How We are Getting Dumb By Using Too Much Whatsapp
The Research of an Armenian Scientist Lead to the Conclusion We Are Atrophying Our Skills.
The first step to solve a problem is to recognize it. And I discovered I had one when I installed an app called YourHour. This simple app will tell you how much you use your phone per day, and how many times you unlock it.
I installed it after reading in one of Cal Newport’s books about how an average citizen unlock his phone around 150 times per day. This number points to widespread obsessive-compulsive behavior. It is not that I didn’t believe Cal (A brilliant author, worth to check his thoughts about the concept of Deep Work).
I just did not believe I had this compulsive behavior myself.
To my surprise, the app showed me that I was also unlocking my phone near 160 times and using it more than 4 hours per day on average. That is when I decided it was enough.
I didn’t want to miss everything around me. The scenes, the people. After all, even my wife I met in public transport, when — fortunately — smartphones were still not a thing.
I was committed to the battle against phone addiction. The first step was to fight the productivity excuse.
The Productivity Excuse for Excessive Phone Use.
I need to use my phone to check my agenda! I need to see my bank transactions! What if my boss calls me?
Yes, work stuff is important, and it is ok to be accessible during emergencies. We get it.
But in reality, it is not that what makes us spend hours looking at our phones. You are probably checking your agenda or bank account a fraction of the time you spend endlessly scrolling your Facebook newsfeed or Instagram.
Most of the time, in my case, was consumed by Whatsapp (more than 2 hours per day) and Facebook (near 1.5 hours). Yourhour inform all those numbers, broken per app, in detail. By the way, I am not earning any commission from the app, and it is free to use.
As an Expat living thousands of kilometers from my family and most of my friends, I had a pretext to use so frequently Whatsapp and Facebook: to keep contact.
But is this really effective?
Stop WhatsApping, Start Calling
The widespread misconception among expatriates and heavy-users of instant-messaging is that it is a substitute for other kinds of communication. It is not.
Dr. Albert Mehrabian, in a well-known published paper, made an experiment conveying people to say the same words, like maybe or thanks or really, with different tones and facial expressions. It concluded that only 7% of our communication is verbal, with 38% by tone of voice and 55% dependent on facial expressions and gestures.
In other words: 93% of our messages are non-verbal
By relying almost exclusively on instant communicators like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, we are exploring only 7% of our capacity. By only chatting with your friends or family by text, you are making way to misunderstandings (like this I am sorry that looked ironic instead of truly regretful).
You are also losing, atrophying your own skills to decode voice tones and facial expressions.
For ex-pats like me, this can be a considerable loss, leading to misinterpret even smiles (in this article I explained the different meanings of a smile).
For every person, a loss of an important skill that during human history was responsible for our very evolution as social animals.
Other Effects in Our (and in Our Kids) Brains
If the effect in adults is visible in factors like communication and interpretation, in children it is more brutal.
A study published by the MIT Technology Review exposed that kids who spent more time in front of screens had what the authors call lower “white matter integrity.”
White matter can be roughly thought of as the brain’s internal communications network — its long nerve fibers are sheathed in fatty insulation that allows electrical signals to move from one area of the brain to another without interruption.
The integrity of that structure — how well organized the nerve fibers are, and how well developed the myelin sheath is — is associated with cognitive function, and it develops as kids learn language.
If you ever read the book The Talent Code: Greatness isn’t born. It’s grown from Daniel Coyle, you are familiar with it: Myelin, the element behind skilled footballers, great musicians, and world-class thinkers.
Ideally, we should take out our faces from those glass screens and face the world. But even you are far from your relatives and friends, you do not need to resort only to 7% of communication potential represented by texting.
There is always the possibility of doing a video-call.
Chances are that your family will be happy to see you, and you will avoid the misunderstandings of text-only conversation.
Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline, writer of the books Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity and Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide. You can check some of his articles here.
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