,

or within a certain time of waking up,

that can be very, very good for mental and physical health.

- One of the things that we have, really, to our advantage

is that children hate to be treated like they're idiots.

They hate to feel they're being manipulated

or snookered in some way.

And if we can engage them into understanding

that they are not actors in this environment

but they are reactors in this environment

to algorithms that have been pre-engineered

to get them to twitch

exactly how the makers of those algorithms

want them to twitch, then they can back off

and use their higher cortical functions.

- You don't have to, especially for a high school student,

you don't have to take the phone away.

It's limited use.

So two hours a day or less

doesn't seem to have serious effects on mental health.

That's enough time to text your friends

and get on social media and watch a few fun videos,

and then go and live your life.

I think that's good advice for everybody,

teens, parents, adults, everybody.

- The people who are returning to analog

or seeking it out in their lives,

if someone's going to the trouble of buying a turntable,

you know, going out and spending a couple hundred dollars

on a new record collection, they're doing it as a choice.

They're doing it because they see that this is an experience

that is different and often complementary

to what happens on their phone and their computer.

I think that's a healthy way to live in this world.

- And I think that the great challenge for all of us

is to learn how to use these technologies

in ways that are mindful and meaningful

rather than we're responding

to design cues, (inspiring music)

responding to incentives that have been programmed for us

to sell us on an online life

and then to sell portions

of that online life to advertisers.

- [Jon] Large tech companies that still do not admit

to the addictive nature of their products

have committed to create more apps to monitor screen use.

In June 2018, Apple announced Screen Time

at their conference, which does just this.

Time will tell if this approach will work.

I really do hope it's a turn in the right direction

for all our sakes.

- Let's face facts.

These screens can take us live

to the summit of Mount Everest

or to the depths of the ocean

or to cultures and experiences

we could never have in real life.

There is great hope in that.

- [Jon] I still use my smartphone, but far less.

I do feel that I took my time back

from something that was stealing it from me.

And you can, too.

I'm not saying you have to delete your apps.

Just decide on where you want your attention to be focused.

In the real world or in theirs?

And, really, who deserves it the most?