The Tech Effect on Connection

Have you ever stopped to think about how social media has changed the way we perceive ourselves and our actions? In this episode, I’m exploring the topic of relationships and how they are affected by the “wild west” of the online landscape. I’m not here to offer a quick fix – I wish there was one, believe me – but instead, I want to raise awareness about the challenges we face now and in the future when it comes to how technology is affecting our connections with each other – and ourselves.

I’ll be sharing some of the many ways that our online behaviour is eroding the relationships with those around us, and explore the idea that it’s not too late to catch ourselves and make conscious choices for future generations. If relationships are important to you (ie. if you’re a human), this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

And as with everything I share on the podcast, this is what I believe based on what I’ve read and researched. But please don’t take my word for it. Keep what sticks, discard the rest and for goodness sakes, go out and test drive it!

What You’ll Learn In Today’s Episode:

• What the Online Disinhibition Effect is and how it relates to our online persona.

• What it means to be part of the “straddle” generation.

• How our online behaviour is eroding the connections we have.

• Why it’s not too late to change course.

What Was Mentioned:

• The Cyber Effect: An Expert in Cyberpsychology Explains How Technology Is Shaping Our Children, Our Behavior, and Our Values by Mary Aiken

• The End Of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

• The Social Dilemma

Ideas Worth Sharing:

“I can see looking back now that parts of our psyche were in collective motion.” – Christina Sestan

“Anybody with half a brain knows that people no longer need anonymity to spew vitriol.” – Christina Sestan

“Unless you live alone in a cabin in the woods, you are likely relying on relationships and interaction with others for your continued well-being.” – Christina Sestan

“Some things don’t have an easy answer.” – Christina Sestan

Connect with me: Instagram

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• Read the Full Transcript

  Speaker 1 0:01

  Hi, it's Christina. Thanks for joining us. And welcome to The Squeeze. Right now, we are well beyond anonymous cruelty. Anybody with half a brain, you know people don't need to be anonymous to spew vitriol. It's the wild west out there. I was catching up with my stepdaughter today. She just returned from six weeks traveling through Southeast Asia. I certainly had some experiences doing that in my day. Anyway, she was showing us all these pictures on her phone and telling us these stories, and it was pretty cool. She had so many photos to go through, and obviously that's not weird or strange, because everybody takes a million photos on their smartphones. But later, after lunch, when I was heading home, I was thinking about my first experiences with social media, kind of brought that to mind, and I remembered like this really strange sort of twist that happened about the way that I sort of began to consider myself and my actions when it came to social media, so what I mean is like up to that point, I was just living my life, you know. It was just what it was, but suddenly, in the context of like posting, I was the subject of some invisible camera crew that were following me around. So, like, what I mean is, I would be holding up little snippets and of my life and sort of vetting based on how I imagined they were going to look and sound to others, so it was like I was sort of a lifestyle curator, you know, picking out a collection of snapshots worthy of display, and I know I know what I'm saying is just such an absolute, so what, because this kind of self-orientation is it's ubiquitous, but it wasn't always so back to that time when I was first navigating social media and figuring out posting, it was like there was this sort of unconscious shift, right, like I wasn't very aware of it, that I was slipping into a bit of an objective relationship with myself, and it really felt, and it still feels sort of disingenuous, and like kind of performative, but the bottom line was everyone else was doing it, so you know, who was I to be standing on the pool to equanim, everyone else was swimming, there was a lot of what we call social confirmation bias going on there, anyway, so I decided this afternoon when I got home that I was going to deep dive into the annals of my what I call mostly defunct Facebook page. I haven't posted on it in eons. Anyway, I was surprised to discover that my first post was 15 years ago, actually over 15 years ago. It was July 24 in 2007 and I posted this, I posted wondering how to protect my info from the ever present marketers preying on the site, which cracked me up. Once the skeptic, always the skeptic, it seems anybody that knows me knows that online privacy is a big deal to me, and I talk a lot about that, anyway. I kept scanning, and I scanned like several months of posts, and that actually only added up to a handful, because I was decidedly non-prolific then and now, and all of those posts were in the third person, which was weird, but that's because the original Facebook posting window, it was just a question. It said, What are you up to right now? And then it would say there was a box, and it would say Christina, and you were meant to fill in the blank. So my posts were things like, is trying to come up with a Halloween costume, is still reeling from Obama's victory speech, is super excited about going to Seattle with Mark for my birthday weekend, so obviously now what it says is what's on your mind, Christina. Anyway, I can see looking back now that parts of our psyche were in like this collective shifting motion, and I can see how that's been incredibly instrumental in a lot of the challenges that we witness and take part in, frankly, around online conduct, and that's, you know, conduct that can be pretty shockingly divisive and cruel. So, of course, I know, I know this, you know this, it's easier to say shit online when you're anonymous. There's, of course, research that supports that.

  Speaker 1 4:42

  It's called the online disinhibition effect, or ODE, to the regulars. Essentially, it means people are bolder, less inhibited, and judgment impaired online. Think all you can drink tequila chat rooms for anyone who's ever checked out chan back in the day, you. Know what I'm talking about. In fact, that's why chan took off so fast. Anonymity plus no moderation equals Thunderdome. And you know what they say about Thunderdome. Anyway, I saw so many shocking and terrifying threads on that platform. If you have any spare time to go diving down rabbit holes, you might want to go back and check out the relationship between chan and the birth of the incel movement. It's quite fascinating. Anyway, right now we are well beyond anonymous cruelty. Anybody with half a brain, you know people don't need to be anonymous to spew vitriol. It's the wild west out there. So Mary Aiken, in her book, she wrote this book called The Cyber Effect. Highly recommend that. I'll put that in the show notes. She writes a great deal about how our behavior gets amplified and gets accelerated when we're online, and she is so confident in this. She says it's an almost predictable mathematical multiplier, and that's why she uses it in the title of her book, which is The Cyber Effect, but the reason I'm talking about this, I am one of those people who is a member of something called the Straddle Generation. It's essentially it's a term that means that I've lived a fairly substantial part of my life without a computer, read free range kid, but I've also lived a fairly substantial, probably longer part of my life with a computer, and this gives me a unique vantage point, but one that's gonna fade. It's gonna fade until we're only left with people who have only ever known life on the internet. So, what does this mean in a book called The End of Absence? Michael Harris describes it this way. He says that these are the few days when we can still notice the difference between before and after. Most importantly, he emphasizes that we can still catch ourselves. I think what he's talking about is that we have a better chance to consciously critique what we're up to and to push back on patterns that maybe don't serve us, and I think we have a better opportunity than perhaps future generations. Hey, you're listening to The Squeeze, and if you like what you're hearing, there's a whole world of citrus couching to discover. We've got an online leadership program, it's called Citrus You, and it features those three key tools you need to be a better leader, well, to be a better human. We also have a number of mini learning bundles that you can get into, and there's plenty more. If you're interested, you can follow us on Instagram, or check out our website@www.citruscoaching.com And the show resumes now. So I want to ask you a question. Are relationships important to you? And I'm aware that I'm recording in a time where the definition of relationships kind of up for grabs, and the whole question of sexual identity, it's in a pretty major state of flux. So, to be clear, I'm not talking just about romantic relationships, I'm talking about all relationships. So, unless you live alone in a cabin in the woods, you're likely relying on relationships and interaction, hanging out with others for a kind of sense of well-being, and you already know this, but there's tons of research that shows how our desire to connect is actually wired into our brains, and did you know that some researchers have discovered that when we experience threats to our social connections, we experience it in much the same way that we experience physical pain. So, short answer, we need connection, but here's the problem. The very thing we say we want, and in fact, I think it goes beyond saying we want it. I think it's biologically wired into us. Connection is what I'm talking about. The problem is that we want it, but it can be severely eroded by, you know, some of our pretty average online behavior, so something like smartphone addiction, like it's being normalized. Sure, we've all watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix, and we understand the whole manipulation thing that's going on.

  Speaker 1 9:36

  We're being played, we understand the relationship between the like button and the release of dopamine, but we keep on keeping on, so I'm not saying this so you can beat yourself up and say, yeah, I need to put my phone down more often, because it's also important to realize that the fact is our current technology is super powerful, it's adept at keeping your attention, isn't that why someone like Tristan. Harris, he was a former design ethicist, product philosopher at Google. Isn't that why he agreed to appear in the film The Social Dilemma? And he's really public about his time in Silicon Valley, and he's even been quoted as saying the prime directive was hook all the users into spending time on the apps. I like that line from the social dilemma, only two organizations call their customers users, illegal drugs and software, so that must be worth a mic drop. There, so what to do, what to do, what to do, what do we do about it? Have you ever had that experience where you're talking to someone, I'm talking about in real life, or IRL to those in the know. Anyway, you're talking and they're listening, and suddenly they reach in their pocket, they grab their phone, and the whole while they're saying, "I'm listening, I'm gonna say, I just.. I just got to check a text, and it suddenly feels like they've just turned around and walked out of the room. Of course, you have. Well, in a sense, it turns out they have metaphorically walked out of the room, and your opportunity for connection has literally just ended, so you know how it goes. So maybe you've been that person that was speaking, and you say, "Hey, you're not listening to me, and then the phone grabber goes, "Hey, settle down, just be a second, and then the speaker, if this is you, stands there, and you're feeling like your anger is rising, but you're also feeling kind of stupid, because absolutely everyone around is on their phones these days. That reminds me, actually, it's funny, because I remember the first time I saw a couple, they were out for dinner, and they were both on their phones, and it was outrageous, and it was funny, and I photographed them secretly. That's the good old days, anyway. So you, as the speaker, perhaps you're like, "Come on, man, you decide you're in a push. Come on, I want to finish telling you what I was telling you. And at this point, the phone grabber may actually get mad at you, like, "Chill the hell out. I told you I'd be just a second, and at this point, not only is the connection gone, but then you've got some new sticky unwanted feelings in the mix. So it turns out the speaker isn't wrong for being upset. So last time I checked, big psychological organizations were also interested in the impact on connection when one, or God forbid, both of you get on your phones, it seems so painfully obvious to me, but apparently I'm in some kind of minority. You see, the truth is, I still feel embarrassed if my phone rings while I'm in the checkout line. It's like I'm not kidding, I ignore it and try to draw attention elsewhere, so clearly I'm obviously part of the straddle generation, and I think it's important to just pause for a second here, and you know, just let you know I'm not going to try and sell you on some three step process here for how you're going to eradicate all these negative impacts on your life from your online surfing, would that I could maybe the best that we can hope for is that I'm just going to surface a few tidbits for you to consider, things that might bump your awareness a bit, at least for a little while, maybe even enough to propel you in more, I'll just call them relationship nurturing directions, I don't know, maybe not. I'm honestly not sure, but keep listening. Remember that example I gave about the two folks trying to have a connection while a phone was coming in between them. Again, it's a pattern that is so ubiquitous that I'll just say, congratulations, you're normal, haven't seen you at the meetings, that kind of experience then spawns, or is spawned by.

  Speaker 1 13:46

  I mean, it's hard to tell which came first, but I'm talking about something called continuous partial attention. So, think about that term. I'll say it again: continuous partial attention. How can you be good at anything from that place? Add to the mix the mother of all time wasters. This is something called the time distortion effect. That's what happens when you look up from your phone or your laptop and you say, holy crap, what happened the last three hours? Because we can literally get lost in cyberspace, and escaping it sometimes it just feels like we're waking from a dream, and yeah, that's precisely how these things are designed. So, case in point, I'm going to share with you, I love Reddit, there, I admit it, and as what I self-identify as a so-called student of nature, or human nature, I should say, I often use myself as the subject. I find that's pretty useful, comes in handy, keeps me honest. Anyway, so while scrolling through said Reddit, I noticed over the first several weeks that I couldn't really avoid noticing the time distortion. So you know, obviously, as I said, that's part of the design, but what I did was I started keeping track of it in my journal, and you know, I consider myself a fairly aware and conscious person, but I have to tell you, it was incredible how much I would continue to, you know, move my finger, my scrolling finger, across the touch pad, and I swear, if there were a microphone in my head, it probably would have sounded like just one more, just one more. Okay, just one more. I swear, this is the last one. No, wait, just one more, I promise. And so on. And just the other day, I was listening to a podcast where I learned that TikTok, if you go on TikTok, their algorithm is so clever that it will figure you out and hook you within 45 minutes. Haven't tried it yet, but I'm thinking about it. So, where do we go from here? I've already told you I don't have any magic beans. No, wait, that's another story. I mean, I don't have any three-step process to hand you. It's not to say there aren't things you can do, but I suppose it feels a little more honest if I just kind of lay out the real challenges that we're facing. Besides, I don't know about you, but in my two decades of working in leadership development, I'm a little bit fatigued with all the solution peddling, you know what I mean, like everybody's got an answer for everything, and some things don't always have an easy answer. So I think back to my time hanging out with my stepdaughter earlier today, and her countless photos. I swear to God, I think she said she had something like 10,000 on her phone. I think of how much we've all changed when it comes to curating our existence online. How savvy we've become with selfies, not me, but everyone else. I still look ridiculous. And holy cow, have you seen the video filter technology on Instagram? I think of how phones often seem more attractive to us than the people we say matter most to us in the whole world, and I think about those behavioral design engineers who've very publicly denounced said behavioral design in an attempt to perhaps pull together the shreds of their integrity. I don't know, ladies and gentlemen, I think we're in a real pickle here, but before we all get forlorn and mopy, I'll tell you what. I'm going to turn the mic on you. I'm going to ask you, how do you protect your relationships from the cyber effect? What are your tricks? What works? Leave them in the comments, and I'll share them next show. I'm So you've been listening to The Squeeze. Thanks for joining us today. If you want to continue tuning in, don't forget to click subscribe. And, as always, we want to hear your thoughts, your comments, your feedback, and challenges. If there's anything you don't agree with, thanks for joining us, and see you next time.

  Unknown Speaker 18:03

  Bye.