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Stultify and Punish

Wild Thought

In any case, the digital revolution is proceeding. It is taking its place in a long line of radical innovations that have turned human ways of thinking upside down. First, the invention of writing set an ineradicable seal on the break between 'wild thought', as Lévi-Strauss calls it, and societies in which History, as a cumulative process, is established by means of writing. On the cusp of the modern world, printing also provoked a veritable intellectual revolution, promoting freedom of thought and contributing to the rapid expansion of the Reformation.

It was thought that AI would take its place in this glorious lineage, that it would help us think better both individually and collectively, and that it would multiply collaborative experiments such as Wikipedia. Alas, it seems safe to say that this promise will not be kept. The current transformation is leading to the birth of an individual marked by credulity and an absence of critical thinking. We expected Gutenberg, but it's television 2.0 that is being established.

In a classic of contemporary sociology, Bowling Alone (1995), the American sociologist Robert Putnam showed that the immense surge of individualism that seized Western societies after World War II owed a great deal to television. The considerable amount of time spent watching a television screen (4 hours and 50 minutes a day on average!) has led us to neglect friends, family, and associative life - what is called an individual's 'social capital'. Television has swept across all communities, from bowling clubs to PTAs, that used to provide the cement holding American social life together.

The magnificent work of Michel Desmurget, La Fabrique du crétin digital ('The digital cretin factory'), analyses from this point of view the malfunctions produced by the current revolution. The figures provided make one's head spin. From the age of 2, children spend almost 3 hours a day in front of their screens. Between 8 and 12, the time spent in front of tablets and laptops rises to 4 hours and 45 minutes a day, on average. From 13 to 18, it's 6 hours and 45 minutes a day. Thus, we reach a situation in which adolescents spend 40 per cent of their waking life in front of a screen! The psychic and affective life of these young people is punctuated by waves of sullenness and euphoria, shaped by addictive practices like online sexuality and manifested in deleterious effects on their nourishment and frequent risks of obesity. As analysed by Bruno Patino in La Civilisation du poisson rouge1 or by Gérald Bronner in Apocalypse cognitive,2 the capacity for attention among adolescents is severely damaged by channel hopping, impulsiveness, and impatience. Reading a book, which presupposes that the author is given time to introduce his characters or pursue a line of argument, is constantly interrupted by obsessive checking of one's mobile phone, which makes it almost impossible to remain focused on anything at all.

Marshall McLuhan, the high priest of this domain, said: 'The medium is the message.' The media are their own content, we look at television and not any particular film. In the same way, we don't know what we're looking at on our mobiles: 'scrolling', the indefinite unfolding of screens, sweeps us along in a totally addictive way. We are caught up by the scrolling itself, whether it's a sequence in which a child cries while watching The Lion King, or an adult watching news about the war in Ukraine.

The compulsive consultation of our mobile phones is labelled with a term that is now ubiquitous: FOMO ('fear of missing out'), which expresses the excruciating worry that we might miss something, whether it's a news item, gossip, or an opportunity. Without waiting for the impending synthesis of silicon and biology, the iPhone is already fabricating a genuine fusion of the human and the machine. The tactile interface creates a relational connection between the two, like the hard drugs that take possession of the brain and subject it to the need for their consumption. A German study cited by Gérald Bronner has shown that a telephone's ring lit up exactly the same area of the brain as did saying a person's first name!3 Even when the telephone is turned off but remains within view, the need to turn it on, to feel it in one's hands, is irresistible, like the injection that the heroin addict's brain commands him to give himself.

Adolescents' ability to attend to the real world has reached a historic low. According to a study cited by Patino, attention spans diminished by one-third between 2008 and 2015, from 12 seconds to 8 seconds! Desmurget also mentions Canadians (who are nonetheless ranked very high in traditional ratings of well-being and open-mindedness) as being among the primary victims of this development. Their wide-open spaces and rigorous winters have made them voracious consumers of digital culture, and this seems to have greatly reduced their attention span. The way of reasoning also changes in nature. 'Test and learn' has replaced logical explanation, as has AI itself: in the United States, students are no longer required to use cursive writing, but they must be able to use a keyboard. However, cursive writing plays a key role in the development of the brain and of motor skills. Of course, human beings have not always written, but the disappearance of written thought could have entirely unpredictable consequences for their way of reflecting.

Sean Parker, who was president of Facebook, was not afraid to admit that the firm sought nothing less than to 'exploit the vulnerability of human psychology'. What is at stake for all these social networks, from Facebook to TikTok, is winning this great 'battle for attention', no matter what the psychic consequences might be for the populations targeted. In a document entitled 'Facebook Files', a former employee of Facebook, Frances Haugen, has revealed that the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg was fully aware of the psychic troubles that it was producing. This whistle-blower, who is a graduate of Harvard and who had spent two years working for Facebook, gave the Wall Street Journal a series of compromising documents. Cited by Le Monde (28 October 2021), Haugen explained that Facebook's research had determined that content that 'polarizes, divides, or incites hatred results in greater commitment', and that the firm deliberately exploited this fact. She also showed that Facebook's managers were fully aware of the psychic disorders created by its subsidiary Instagram among adolescents less than 13 years old, and who felt ill at ease. But they targeted them anyway.4 There has been a small victory for Frances Haugen: for the moment, Facebook has suspended its Instagram facility for users under 13 years of age.

A number of impressive works show the cognitive consequences of this phenomenon. Thus, an experimental study tested the impact of a smartphone on a group that earlier did not have access to one. In less than three months, it registered a very clear decline in their ability to pay attention, and they also received lower scores on tests in arithmetic. Their 'impulsiveness' increased in almost mechanical proportion to the time spent on their smartphones. A symmetrical study conducted by a group at Stanford disactivated access to Facebook for a month. The time freed up made it possible to see one's family and friends more, but also to watch more television . Ultimately, the improvement in the well-being of the people tested was significant, to the point that, once the experiment was over, their digital consumption remained considerably lower. According to the study, one month without Facebook reduced anxiety and symptoms of depression by a quantity equivalent, in terms of well-being, to a gain of $30,000!5

As in the case of tobacco, the risk of addiction to social networks is well established. The difference is that tobacco appeared to be the enemy of a society that was putting increasing emphasis on the body and health. Conversely, digital society immerses its participants in a virtual world, as in the film Matrix, to the point that nothing enables us to distinguish the real from the simulacrum. It destroys its users' critical defences by depriving them of the distance necessary to put into perspective the emotions that it elicits. A 'digital disinhibition' similar to that produced by drugs or alcohol is at work on social networks, where people allow themselves to depart at will from the norms of ordinary social life.6 As Nathalie Heinich puts it so well, social networks stimulate competition to attract attention and 'induce people, by provocation, exaggeration, to say the unsayable, to display the unrepresentable. This extremist one-upmanship elicits powerful emotional responses that are immediately expressed by "likes" or "retweets" and automatically amplified by technology, without mediation, distancing, or hesitation.'

In the words of psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, 'overexposed intimacy threatens the construction of a self' through the constant desire to display oneself advantageously, in a wild competition with others driven by a pathological quest for recognition. The compulsion that moves everyone to exhibit his...