Phone down, life up: Being present in a world obsessed with sharing

Adam: Sometimes it feels like we're scrolling through life more than we're living it. Welcome to the Search Bar. I'm your host, Adam Sparkes, and on today's episode, we're discussing the impact of social media on real life experiences with Kirsten Weber, professor of communication at Central Michigan University. Thanks for coming in, Kirsten. I'm kind of excited to talk about social dynamics and how they're affected by our social media personas. I thought this was going to be a really interesting conversation when I heard that we were going to have it. And one of the things that really jumped into my mind, and I'm sure you'll remember this moment too, is there's this really famous photograph and it's of this woman leaning over a rail and everybody else has a cell phone out.

Kirsten: Yeah.

Adam: Does that feel even more impactful now?

Kirsten: Yeah, I mean, I certainly have seen the growth of it. I mean, given our ages, I remember when I didn't have a cell phone growing up, and I remember in college finally getting a cell phone and then just seeing the way that cell phone use has infiltrated so much of our lives. And so yeah, I think that now when we go to concerts or when we go out to weddings or whatever it is, that folks are often on their phone as opposed to being present in that moment. So there's certainly been a big shift and there's a lot of research to back up that that's the trend that we're seeing.

Adam: I think that's really interesting. I like that you brought up mindfulness. That's a theme that keeps popping up with guests on the search bar because it feels like sometimes when we talk about mindfulness, to me it always feels like this game, this very modern game of mindfulness, which is that what did we used to do before we had to spend 10 minutes with ourselves without a phone, which is hilarious. But to me now, mindfulness is like I'm in line at Walgreens and the lady in front of me has got a full shopping cart and a lot of coupons and a checkbook. And first of all, I'm trying not to be annoyed by that because what am I going to do? It's not her fault. She's just doing what the coupons are there. She still has a checkbook. That's a decision. It's just listening to vinyl records, I guess, just in a different way, but just not picking up my phone. And I think for me, that's been an interesting exercise to put myself through because I think it's the immediate thing that we do when we're like, oh my gosh, I have to wait six minutes. And I was expecting to do something right away. But that's something that 30 years ago we would've just done. You'd have just waited in line, and I think you probably would've been less likely to be annoyed too. Right. Do you think that attention spans are affected by this?

Kirsten: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of research that shows that attention spans are affected. And I mean, I think people just are less likely to want to engage with each other because we don't have to do that as much. Whereas before, that's just what we did. I mean, if you think about the way that our world is shifting in terms of technology, it's moving us away from social interaction. Think about the checkout line. So you're behind the lady with the check, but nearly every store now has self-checkout. And so we're almost training ourselves to interact a little bit less, which is a whole-

Adam: Not Walgreens on mission. Okay, no self-checkout there. You're waiting for your grandmother with her checkbooks.

Kirsten: But here's the thing, I mean, you're absolutely right. So we aren't being placed in positions where we necessarily have to wait. And so it's sort of reinforcing that we shouldn't be waiting, and so we're more likely to get on our cell phone, and then we have these hits of dopamine. And so it's-

Adam: The substitute social interaction comes in there. You can connect with six people when you're waiting in line there versus talking to the person behind you or the little old lady who's getting 17 boxes of Metamucil or whatever it is because they are on coupon. I'm picking on all of the ladies who are like my grandmother who shop here. But I think that that's sort of that thing that you were saying. I could be having a social interaction. I could be doing a thing, but I'm here and there's getting maybe a specialized social interaction because maybe it's the person that I'm getting similar hobbies or similar political beliefs as me. So I'm feeling connected with these people, but am I really, right? Is that a thing that we're tricking ourselves into too? I wonder where you start to feel like people or their lives in a genuine way. And I think if we really think about it, most of us know better. Your Instagram feed is not you, right?

Kirsten: Yeah. I mean, the way that social media is set up is we're getting a lot of those dopamine hits because of how frequently we're getting stimulating information into our brains. I think in terms of the quality of those relationships is what you're getting at. And there's a lot of research that would say that those are not high quality relationships and that we do need high quality relationships to really be healthy. I mean, there's a couple of different studies. One would suggest that one of the ways that we use social relationships that are most beneficial to us that bring us most health and wellbeing is that can we rely on that person during a difficult time? And so if you think about that as being a standard for, is this a quality relationship or not a quality relationship, probably if you go to Instagram and are like, Hey, my car broke down and I need a ride to work, and can somebody help me get my kid after school? That's what I need. You're not going to get that from Instagram. That's just not going to happen. And so no, those aren't really high quality relationships. They're not going to help you overcome a difficult experience that you're having. Whereas if you have close friends, people here that are helping you with the podcast, those individuals, you can call up and say like, Hey, help me out. So I, I guess a way of thinking about if those relationships are really helping you, it's not that they're always bad for you, it's just that you can't really rely on them. And so when push comes to shove, that's not going to help you, and that's a litmus test for your wellbeing as it relates to having these relationships. I think another thing is there's a lot of research that shows that if you're just scrolling through that, that is more detrimental to your wellbeing than if you are creating some type of content. So if you are somebody who is going on there and commenting on people's posts and, oh, I really like this vacation photo and oh, here's a vacation photo that I took, doing something like that is healthier for you than if you're just scrolling. So if you're standing in line and your option is scrolling or talking to the lady who's buying a lot of Metamucil, you're going to get a lot more out of just having a chat with her and be like, why do you have 19 boxes of this? Tell me more about your life story than if you just go on there and you're looking at some of these faux representations of people's lives.

Adam: Yeah, maybe you'll find someone you relate to that you didn't think you would, right? I have chronic illness, we won't get into it, but especially when I was encountered it for the first time, I was very young and there was a celebrity that had also encountered the same thing, and I don't know this person. And watching them go through it and be somebody who is famous for writing and documenting things talk about it was really helpful. So I wouldn't want to discount something like that because it was interesting to see someone who was getting a lot of public feedback go through a similar situation to me, that was pretty scary and horrifying and have them share that experience. Again, is it the same thing as getting it in person? No, but I was also in a situation where there wasn't a lot of people around me where I could go, Hey, remember when this thing happened? Because I was on a little bit of an island at the time. So I guess when we say all this, I want to say, yeah, there's still a positive thing there, but at some point, to your point, no matter how endeared I became to that person's online persona, there are of no direct input to me. So even if I'm having a problem in that area of my life where I've got a little bit of a unique situation, I'm probably still better off talking to my wife versus I'm going to go back to that profile and you know what I mean?

Kirsten: I think yes and, can I add to that?

Adam: Yeah!

Kirsten: So you're sort of talking about what we term in the field, inner subjectivity, so you have a subjective experience that's sort of unique to you and experiencing whatever this ailment is. And so one of the reasons why connecting with that and sort of faux connecting with that celebrity was that you probably felt really validated in your experience by seeing what that person did. And so we call that inner subjectivity, being able to understand the subjective experience to someone else. And that's something that's really key to a lot of unique experiences and why it's so beneficial that we can reach out across time and space to other people who have these experiences that we're having that are pretty unique because it validates our experience. It feels like empathy. They really understand. And so even though maybe you have a really, really good friend who can come and help you out when you're having a hard day or whatever, however your day is impacted by this ailment, there's something about knowing that somebody else truly understands. They feel this thing that matters for us as humans. And so like I said before, when I was doing this research on breast cancer patients, and I've done this type of research in a number of other areas with other chronic diseases, or sorry, other rare diseases, some of them being chronic, that having that inner subjective support from somebody, it really does make a difference. So I think you're right in what you said in that it makes so much sense to me as a scholar that you felt connected to this person and that made a difference for you, and that you recognize that probably your spouse, your wife, that she probably can offer support in a really different way than some sort of nebulous celebrity that's out there. So they both make a difference.

