One of the first things you learn about in public health school is “harm reduction:” a philosophical approach to addressing complex disorders like addiction not by pushing an abstinence-forward frame (i.e. “you must quit cold turkey!”) but instead by identifying the harms which are often comorbid with these disorders and trying to mitigate them. The classic example taught in MPH (Master of Public Health, not miles per hour) seminars is needle exchanges. Individuals dealing with substance use disorder will sometimes use intravenous drugs, requiring the use of sterile needles. In the 1980s IV drug users often would share needles which led to high incidence of blood-borne diseases, most notably HIV. While HIV was still not a subject to discuss in polite company at this time, the idea that we could reduce HIV prevalence by providing sterile needles took hold in the UK, the Netherlands, and eventually in the US. Health departments set up locations where individuals could drop off used needles and receive clean ones without any judgement or questions asked. Needle exchanges remain politicized (common arguments include encouraging drug use and bringing “undesirable” individuals into neighborhoods which have needle exchanges), but they are arguably quite effective at addressing the specific issue of bloodborne diseases among IV drug users.
Being a communication scholar, I have recently been thinking about what a harm reduction approach to our digital lives might look like. By digital life, I mean the modern archetype where most of us carry a smartphone in our pockets, use it heavily, have an up-to-date presence or use pattern on a major social media platform, rely on laptops, tablets, or desktops for the majority of our work, have “smart” TVs or watches or homes, etc. Digital life, for the purpose of this blog at least, can just be taken to mean modern life, with all the technological amenities we have come to take for granted - at least in metropolitan areas of the US (I won’t pretend to know about every lifestyle).
It’s evident from my previous blogs and many of the courses I teach that I do believe there are real harms which come with our digital lives. Adopting a true harm reduction approach requires a precise articulation of what those harms are. In this blog, I will outline some of the harms I see as being worth addressing in our modern digital lives, and share a few strategies I employ or wish to employ to reduce those harms. I also want to clarify that the parallels I draw between digital life and addiction are, in fact, intentional. As I have mentioned in a previous blog, I do see many digital systems in our lives operating much as addiction would. I’ll also note that I tend to have a broader definition of addiction, and am quick to classify “softer” substances as potentially addictive, including cannabis and caffeine.
So what are the harms with this digital life of ours? Here’s a couple:
The death of privacyThose of us who use smartphones, social media, web browsers, smart tvs, etc. without much forethought are having pretty much all of our activity tracked. And not just tracked, but that information is being analyzed, packaged, and sold in order to make decisions about what advertisements to serve you. Beyond the basic “advertising = bad” argument, having all this tracking means we have no real freedom to do whatever we want. If you are consistently served content based on what corporations and algorithms deem appropriate based on the profile they construct of you, then you are not effectively making free choices on what media to engage with.
The harm here, as I see it, is not just a loss of privacy, but a loss of freedom. I’ve covered this issue in more depth in my blog on digital autonomy, but I truly believe that the best version of using modern technology is one where we can use it without being tracked. Imagine if someone followed you around all the time keeping notes on what you did. Even if you didn’t care that they were there, the first time that person pipes up and says “oh you tend to go to the bathroom right around this time, how about I make you a bathroom playlist?” you’d probably feel pretty violated, right? Would you feel free knowing that someone has that level of information about you? I wouldn’t.
There are extreme ways to address this harm, like completely getting rid of all your internet enabled devices, deleting all your accounts, and only accessing the web through a library computer five counties over. But that’s not a realistic standard to hold anybody to, especially when our friends are often mainly reachable through social media, or when these technologies are just plain fun to use. Here’s a couple things I’ve tried which tend to help:
In a completely different direction from the more technically driven points above, one of the major harms I see in my peer group is how much we perform our lives for each other on social media, and consequently how much of a warped worldview we each have because of the bombardment of only the highlights from each other’s lives. When I was about to graduate from college, my social media feeds were full of friends and acquaintances announcing grad school acceptances, tech job offers, marriage proposals, luxury vacation pictures, and even more simply, pictures of them having fun with others. In my evaluation, I had a perfectly lovely life at that point, but the aggregate effect of seeing so much positive news from other peoples’ lives is just not something our brains are meant to process.
Especially as young adults, we are prone to social comparison, and the constant barrage of positive life updates on social media forms an aggregate “other” who is persistently more successful, more adored, happier, sexier, better. It wasn’t even the case that I was comparing myself to a single person in my acquaintance circle. I was comparing myself to people, i.e. “people are doing so much better than me in jobs/school/love/life.” In turn, I too became motivated to perform how excellent my life was (which, again, was perfectly fine). But this performance necessarily turned into lying, at least for me. A wet lab internship which I hated turned into a prestigious research opportunity that was sure to place me on the fast track to being an NIH funded PI. A date that ended in an argument turned into a Man-Crush Monday post where we were so obviously and disgustingly in love with each other that there could be no room for any obscenely human experiences like disagreement. Even a nighttime walk to clear my head had to be performed online, becoming a signal of how sincerely deep I was by adding a Rumi caption over a picture of campus at twilight.
These impulses to perform and compare are natural consequences (and I argue, harms) of our digital lives today. Here’s what I’ve tried:
It’s probably fair to say that at this point, if you live in a metropolitan part of the US at least, every part of your life has some contact with the digital world. We check our phones for the weather, our correspondences, the time, and entertainment right as we get up for the day. We use apps to figure out traffic patterns, directions, and when the next bus or train is coming. What is modern work without email? And what is modern dating without texting? Luxury high-rises now provide lessees with apps to enter their units instead of keys, and universities issue digital ID cards instead of laminated plastic. I can’t even go into a restaurant without using my phone to see the menu, no matter how incapable my decade-old phone may be to scan the QR code.
Now remove the semiconductor from reality suddenly and what happens (for a fun exploration of this premise, see the 2012 science fiction show Revolution)? I know at least a dozen people in my life who genuinely might not be able to make it work - either for lack of navigational sense or because they use their phones to pay for public transit. That’s nothing to speak of their jobs, which are basically impossible without a computer (I don’t think I even know anyone who keeps physical files anymore). Most of our money just ceases to exist. This is a single point of failure that is so extreme that thinking about it for more than a few minutes terrifies me.
So what is the true harm here? Overreliance by itself isn’t a harm, nor am I talking about the potential harm from taking away the thing we are reliant on. To me, the harm at play here is simply the degradation of what it means to be human. Thousands of years of evolution created a body that was capable of walking long distances tirelessly, and a brain that could think multiple steps ahead to plan out complex social groups and strategies. And within a few generations, that brain and body became utterly dependent on an entire alternate digital reality. I know this analysis may read as over-simplified or contrived, but I do think of this issue as a harm worth addressing. Here’s a couple things I do in my daily life as harm reduction strategies.
With fridges - well this is unavoidable at this point in the US, but modern fridges come with a “smart defrost” system that is meant to intelligently manage the humidity of your fridge’s interior. This system is actually part of the required specifications from EPAs push for “high-efficiency” appliances. However, the consequence of this system is that modern fridges will kick on the defrost system soon after you open the door, instead of working on a timer like old school fridges. While this adaptive defrost technology does reduce the energy needs of the fridge, it also wears out the defrost heater and evaporator coils, leading to the need to replace the whole fridge sooner. Compare this system with pre-”high-efficiency” fridges, which just kick on the defrost every 12 hours. Sure they might have used a bit more electricity since they’d turn on even if you hadn’t opened the fridge in a week, but they also lasted for ages (you can still buy a fridge from the 80s or 90s and with a little TLC get it in good working condition).
But what’s my point here? These so-called smart machines reduce our actual ability to navigate the world, make processes that should be simple more difficult, and in some cases sell us a myth of “intelligence” while actually being worse for consumers in the long run. Imagine, what if we had a smart technology that made everyone think it was so good at thinking that companies started laying off skilled workers in droves, only to eventually realize that the afore-mentioned technology wasn’t actually thinking in the first place?
I recognize that my definition of “harms” from digital life might seem a bit broad in places. But it is likely intuitive to all of us that the modern digital paradigm is pervasive on an unprecedented level, so it makes sense (at least to me) that the associated harms might range from the technical issues of privacy all the way to fundamental issues of what it means to be human. I’ve shared a few strategies I use in the hopes that the reader might think about whether these strategies are either (a) sufficient to address the harms, (b) unnecessary because the harms I discuss aren’t that real or important, or (c) insufficient to address the true scale of what the modern digital paradigm means for our continued humanity. Stay tuned for future blogs where I may continue to dig into this and related issues.
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