Humanity's relationship to technology has been a burning existential issue ever since the invention of machinery. The typewriter was once excoriated by social observers for replacing the human element of handwriting with that of soulless machine communication. Doubts about technology grew as machinery evolved into automation, and automation into digitization. In 2020 the question of our relationship to technology remains as relevant as ever, and as unanswered as ever.
But there are always thinkers wrestling with it. Dr. Anthony Silard is an expert in the field of digital technology's relationship to humans. He holds a Ph.D. in leadership from IESE Business School, and a Master’s in Public Policy focused on leadership from Harvard University. He has received two awards from Harvard—the Robert F. Kennedy Public Service Award and the Manuel Carballo Memorial Award. He was named a Visionary of the Year by the public-service television show The Visionaries, and was featured at the Presidential Summit for America’s Future and America’s Promise.
Dr. Silard has utilized his expertise to coach others on how to find balance with digital technology, and to negotiate the gap between what it promises and what it actually does. Among his many clients have been senior executives of Fortune 500 companies, political leaders, G-20 cabinet ministers, and thousands of other people scattered among 40 countries. He also has brought many of his insights together in a timely book entitled Screened In: The Art of Living Free in the Digital Age, and will be hosting a ten-part course on GrantStation designed to help nonprofit heads navigate the turbulent straits of leadership in the digital age.
“Our phones and other devices are like wolves in sheep's clothing.”
When Dr. Silard and I chat, it's via a Zoom session that spans everything from his time living in Africa to musings about Victor Frankl's 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning. Since technological fears have long nagged humanity, I'm tempted to think critiques of online life are the latest example of people decrying the typewriter. But Dr. Silard points out the uniqueness of our current dilemma. “Our phones and other devices are like wolves in sheep's clothing. They stealthily weave their way into our lives without us realizing how dependent we're becoming on them.”
The point is well taken. Typewriters, radio, television, and other technological advances were largely optional. But the Internet is, for practical purposes, impossible to reject. That makes the devices we use to access it survival tools. Statistics quantifying their pervasiveness can be surprising. Just one example: on average, people who own smartphones interact with them more than 150 times per day. The main purpose of the 275 million smartphones in usage in the U.S. is to provide connections to friends, work, and events. Yet consider this counterintuitive statistic: a 2020 survey showed that 61% of Americans consider themselves lonely.
“Social connection is a buffer against loneliness, depression, anxiety, and trauma”
“Social connection is a buffer against loneliness, depression, anxiety, and trauma,” Dr. Silard explains. “What exacerbates those even more are feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and disillusionment. That's really the constellation of some of the most toxic negative emotions. Social connection is the number one remedy for all of that. But when we go online seeking social connection, instead what we end up with is social information.” This social information consists of factoids about people's lives that we receive without the accompanying human interaction we're evolutionarily wired to crave.
Dr. Silard notes that this social information can have negative emotional consequences.
“You go on social media and you see someone in high school you didn't even talk to, and you see a photo of the one moment in their weeklong vacation where everyone is smiling, and you go, Why doesn't my family smile like that? How come we're not connected like that family? And then you feel worse about yourself. But on the other hand, you've got people suffering through situations they don't feel they can share on social media. So it's this collective game of self-presentation, meticulously curating our profiles. And that's why the number one recorded emotion of Facebook users is envy.”
Adding to these issues is the fact that we all have access to the content of countless people outside our circles of social media friends. These bits of social information from people we've never met often pile on more stress, making for a 24-hour cocktail of infinite interconnectivity and heightened anxiety. “There's a lot of research, including by Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner,” Dr. Silard says, “showing that when you keep yourself at a high level of anxiety your immunological system kind of overfires, and it's easier to have an immunological breakdown. We're just not meant as human beings to be coiled springs ready to release at any moment.”
Nonprofit workers in particular are vulnerable to this type of stress.
“I do a lot of research about secondary trauma in organizations, especially nonprofits. I'm leading the largest national study in the U.S. right now on secondary trauma in police departments. But whether it's nonprofits or police departments, it's the same kind of dynamic. Whenever a person is experiencing primary or personal trauma, any life-threatening situation—think: illness, natural disaster, crime, poverty, racism, rape, violence—anything that can be threatening to their lives, they experience primary trauma. When a second person has an extended interaction with that person they mimic the effects that the initial trauma has on its host. Think secondhand smoke. They can contract that trauma. They can receive it. They start to also experience stress, burnout, disillusionment with society, difficulty with intimacy, trouble trusting others.”
Even within office settings, contact with others has become more superficial and more stress inducing.
Even within office settings, contact with others has become more superficial and more stress inducing. At work, constant connectivity has increased the needless replication of banal data. A recent Forbes study revealed that the average office worker spends 2.5 hours per day reading and responding to an average of 200 emails, of which approximately 144 are CCs and BCCs irrelevant to their job. And yet, even though all this digital waste is known by workers to be waiting in their inboxes, for many the very idea of unopened emails piling up creates anxiety.
“Research by Melissa Mazmanian of UC Irvine shows that in companies, it's those who are the least secure about their jobs that check their email the most,” Dr. Silard notes. “They feel like if they're going to be the first promoted and be the go-to person that they have to be available 24/7. And what I fear for these people is, by the time they get to that higher status place they want to be at their work, that they've lost so much of their lives. We've created this culture where constant connectivity has become the norm.”
Some companies have reduced the amount of email they send and have seen increased productivity as a result. It's a solution Dr. Silard endorses in his book Screened In, and one which could be particularly welcome for nonprofit workers who tend to already experience secondary trauma. Not taking time off, not taking breaks during the day, taking on too many tasks, working during what should be leisure and reflection time, and accepting exhaustion as part of the job, are all behaviors that can lead to worker burnout. But there are useful coping strategies for these issues and the stress they bring.
Dr. Silard gives an example. “One challenge I have is being able to regulate my laptop during the workday. What I try to do is keep a 2:1 ratio. If I do an hour on the screen, then I do half an hour off the screen. It means, you know, I've got a printer here and I need to revise this. I'll print it out and do it on paper. It helps a lot. I can discern the difference from when I don't do that. It keeps me engaged. There are three traditional types of engagement—you're physically engaged, and/or psychologically engaged, and/or emotionally engaged. So maintaining those three in work is important. I'm only able to do that if I modulate my screen use.”
by Dr. Anthony Silard
The issue that Dr. Silard reiterates during our chat and in his book is that online interactions, whether via smartphone or computer, are among the least genuine ways to connect with other people. When someone scrolls through their social media feed, they're engaging with some posts but glossing over others. “Most people are unaware of how they've been baited and switched by their devices. They unwittingly consider themselves to be in demand when in fact they're discarded daily by people they consider their friends.” Basically, people have been seduced by social media into trading high quality human interactions for interactions that are low quality. While it's true that digital technology has made COVID-19-induced isolation bearable for many, it has also crystallized that we need personal contact. The slogan of 2020 might be: I can't wait to see you in person again.
Not only does social media offer inferior interaction, but it also creates false expectations about amount and frequency. A few fulfilling face-to-face meetings a week would have made for a satisfying social life before the digital age. But today, particularly for digital natives—i.e. people who can't remember a pre-Internet world—as few as three or four online interactions in a week, or even twenty or thirty, might be psychologically crushing. This is all by design. Dr. Silard takes pains to point out that, from interface layout to the tone of audio notifications to the color of visual alerts, smartphones and social media are designed to be addictive. Because of this, reducing screen time can be seen as a one-person battle against legions of highly paid, highly educated programmers whose mission it is to keep you glued to a screen.
“The principles in Screened In have really helped me to reduce the amount of time I spend on my phone or other devices,” Dr, Silard says, and indeed, the book offers a wide slate of digital limiting strategies developed over years—among them never talking on the phone or texting while driving, changing smartphone displays from visually dazzling color to simple greyscale, setting an alarm to signal the end of the work day, sitting less during office hours, and countless other personally tested ideas. Heads of companies might do well to learn about the technology-induced problems their workers suffer, and about solutions that can mitigate them. The result might very well be more efficient, more engaged, healthier, happier employees. Dr. Silard writes that the changes he made helped him become more focused during work and more connected to his family.
Screened In eventually outlines something called the Heart of Darkness Challenge, which is designed to regulate screen time, prevent or reduce Internet accelerated addictions, and enable its adopters to become more present in the moment and derive more enjoyment from life. The Challenge is a set of guidelines, rather than steadfast rules, and comes with a procedural side door so people have a way of checking crucial emails and phone calls without violating the Challenge's framework. Screened In ends with diaries from clients who tackled the Challenge. They describe their day-to-day progress, struggles, and successes trying to rebalance their lives.
Dr. Silard's mission is nothing less than to enable people to reclaim a piece of themselves that may have been lost down a digital well, and in so doing to have time to think about something larger. “If we're not going to be circumscribed by technology, and by social media, and online news, and doom scrolling, and so forth,” he explains, “we've got ask ourselves, What are we going to be enmeshed in? That's the question that I think many people don't want to ask today. What is going to be our life's purpose? What are we going to spend our time on that keeps us moving toward something that we really believe in? That's the more challenging question that we have to ask today.”
Action steps you can take today
- Read Screened In to learn more about rebalancing modern life.
- Read the articles Dr. Silard has guest written for GrantStation.
- Sign up for Dr. Silard's 10-part digital course.
ABOUT DR. ANTHONY SILARD
Anthony Silard, Ph.D., is the CEO of The Global Leadership Institute and the President of The Center for Social Leadership. He was once named Visionary of the Year, and featured at the Presidential Summit for America’s Future and America’s Promise. As a leadership trainer, Anthony has coached thousands of CEOs and senior executives of Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and the world’s largest nonprofits such as GE, Disney, Nokia, Bank of America, IBM, CARE, Save the Children, The United Way, and the American Red Cross. He has also coached political leaders, including G-20 cabinet ministers.