Adam: Yeah, I only said it because I just felt like when we talk about these things, I think where there's a little bit of a cautionary tone, which is-it's earned, right? Again, because I think if everyone's honest with themselves, they know that sometimes their relationship with their social media platforms probably isn't the healthiest, but it's also like there's a, nebulous is a good word, it's a little bit nebulous. There is a gray area that we're trying to operate here where we're going to hopefully feel better, do better. In family dynamics when it comes to these things. What's the advice you have for managing teenagers with this? Because I imagine that there are even just younger people, us as parents talking about this, have a very different feeling about what our relationship with their phone should be versus probably what our kids do. And I imagine that there's a big gap there generationally with how it's viewed positively and negatively, what the discipline level is for putting a phone down.

Kirsten: Yeah, I think it's really complex. I don't think a really easy answer for that. I mean, some of the research shows things like young girls in particular experience a lot of bullying through text and things like that during the middle school years. And so you should wait until at least high school. There's some sort of similar trends with boys and gaming and those types of things and viewing sexual content. And so there's sort of this general recommendation that waiting until high school makes a lot of sense. But I think if you want to have a broader more in depth conversation, you have to think about things like right now, a lot of kids, that is how they connect with each other. And so if they don't have a phone to be able to connect to each other or they don't have of some mediated form to connect to each other, most people don't have landlines anymore. And so one of the things that we did is instead of having a landline and instead of giving our kids cell phones when they were pretty young, is we just had a cell phone that sat on the kitchen counter and it was just plugged into the wall there, and the kids couldn't really bring it anywhere. But if they needed to or wanted to call grandma or call whoever, they could do that because important that they learn how to have those conversations. If you've talked with a pretty young kid on a cell phone, they don't know how to have the conversation. They sort of pick up the conversation partway through it. And so learning the basic like, hello, this is so-and-so, how are you? Okay, they need to learn that. And so giving them some early exposure can be really, really helpful. And that's what we got when we had landlines. Then there's somebody sort of telling you like, oh, we don't do this. We don't do this.

Adam: And the phone rang in the house all the time.

Kirsten: Yeah, yeah, right.

Adam: At some age you were like, okay.

Kirsten: And so part of it is just learning those rules. So one of my sons the other day, he sent out a text message again using this phone, he sent out a text message to everybody that he knows, and he introduced everybody on the text message to everybody else. And then of course, everybody freaked out because this is 30 people, and it was my mom and his friend from school and somebody from practice. And they were like, who are these people? And why do they all? So I think part of this is we have to teach them the etiquette of phones, but we have to do it in sort of a safe way, and we have to let them learn how to socialize with each other because if they don't have access to something that allows them to socialize, then they're just going to be isolated in their rooms and we don't really want that. But then there's other things like how do we have conversations with them about things that are sort of difficult, like sexting? We have to have those conversations with them. And so this is where kind of going back to that mindfulness conversation maybe matters because you can have that same conversation with your kid and say, how did this feel? Did you like this? Did you not like this? Here's the consequence of doing this type of thing. What do you think about that? My other son, so he's in high school and he has his own cell phone right now, and when he first got that, the conversations that we had pretty frequently were like, I see that you're using it in this way. How is it making you feel to use it in that way? Have you tried to do this thing? I've noticed that you've done this. And so then he starts to internalize the same dialogue that we should be having with ourselves about does this feel good? If I'm doing this, then I'm not doing this with my friends, or I'm not doing this to sort of, I don’t know, play music or improve myself or whatever it might be. And then having conversations too about what are different types of phone activities that you can engage in. Not all exactly the same. Some of it is, I'm listening to music on Pandora. Is that the same as if I'm just scrolling through social media?

Adam: I would think not.

