'We're wildly unhealthy slaves to the algorithm'

It's not just young people who are dangerously addicted to their smartphones, it’s adults too. In fact, we're just mindless automatons where our devices are concerned, says Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, associate professor at University College London, who specialises in digital literacy and social media.

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“Future generations will look back on our generation as wildly unhealthy tech slaves, the same way we look back at people smoking in hospital delivery rooms a few decades ago,” she says.

“The attention economy is holding our eyeballs — and our children’s eyeballs - at any cost, and this can prioritise hate, harm and disinformation because they are more attention-grabbing. That's what advertisers are paying for. It's an unethical financial structure.”

Thankfully Dr Regehr's written a new book, Smartphone Nation, to help us push back against algorithms hellbent on hijacking our attention spans and imposing unpleasant and inaccurate content on us.

CAMPAIGNING

Dr Regehr is part of a growing community campaigning for a life free from social media's death-grip, which includes Jonathan Haidt, the bestselling author of The Anxious Generation, and the grassroots movement Smartphone Free Childhood, which is persuading parents around the UK to delay giving their children devices for as long as possible.

Dr Regehr warns that social media is fundamentally changing humanity. “Social media has changed the way we think. It has changed the way we access and process information. It’s worth us all asking how much time we spent on our phones today,” she says.