Offline

Free Your Mind from Smartphone and Social Media Stress

Imran Rashid, Soren Kenner

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780857087928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Authors Imran Rashid and Soren Kenner have sparked an international debate by revealing the "mind hacks" Facebook, Apple, Google, and Instagram use to get you and your children hooked on their products. In Offline, they deliver an eye-opening research-based journey into the world of tech giants, smartphones, social engineering, and subconscious manipulation. This provocative work shows you how digital devices change individuals and communities for better and worse. Amust-read if you or your kids use smartphones or tablets and spend time browsing social networks, playing online games or even just browsing sites with news and entertainment.

Learn how to recognize 'mind hacks' and avoid the potentially disastrous side-effects of digital pollution. Unplug from the matrix. Learn digital habits that work for you.

Chapter One

A Tsunami of Technological Transformation

The Internet and its complementary technologies—particularly smartphones and tablets—have been the biggest cultural tsunami to hit the world since the steam engine brought about the industrial revolution in the mid-nineteenth century. Billions of people are now connected to each other, as well as to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of gossip, entertainment, news, music, films, TV and more. In a scant 25 years, we've gone from a world in which few had heard of emails to one in which even people living in the barest of shanties are wired in. And in the time, it probably took you to read the last paragraph, eight million emails and two million messages were opened, 300 000 posts were liked on Facebook and 100 000 Snaps, 50 000 tweets and 10 000 Instagram posts were created!

IBM estimates that 90 percent of all “information” ever created by humans, starting with the first cave paintings, has been produced within the past two years!¹ According to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, humans now create as much information every two days as they did during the entire span of time between the dawn of civilization through 2003—something like five exabytes of data every 48 hours.² And this is just the beginning.

New technologies are emerging at a frenetic pace—artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, blockchains and digital currencies will soon be added to the mix of new trends that already include online shopping, the streaming of film, TV and movies, social media, electronic banking, online dating, and much more. All of it is easily accessible by pretty much anyone from pretty much anywhere by smartphone or tablet. We are in the middle of an incredible transformation. A new age of connectedness that empowers individuals and breaks down barriers to make life easier, richer and fuller of possibility than ever before.

The speed with which we engage in this transformation is simply staggering: “By 2020, the number of smartphones, tablets and PCs in use will reach about 7.3 billion units,” according to Peter Middleton, research director at Gartner.³ What's really mind-blowing is that so few people seem surprised to learn that, practically in the blink of an eye, seemingly every man, woman and child on the planet will possess perhaps the most disruptive technology ever created in the form of a smartphone or a tablet.

Reproduced with permission. Redrawn from Ericsson Mobility Report June 2018.⁴

Of course, the word “phone” is a misnomer when joined with the word “smart,” because these devices are being used less and less as phones and more and more as hand-held computers. The graph from Ericsson on page 18 illustrates the staggering surge in data access through smartphones over a five-year period beginning in 2012.

Imperceptible Change

While the move toward digital connectivity may be the most massive tectonic shift in human history, most of us are scarcely aware of how deeply it is affecting us at the biological and psychological level. You've probably heard the story of how a frog immersed in cold water that is heated up gradually will allow itself to be boiled alive rather than jump out of the pot. That's because the change in temperature occurs too slowly for the frog's primitive nervous system to notice. You might say that the same is happening to our brains, individually and collectively, and the true impact of digital interaction on our lives—despite being overwhelming—is going largely unnoticed.

Today, information is always at your fingertips: you can now find anything from the operating hours of your local cafe to a list of the Best Horror Movies of 1982 in a matter of seconds. On YouTube you can listen to just about any song ever recorded. You can have your extra-hot soy chai latte waiting for you at the counter at Starbucks when you arrive, thanks to the many apps that are transforming the service industry (and many other industries as well). But this ability to project our wishes across the time–space continuum through digital technology comes with a price, and it's one that we are only now beginning to understand.

Think about the energy that just a visit to your favorite coffee shop demands of your nervous system. The number of choices is astonishing and choosing requires far more energy than you might realize. You might think that ordering coffee with an app is pretty cushy compared to being a hunter-gatherer who, whilst out in the forest, finds himself preyed upon by a tiger. One could argue quite handily, however, that the occasional dose of primal jeopardy (being chased by a tiger) has a way of keeping humans grounded or more focused. The importance of being able to become fully immersed in activities that require your full attention and are highly purpose-filled (such as hunting) is something we will return to in later chapters.

What is almost as amazing as all this new technology is how quickly we've come to take connectivity for granted. And yet, the technology we have now will no doubt seem laughably primitive in a few more years, when it's entirely possible that smartphones will be replaced by intelligent glasses or even devices embedded under your skin, making a search for information as simple as thinking about it. As a matter of fact many researchers are already working on direct brain-to-internet connectivity⁵ and the first practical applications have already been developed: prosthetics for lost arms or legs that operate by the power of thought! At the World Government Summit in 2017,⁶ Tesla and Space-X founder Elon Musk said:

Humans must become cyborgs if they are to stay relevant in a future dominated by artificial intelligence … There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot can't do better. If humans want to continue to add value to the economy, they must augment their capabilities through a merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence. If we fail to do this, we'll risk becoming “house cats” to artificial intelligence.

A controversial viewpoint, but still an indication of how uncertain the future is and the level of impact some think technology will have on it. The transformation is already well underway, and the road ahead shows no sign of slowing growth—quite the reverse in fact. The near-exponential growth we have witnessed with the advent of the Internet seems set to continue for quite some time to come.

Because Your Eyeballs Are Worth It

Why would anybody want to brain-hack nice people like us? You may not be entirely surprised to learn that doing so is BIG BUSINESS. So, before we get to the “how” they do it, let's pause to consider who is doing this to us and why.

When you pick up a smartphone or tablet and interact with the web, you're not just connecting to a ubiquitous and rapidly growing layer of information: you are tapping into an infrastructure designed and managed by a new breed of behemoths. Although these companies are usually only ten or twenty years old, many have revenues t...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction: Offline
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• EPILOGUE
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT