After Trump won the USA presidential election, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to allow my 2025 articles become dominated by his political journey. However, he unleashes so much global negativity on a daily basis, that’s its difficult to navigate from the political chaos he is causing internally and externally: Blaming the Washington plane crash on diversity hiring policies, pulling out of the WHO, withdrawing financial support from thousands of American-sponsored aid organisations, blaming Ukraine for the war and labelling Zelensky a dictator, offering/threatening to buy Greenland, suggesting Gaza be redeveloped as a sort of massive holiday resort for Americans and Israelis, pardoning the January 6 Capital Hill rioters. You could write a book on each. But instead of blaming it all on Trump, I think I’m going to surprise you all and blame everything on, well, us.
So, why are people in their droves supporting and celebrating the Musk’s, the Putin’s, the Trump’s, the Marine la Pen’s of this world: Could the common denominator in this be our unadulterated obsession with mobile phones? It’s not so much the phone itself, but how your data is amassed from all your usage – on social media platforms, shopping platforms, what and how you read. This in turn, is engineered by the big corporations and used by manipulative leaders and organisations into shaping the new world around us, which is facilitating a new social order
Three things have fixed my attention on this issue. Firstly, the latest OECD report on western literary levels. [Just to be clear the OECD is defined as The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It conducts research and independent analysis internationally on a range of policy areas from those countries]. The second was from a Guardian article that reported on the Moldovan general election, and the third is from a chilling but must-read book called the ‘Anxious Generation’ by social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt. What do all these disparate sources have in common? A worrying trend that is facilitating all those despots – technology, social media and AI.
Before I am burned at the stake for an attack on technology – let me declare it is a wonder of our evolution. I use the word evolution deliberately because, as humans we have progressed from cave dwellers, to humans who have produced great civilisations over time – six million years give or take! Our technological evolution is propelling our ‘progress’ so quickly, that we have hyper-jumped ‘evolution’ and are entering into areas where we may not know their impact on humanity because we are going too quickly.
Let’s begin with a shocking statistic from the OECD report. Only nine per cent of Irish adults are deemed to have a high level of literacy, which means that these adults can ‘comprehend and evaluate long, dense texts across several pages, grasp complex or hidden meaning’. We are not talking about highbrow stuff here. The key words are, ‘comprehending’, ‘dense’, [detail] ,‘several pages’. Worryingly this is far below the Nordic countries with 24 per cent and even Britain at 14 per cent, all low in their own right. The reason why this is such a worry, is that humans are losing an ability to disentangle information and, more importantly, are less willing to engage in an article that occupies them beyond a soundbite, catchy message or sensational and short piece of writing. This has allowed the gradual creep of people like Trump, Vance, Modi (India’s PM), and so on to get away with what they are saying/writing because populations no longer have an interest, or ability to go deep into an argument. It’s been a fundamental part of disinformation and fake information that seems to be accepted at face value, without reflection. People are accepting simple soundbites because we are losing the skills to unravel more profound debate.
Jonathan Haidt has been tracking data about the effects of mobile phones on children and teens, [who have turned into adults] since the advent of social media, coinciding with the development of the iPhone and its equivalent since 2010. The result of his work is a brilliant piece of research, ‘The Anxious Generation’. Our obsession with phones and in particular social media has had a devastating impact on a generation of people, leading in many ways to what has been borne out by the OECD report. The premise of Haidt’s argument is that phones and social media have created anxiety in people because social media companies try to ‘maximise engagement by using psychological tricks to keep people clicking and hooked’. That is bad enough for an adult but in the teen years the brain has been rewired during a very vulnerable stage in life, at a time when their frontal cortex, which is important for self-control, has not yet been developed. Aligned with people’s lessening ability to deal with more complex articles or information, people’s attention span has been diminished hugely too. Haidt tells us what many of us already know – the addiction problems. Social media hooks its audience with every type of notification – sent, delivered, liked, tagged, messages and so on. TikTok, Instagram, Snap Chat, hoover up huge amounts of hours on vacuous visuals that instead of energising people, drain them. The more powerful AI is becoming, the more sophisticated the algorithms have become to keep you on your phone and away from everything else.
Haidt is a thorough researcher. He has based his findings on numerous studies over decades, mainly in USA, UK, Canada and Australia – none of those a million miles culturally different to Ireland. What he found in one study is that young people get 192 notifications a day, or approximately one very five minutes. That means that all day long, they are being pulled from a task/job/moment of focus. This is part of the reason why, as adults, people can no longer focus on long and dense texts, when they have been shaped by short and snappy messaging and soundbites, as well as twenty second videos and endless scrolling, during their youth.
The book contains numerous behavioural charts, which all show a high rise in a range of conditions since the advent of the smartphone and social media. On every metric, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, sleep deprivation, feeling like a failure and feeling lonely all are exploding, and even more so for girls it appears.
And so to Moldova. Maia Sandu is the current leader of Moldova, a country of 2.4 million. It’s a former soviet satellite state and Putin wishes for it to be under Russia’s sphere of influence, as well as Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, to name but a few. However, Ms Sandu has won two consecutive presidential elections on the platform of EU integration, the rule of law, transparency and anti-corruption, the antithesis of what Putin stands for. Ilan Shor, a Putin-supporting oligarch, ran a vote-buying campaign. How does that work? Targeted people (via algorithms, AI, phones), were asked to open a bank account where money could be sent to them. The next step was to download a chatbot on a messaging app called ‘Telegram’, where they would receive information on how to vote, where to protest against Sandu or go to pro-Russian rallies. Then they would be paid. Ten per cent of the voting population were found, after an investigation, to be part of this covert scheme. This is no longer a thing of science fiction in a world where people are less and less interrogating data, are accepting simple and often misleading messaging, and are believing disinformation because we are losing our capacity to analyse it. It is here and its tentacles are reaching further into our society.
Is it too late to combat it? Not according to Haidt. If we care about children and our future in a world that will be eventually run by these same children, there are steps one must take. It begins with collective actions where groups of parents agree to a no phone policy for children before twelve. No social media before sixteen. Phone-free schools. And what some of you might find curious – more unsupervised play and child independence, to allow children to learn pitfalls and make independent choices away from well-meaning but increasingly suffocating parents. Learning from peers, reading body language, working out how to play in groups are all the very things children no longer do, as they are glued to phones and blanketed by parents. I would add, that phone time could be replaced with more literature, articles, puzzles and thinking games, so that we will have a generation, who can work things out for themselves, and combat the dangers of AI and social media, which has, in many ways, dulled our critical thinking when our choices are made simpler by artificial thinking. It won’t be easy. After his meeting with Trump in DC, Keir Starmer announced their joint approach to dealing with AI. Read what you may into it. He said, “Instead of over-regulating these new technologies, we’re seizing the opportunities they offer.” Surely we need more regulation, not less? Over to you…
