"On the Internet everything has led to the struggle and the need for recognition"

 

It has been over a year since Enric Puig left his iPhone in a drawer and decided to get more out of his time and personal relations. He believes we are hyperconnected and have sold part of our time and energy to the big hegemonic Internet technology companies. In 2016, he published La gran adicción. Cómo sobrevivir sin internet y no aislarse del mundo (The Big Addiction. How to Survive without the Internet without being Isolated from the World), a book that features the experiences of nine people who, for different reasons, have decided to disconnect from the Internet. Puig is a professor at the UOC Faculty of Arts and Humanities and co-founder of the Institut Internet. We talk to him about the impact of the Internet and social media on our society, how we can address this dependency and the work of the institute he created.

 

 

It has been over a year since Enric Puig left his iPhone in a drawer and decided to get more out of his time and personal relations. He believes we are hyperconnected and have sold part of our time and energy to the big hegemonic Internet technology companies. In 2016, he published La gran adicción. Cómo sobrevivir sin internet y no aislarse del mundo (The Big Addiction. How to Survive without the Internet without being Isolated from the World), a book that features the experiences of nine people who, for different reasons, have decided to disconnect from the Internet. Puig is a professor at the UOC Faculty of Arts and Humanities and co-founder of the Institut Internet. We talk to him about the impact of the Internet and social media on our society, how we can address this dependency and the work of the institute he created.

 

It was not the result of impulsive reflection but of years of research into related issues. The trigger, however, was a call to talk about this subject in a report on the programme 30 minuts, for the Catalan broadcaster Televisió de Catalunya. The report was called "Hooked on the Internet" and was well-received by the audience. That indicated the beginnings of some social awareness and interest in the subject, and this was 2014. As Barcelona was seeking to be a leader in technology and the mobile phone discourse, Genís Cormand, the journalist with whom I made the report for 30 minuts, and I decided it would also be interesting to approach this from the humanistic side. So at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture, CCCB) we organized the Enter Forum, an international meeting of experts on the social repercussions of new technologies. I started to reflect on whether it is possible to live today without the Internet and, if so, what the consequences would be, and I started looking for experiences of people completely disconnected from the Internet with a discourse that made us reflect.

As I was writing the book I gradually disconnected, first from social media and then my smartphone became so empty of apps that in the end I did not need it. I use email, which I see as an essential tool for teaching at the UOC. I think there is a fundamental problem: for years I have only seen the benefits of all these tools; it was the prevailing discourse, which I think is now changing. Personally, I have reached the level of use that suits me, but it is not a dogmatic or entrenched position. If in a specific moment I need WhatsApp, I will install it, or do the same with Twitter, but I doubt it.

I was interested in people who were not simply escaping into nature but wanted to recover their urban life, and people of a specific generation, particularly non-digital natives who were not very old. I found them by word of mouth and had quite a few coffees.

There has been a progression, a shift from the importance of information to the importance of the user, and this is part of the problem: the central element is no longer information but rather the construction of the user on the Internet. This goes against the utopian principles that underpinned the birth of the Internet: decentralized information and information altruism. Everything has led to this struggle for recognition and the need for this recognition, which begins with blogs and ends with social media.

The ideological dimension behind the smartphone is overlooked. There is not enough reflection on the business models of these companies, which have managed to persuade us to fill them with content ourselves so they can make money. The smartphone as a device would not have become hegemonic without this operation.

The problem is the mixing of the public with the private. If I get to the bus stop and I need a smartphone to find out the time of the next bus and buy a ticket, it means I am obliged to buy the device, to contract a private telephone company and, probably, to download an app, also from a third party, and, finally, maybe I even need a Facebook account to make it work. In short, I have to go through private companies to do something as public as catching a bus.

There is no consensus. More and more neurologists and psychiatrists say that intensive use of technology during school years undermines skills. We must first acquire skills and then use technology as a tool. The more knowledge we acquire, the more we can get out of the Internet to use it to complement what we already know and expand on it. It is quite deliberate that the Waldorf schools in Silicon Valley deprive their students of technology. One of the chief executives of Google sends his children there and says that when they are 13 they still do not know about Google. Those who know more about technology give us hidden lessons.

This is for the same reason one person can be alone at home and another cannot, or that one person after a few visits to a casino will already be developing the symptoms of an addiction to gambling and another will not. There are many psychological aspects at play, but the fact that this happens to many individuals denotes an addictive nature and is an issue that must not be ignored: the ideological dimension of many Internet business models, which demand our participation and our content, and create the need for recognition. A smartphone is a container of unanswered questions. When we upload a photo to Instagram, we plead: do you like this photo? And it really is an unanswered question and always will be.

It's very tricky. Consider that my book was initially going to be called How to Survive without the Internet, but ended up with the title The Big Addiction. When we talk about the Internet, we are talking about an addiction not recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). There are adolescents who sleep with their mobile stuck to their ear to wake up to the vibration of a call or message, and others shut away in their room with their computer who urinate in a bottle so they don't have to go to the toilet. These are cases of serious dependency, but then there is a grey area: people feel guilty because they spend many hours on the Internet, because they are always checking WhatsApp... The most important thing is knowing that there is a power relationship between technologies and us and that we are losing the battle.

Many of the programmes that are beginning to emerge take the wrong approach: they are only useful for extreme cases. For the bulk of the population, the treatment should not be clinical because it stigmatizes. We cannot compare heroin with social media. We see that in many cases people sense that they have a degree of dependency and something should be done, but their social circle does not provide them with the tools they need.

Yes, the idea is for these people to be able to find other people with the same concern and put them into contact and organize some kind of meeting, so they do not feel that spending less time on social media means "de-socializing"; to show that there are tools within their reach and that it is a good strategy to follow because it is not that you are addicted to social media but to the virtualization of socialization. Fundamentally you want to socialize but the channel is not the right one.

There are no statistics but something of a trend. When I published the book, some parts of the media were talking about the new urban tribe of the disconnected. I think this trivialized the situation. Something I have reflected on a great deal is that digitalization to some extent was a fad: it looked good to be digital. But although a specific fashion may be very trivial, its final repercussions may not. I also have to say that this is quite recent and we have yet to see how it evolves.