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Proyecto final con extensión de más de 40 páginas

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Proyecto final con extensión de más de 40 páginas

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Imagen basada en Saturno devorando a su hijo, Francisco Goya (1819-23). Ilustración por Kim Dong-kyu.

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Imagen basada en El grito, Edvard Munch (1893). Ilustración: Kim Dong-kyu.

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Imagen basada en En el conservatorio, Édouard Manet (1878-79). Ilustración Kim Dong-kyu.

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Imagen basada en La última cena,  Leonardo da Vinci (1495-98). Kim Dong-kyu, 2013.

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Imagen basada en Anciano en pena, Vincent van Gogh (1890). Ilustración por Kim Dong-kyu.

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Imagen basada en The Angelus, Jean-François Millet (1857-59). Ilustración: Kim Dong-kyu.

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Imagen basada en Alphonsine Fournaise, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1879). Ilustración: Kim Dong-kyu.

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Imagen basada en Man on a balcony, Gustave Caillebotte (1880). Ilustración: Kim Dong-kyu, 2013.

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Imagen basada en Hotel Room, Edward Hopper (1931). Ilustración: Kim Dong-kyu

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https://mailchi.mp/ribbonfarm/against-waldenponding?e=212313ca14

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Imagen basada en The dream, Pablo Picasso (1932). Ilustración por Kim Dong-kyu.

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Imagen basada en Wanderer above the sea of fog,Caspar David Friedrich (1818). Ilustración: Kim Dong-kyu

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Imagen basada en Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, Edouard Manet (1863). Ilustración: Kim Dong-kyu

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Imagen basada en Portrait de Marie Therese Walter, Pablo Picasso (1937). Ilustración: Kim Dong-kyu.

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Para tener en cuenta

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In 2012, I realized I had a problem.

My iPhone made me twitchy. I could feel it in my pocket, calling me, like the Ring called Bilbo Baggins. It distracted me from my kids. It distracted me from my wife. It distracted me anytime, anywhere. I just didn't have the willpower to ignore email and Twitter and Instagram and the whole world wide web. Infinity in my pocket was too much.

I wanted to get control, but I didn't want to give up my iPhone altogether. I loved having Google Maps and Uber and Find Friends and an amazing camera.

So I decided to try an experiment. I disabled Safari. I deleted my mail account. I uninstalled every app I couldn't handle. I thought I'd try it for a week.

A month went by, then two, and I was loving my newfound freedom. I wrote up a post about my experience on Medium, called The distraction-free iPhone.

Then a lot of people read the post. It got over 80,000 views on Medium. Lifehacker ran it, and it got 70,000 more. Gizmodo ran it, and it got another 150,000. Obviously, other people were interested in the topic. (It's not because I'm an interesting writer. For comparison, the next thing I wrote, about zombies, got less than 500 views.)

Sure, most of those bajillion readers - especially on Gizmodo - wanted to talk about what an idiot I am. "Why doesn't he just buy a flip phone?!" (see below)

But a lot of people were supportive. And a lot of them actually tried it. Even some of my friends gave it a shot.

The biggest victory was when my wife made her own iPhone distraction-free. This, after 6 months of telling me I was nuts. You bet I was stoked! (Only you can't really gloat in that situation. Not the "enlightened guy who's too good for his iPhone" thing to do, is it?)

Anyway, I still get a lot of people asking: am I still doing it? Some of those people are probably too impatient to read this long boring intro. So for all you skimmers out there, here's the answer in big letters:

Yes, I'm still doing it. Over one year later.

Oh great. Here comes the self-righteous part.

Over the last 12 months I've learned to enjoy (or at least, be OK with) moments of boredom. I reach for my phone a lot less often. It's probably just my imagination, but it feels like it's easier to concentrate when I need to get things done or tackle a big project.

Times on the bus when I would've checked email, I listen to music or just look around. I even started meditating on the bus (yes, really! And, uh... please don't mug me) using an app called Calm. I can't believe I'm the hippy dippy weirdo meditating on the bus using an app. But I'm actually a lot happier doing that than I was with my tweets.

At home, the phone becomes part of the stereo, and nothing more. At work, I set the thing down a lot. Nearly once a day I forget where it is - something I'd have never been able to imagine in 2012.

The weird part is this: This experiment was supposed to be a hardship. Now? It feels like the easy way out. I not only don't want to go back, going back sounds really... difficult. Think of all the things I'd have to keep track of. Managing notifications and streams and pings and bleeps can add up to a lot of work.

The 24 hour experiment

If you're intrigued, I encourage you to try going distraction-free for 24 hours. It's pretty easy to set up on the iPhone, and most people who've done it really enjoy the break.

Now - there's no pressure here. Some people seem to handle their smartphones just fine. For the rest of us, this is a worthy experiment.

1. Remove Safari

Safari is a big problem for me because it opens a window into a limitless universe of, y'know, everything. Infinity. At any given moment, there's something super interesting on the Internet I haven't seen before. Actually, I'm gonna go check real quick. NO! Must... finish... iPhone post.

You can't delete Safari, but you can do this: Go into Settings, then Restrictions. Turn 'em on, and then you can turn off Safari. Yes, I know, Restrictions - as if you yourself are a person you don't trust to use your own phone. Kinda awkward, right?

2. Remove Mail

Email's another big problem for me. There's some good psychology behind this: our brains have a glitch that makes random rewards incredibly appealing. It's a slot machine where the big payout is... a note from my boss, I guess.

I can't give up email, but luckily with my job I really don't have to have it on my phone. Over the last year, I've encouraged people to text or call me if they need a fast response. As an added bonus, most people have a much higher threshold for texting or calling than they do for firing off an email.

You can't turn the Mail app all the way off on your iPhone. The easiest thing to do is delete your email account in Settings.

3. Remove "infinity" apps

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, even the New York Times - all of these have a potentially endless supply of new and interesting stuff that I could check at any time. So none of them belong on my phone.

You can delete these apps the old-fashioned way, of course. Jiggle, jiggle, ✕!

4. Consciously decide what to keep

Having a blank desktop on the phone is surprisingly calming. Once I'd cleared off so much stuff, I wanted to keep it clean. I found it really useful to ask myself why each remaining app was on my phone. Was it a tool that made my life better? Or was it dragging me along for the ride?

So what made the cut? Here's my list:

1. Phone

2. Messages

3. Camera

4. Apps that make me feel like I live in the future, kept in a folder inventively called "The Future." Dropbox, Google Maps, Uber, Rdio, Instacart, and so on. There are a lot of non-distractors that are amazing. (Even the weather app is pretty cool, when I stop and think about it. I mean, in the 1980s, I had a Walkman. That's my point of reference: a freakin' Walkman. It's totally amazing that you can get a weather report in your pocket. And I would never, ever get addicted to it.)

5. Useful things I rarely use, like a New York subway map or the compass.

6. Useless things you can't delete, like Passbook and Game Center.

What's left of the iPhone is still fantastic - far better than a flip phone, and getting better all the time.

I want a sensible phone, not a smart phone

This whole exercise has left me feeling like I took the iPhone into my life without ever really thinking about what it was gonna take from me. Internet, all the time, everywhere? Sign me up. Games, news, photos, popularity? Yes, please, more, please! It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of excellent gourmet food. The trouble for me? I will always eat more than I should.

Since my line of work is helping companies build software and hardware, I'm trying to take this philosophy to heart. So I'll leave you with a little preaching.

60 word sermon

When we invest our time and energy in technology - as creators or consumers - we should invest in products that belong in "The Future" and not those that make our lives disappear faster than they already do.

Personally, my life's already going by at the speed of light. But this past year, it felt just the tiniest bit slower.

