Washington Post reporter Annie Gowen stood before an audience in Missoula last week and described what it’s like to be an addict in need of help.
Unfortunately I can relate, as I’m sure many of you will, too.
The audience gasped when a screenshot of Gowen’s daily iPhone usage appeared on an overhead screen: 12 hours and 50 minutes. Five percent lower, at least, from the previous week.
“I had a dirty little secret. I was hiding an iPhone addiction that had gone in recent years from troubling to real bad,” the reporter said, potentially “ruining my life.”
Vowing to get support, Gowen always came up with excuses, until one day not long ago she put herself on a path to both limit screen time and learn “what this digital distraction is doing to our brains and our lives and our families as a whole.”
Her findings were “totally alarming.”
It so happens Gowen and I walked news beats at the same time in the nation’s capital, when as with other industries smartphones became necessary extensions to reportorial arms. She eventually became her paper’s South Asia bureau chief and later Midwest bureau chief, based in her home state of Kansas.
Better yet, she was tapped recently as this fall’s distinguished T. Anthony Pollner Professor in residence at the University of Montana’s School of Journalism.
For the recent annual Pollner lecture, titled “America’s Attention Crisis and Its Impact on News,” Gowen asked how many people in the auditorium felt they were spending too much time on their iPhones?
“Almost everyone,” she said of the show of hands. “So I’ve come to believe that just digital distraction, and our [resulting] attention deficit, is one of the most urgent problems facing American society today.”
Contrary to popular belief, Gowen explained that the human brain is incapable of multi-tasking, it’s “not scientifically possible.”
Instead of juggling mind chores simultaneously, our brains are geared to move from a single task to another single task and if needed back again. Otherwise, one’s ability to focus is drastically reduced.
“For kids it can be huge,” said Gowen, adding: “How can I ask my [college] students to read and think deeply when I’m not doing it myself?”
She recalled a most difficult period when her “screen time skyrocketed” and “my ability to focus on anything longer than a tweet became impaired.”
Which isn’t surprising, given screen time addictions not only interfere with a person’s ability to process and retain information, they can damage brain chemistry.
“This was like the sobering thing,” recalled Gowen, quoting one expert in the field who described such retention as a “previously fundamental skill being choked off by a culture of distractions.”
That said, the resulting impact on society far outweighs an individual’s iPhone abuse.
In summarizing the words of another authority, Gowen said: “If nobody can think clearly for sustained periods of time … how can we as a society solve major problems and complex arguments?”
Then there’s this repercussion, as we’ve experienced in recent years: “A population incapable of sustained focus struggles to distinguish complicated truths from simple fantasies.”
(Which might explain the uptick in conspiracy theories. But I digress).
And instead of brains concentrating on a specific task, as another example, we subject them to juggling dozens of social media feeds in the space of minutes. Worse yet, data-tracking algorithms in smartphones are designed to keep us (and our brains) scrolling.
Even Netflix, Gowen pointed out, takes into account that its audience is scrolling through iPhones while watching its lineup of movies, series and documentaries. Thank God for subtitles, right?
The potential impact of smartphone and other computer screen addictions on young people, be it social media or gaming, is particularly worrisome. The reporter showed where teen mental health has plummeted—and suicide rates have skyrocketed—since 2012.
As a result of the distraction, Gowen observed, several Montana schools have begun limiting iPhone use in the classroom, while other phones have been configured to allow only calls and texting. Some users have even tried switching their smartphones to the black and white mode, which is “less appealing than color,” she observed.
Getting back to the lecture’s title, Gowen says digital distractions have not only created a crisis in American society, but “in tandem, the news business.”
“Super grim,” she described the journalism industry today. “The news business is in a real turbulent time right now.”
And on top of that, “news fatigue” has become a major issue in this country in recent months, due in part to a president and White House bombarding the public with one breaking news story after another.
Regardless of one’s political stripes, Gowen said, “people are exhausted by it.”
She also warned that an “AI tsunami is heading our way and it’s going to dramatically change the news industry.”
As of recent weeks, a typical online Google search that once provided links to websites now produces at the very top of our screens an “AI overview” of the subject matter.
One editor of a leading national news magazine, Gowen pointed out, recently told his staff that the publication’s website traffic from Google “will disappear over time.”
Meanwhile, she said, people increasingly “prefer watching the news instead of reading it,” with one of the more popular choices being TikTok.
And for those like me who still prefer to read their news online, Gowen continued, they “only stay in the story for 52 seconds” on average.
“Which doesn’t bode well for our cherished long form pieces, narratives, and deep investigations,” she noted.
“I had this real sad conversation with a member of the faculty of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida, Alex Mahadevan, about this recently and he painted a very dystopian picture of the future of news: a world where people passively watch videos and have their AI agents curate the news for them.
“So Alex was arguing that that’s coming sooner than we think—as soon as six to 12 months. He said that some futurists and big thinkers are even beginning to wonder, is the article dead?”
There was some positive news from the lecture: Gowen has put limits on her iPhone usage; her downtime button also schedules time away. She regularly questions the desire and need to scroll; and she’s experimenting with turning her phone off for longer periods (quite risky when you’re responding to a breaking news story, such as this past summer’s tragic flash flood at Camp Mystic in Texas).
She’s not only found her concentration has improved, she’s reading books again—“real books, not Kindle,” she said—even going to the library to check out stacks of books like she did as a little girl.
Gowen, at the same time, does acknowledge having a difficult time falling asleep without an iPhone. “Sleep is a work in progress,” she said.
She recalled a former newspaper colleague of mine, Arianna Huffington, actually gifting her friends for Christmas tiny little beds to tuck their phones into at night.
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.