Kirsten: And it's not, right. They're doing different things. They're stimulating your brain in different ways. And so having those conversations with them and not just saying, you absolutely can't do this, but get them to start to ask the questions that you're asking, the ones that you're sort of afraid to ask of them, just ask them those questions. And then they start to have that dialogue in their mind. And so then they start to make different decisions. I mean, this is a, I don't want to tell parents exactly what to do. This is something that I struggle with as a parent because there's a lot of opportunities out there to put programming on the phone so that you just turn it off or turn it on, and it's like, oh, should we use this? Should we not use this? And I think my answer is yes and no. If you don't let kids or anybody make mistakes, they can't really learn from it. And so part of letting your kid learn about social media right now or learning about playing games on their phone might be that they need to make a couple mistakes. But then you also have to keep in mind kids' brains are undeveloped. They don't have the self-control that a 30 or 40 or 50 or an 80-year-old is going to have. And so sometimes you need to have some guardrails up to help them. Just like there's guardrails up around driving. We found that kids get distracted when they're driving. And so there's more laws now that say, you can only drive alone, or you can only drive with a family member. You can't drive with 10 of your friends. And so sometimes providing some of those guardrails can be really helpful just because they don't have the same level of impulse control or they don't have the same level of decision-making that somebody a little bit older might have. So it's a complex thing and you just kind of want to think through.

Adam: Yeah, self-awareness comes later in life. I mean, it's just the reality of it.

Kirsten: We're all working on it.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, it's gradual, but it comes eventually. Yeah. When you're saying you're talking about more having guardrails than just maybe these things. Yes. No, yes. No, I think asking your kids why they use things the way they are, what the rules are to them. What are the perceived rules within your friend group or within your school in terms of how you're interacting with each other. Because I think it's important to hear your kids where they're at with that, because it's very easy to just apply the rules that you had growing up. Why don't you do this? Because there are times when I find the teenagers to be frustrating in the way they want to engage with each other. Because I’m like, well, I would've just done this. Well, I didn't live under the same rules or circumstances that you did either, so it's really not fair for me to expect you to approach a social problem or a social situation the same way that I did, because I did have phone with a really long cord in my house. I did go to my friend's house and scream outside at their window to get them to come out. It was just,

Kirsten: That's what we did, yeah

Adam: And it's cute, the nostalgia of that. It's fun for anyone who's over 36, over 37 maybe to hear that. But there's not a version of that that exists in most neighborhoods anymore. So why should I actually be frustrated with my kid when their first means of interacting with their friends is Snapchat? It's like, well, who sent me this? Or how am I supposed to get ahold of so-and-so? Oh, I sent it to the group Snap and only so-and-so replied. And I'm just like, but can't you text them directly? No one uses text. I have an exchange student right now. It's all WhatsApp with them. And it's, it's a very different experience too, to hear them say these things and be like, I'm going to handle it all here before I ever handle it in person or before I make a phone call.

Adam: One thing that happens inside of these family groups, certainly happens in my family sometimes, but I think just in social circles in general is people being with other people but still choosing the phone when they're with that person who might be that real life interaction. How do we manage that? Is that something that's happening everywhere? I assume it is, but

Kirsten: Yeah. I mean, if you go, I think we talked earlier, I mentioned concerts. You go to concerts. If you go to a political rally, that's something that's timely right now. You'll see everybody sort of has their phone upright, but it also happens in interpersonal interactions. So if people are going out to dinner, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, somebody has their phone outright or if you're even at home. I mean, this happens with parents and kids and they find that actually parents are doing this quite a bit and it's impacting the wellbeing of the kids because then the kids aren't getting the social interaction that they need to be able to just be socialized into being a human. But just more generally, they're feeling alone because their parents aren't responding to them. So it's certainly something that we see in families, and it's pretty broad based what we're seeing, and it's problematic. I mean, we need to start thinking about that. One of the, I guess, findings that I like to talk about sometimes is that this matters a lot for having high quality exchanges with people. So there's two instances, I guess two circumstances that exacerbate this in some ways. One, if you're having an important conversation with somebody, so let's say you want to talk with your spouse because you're feeling upset about something if you have your phone out during that conversation, it just makes it worse. People anticipate that there's going to be an interruption. Sometimes there is a real interruption. People feel just by having that phone out that you're going to get ignored or something like that in some way. So if you're having a meaningful conversation, you just got to put the technology away. The other thing is, and I sort of mentioned this, but just having it out in general makes conversations worse. And so you really don't want to have them out for the important conversations, but just having it out, people automatically feel a little less seen and a little less heard. And so you just need to be conscientious of that. Is that the way that you want people to be feeling? Right? You probably don't want people to be feeling that way. And so just putting the phone away is going to automatically make you appear to be a better communicator, a better, more supportive friend, all of those things. So you really, I mean, just having it out is, I mean, it's challenging for relationships

Adam: And what value is it really adding? Usually it's notifications of, I don’t know, Birkenstocks trying to sell me some new shoes. Can't not look at that one when it pops up on my Gmail. I mean, when I am guilty of doing that, I find that those are often the things that I am just swiping to clear off my phone. And then why?

Kirsten: I mean, can I piggyback off of that a little bit?

Adam: Yeah, please.

Kirsten: I mean, I sort of geek out on communication and the way that the brain works. I mean, if you just think about visual stimulus, your brain only has enough capacity for visual stimulus. And so I mean, there's research that shows this. You can't really multitask. I mean, not just you, none of us can really multitask very well, and it's just the way that the brain works in terms of processing information. So if you are looking at your phone, your brain is taking in the visual stimulus there, and I can't take in the visual stimulus of your face too. And so you have to choose one or the other. And it's the same thing with auditory stimulus too. You either get to listen to the music or you get to listen to the ad, or you get to listen to the person. So in addition to it just being sort of rude and people feeling slighted, your brain can't do that. And so when you go to recall that conversation, you're not going to be able to recall it as well because half of the audio stimulus that you got in your brain is going to be that advertisement, and half of it is going to be the thing that the person was saying to you. And I sort of did this experiment in class. You were talking about anecdotal things. So sometimes when I teach listening skills, like communication and listening skills, active listening skills, I make my students have a conversation and I play music at the same time, and this conversation's sort of structured and I have this music, and then I have them try to come back and report, what was it that you talked about? And more times than not, their conversation gets impacted by the song that is being played. And so they'll integrate words from the song into that, and that's because their brain can't both pick up what's in the conversation and what's in the song separately. It has to sort of integrate it. So the same thing is going to be happening to you when you're talking with somebody trying to look at them or when you're trying to listen to them. So yeah, the brain just can't do both at once. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why maybe putting down the phone can benefit you can benefit the way the other person is feeling, can benefit the outcome of the interaction.

Adam: You have to pick between real life and digital life in that moment. And yeah, I can't do two things at once at all. It's funny that you mentioned that because that was the thing that I was thinking about is I've been watching, even watching a football game and then trying to check my fantasy football at the same time. I'm like, I don't know what's happening right now. I cannot do both at once. And I imagine we probably trick ourselves into thinking that these two things can kind of coexist and really have to be in one space at a time.

Kirsten: I mean, for students, this is classic. I like to think I'm an okay instructor, but I get students in my class sometimes, maybe more than sometimes they're scrolling through their phone and they think that they're able to pay attention and not, but there's tons and tons of research. It's like, no, you just can't recall stuff. If you're on your phone in class and you're trying to listen to the instructor, it just doesn't work. Your brain doesn't have the capacity to do that. So

Adam: Schedule some time to put that phone down.

Kirsten: Yeah, exactly. Schedule some time to put it down.

Adam: Well, thanks for coming in, Kirsten

Kirsten: Yeah, thanks.

Adam: It was really good to talk to you. I think it was a great conversation and I look forward to doing it again sometime.

Kirsten: Yeah, it'll be awesome. Thank you.

Adam: Thanks for stopping by The Search Bar. Make sure that you like and subscribe so that you don't have to search for the next episode.