Tell me if you try it

Thanks for reading. If you do the experiment, I'd love to hear about it. Take a screenshot and drop me a tweet. I'll check it on my laptop.
Update: Here's how to do set up a Distraction-free Android.

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My year with a distraction-free iPhone (and how to start your own experiment)

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In 2012, I realized I had a problem. My iPhone made me twitchy. I could feel it in my pocket, calling me, like the Ring called Bilbo Baggins. It distracted me from my kids. It distracted me from my wife. It distracted me anytime, anywhere.

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Falta

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Future Tense

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Credit Credit Patrick Leger

At first blush I may not seem like a prime candidate for a digital detox.

I got a smartphone only a few months ago and don't permit push notifications on it, nor do I have many apps. I'm a sporadic Facebook and Twitter poster. I recently acquired an e-reader for travel but have yet to put anything on it. I have a Roku box with a Netflix account, but have never owned a DVR. And I don't work in a lightning-paced corporate office.

But on closer inspection, I haven't resisted the downloadable siren song of tech addiction as much I'd hope. I receive email alerts on my computer, which I'm on the majority of the day - and check my new smartphone repeatedly while out. I aimlessly browse the Internet, scanning short articles, lists and videos when I could be reading long-form journalism or books. I also visit Facebook and Twitter too often to surveil friends, acquaintances, strangers and enemies, not always in that order. And ever since my Walkman days in college, I move through the world listening to music nearly all the time.

We know the downsides: distractibility, wasted time and shallow " 'sips' of online connection," as the psychologist and professor Sherry Turkle calls it.

So for one week in January, inspired by the example of the powerful media triumvirate of Arianna Huffington, Cindi Leive and Mika Brzezinski, I unplugged. It was surely less of a sacrifice for me than for these hyper-connected women, but to be fair, they did so on Christmas vacation, with two of them jetting off to Hawaii and "a faraway island." I disconnected during a regular workweek and, in lieu of tropical seclusion, enjoyed the subfreezing and proximal isle of Manhattan.

I followed the directives of Maite Barón, the founder of the Corporate Escape, a company based in London that has helped scores of corporate executives negotiate the transition into a lower-pressure life of self-employment.

"I teach them how to be in the present," she said. "Stress and anxiety happen when you're managing the future."

Her tenets are anti-screen and anti-media. "The first thing I say is to take the TV out of their home," she said. "Read one newspaper a week. It's the same news, repeated every day." Check email "maximum, twice a day," she said, "and never when you're right at work - you start reading 300 emails and your day is over."

My inbox is not quite so chaotic, but I determined I would spend no more than 15 minutes in it each session and sign in just once over the weekend. I'd use the phone only from home and would wait until noon to turn it on. I would not initiate any text exchanges, and if I received a message, I would respond as tersely as possible or call the person back. I could not go on the Internet at all unless it was crucial, and certainly not on social media. No streaming or live TV, only DVDs. Handwritten calendar. And music only at home.

In other words, I would nonparty like it was 1999.

The first day, when ordering food at a deli, I instinctively reached to my ear to remove a nonexistent earbud. Later, after finishing up work in a Word document, I mindlessly clicked to open my Web browser without any conscious intent. It was simply a reflexive desire to escape from the application in which I have to create content and into one in which I can more or less passively consume it.

I also briefly experienced the famous "fear of missing out," a.k.a., annoyingly, FOMO. Then I questioned what I was really missing out on. Twitter quips about the New Jersey bridge scandal? Facebook photos of birthday celebration Cronuts? Yahoo News on the 17 habits successful dentists practice? Soon enough, FOMO yielded to what Ms. Barón and others call the " joy of missing out," or (sorry) JOMO.

Without my procrastination enablers at hand, I read Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" at breakfast every morning instead of looking at email and a panoply of browser tabs. I had tried to read the novel on previous occasions and put it down each time. Now, without distractions - or, equally important, without the threat of distractions - I grew deeply immersed. (Nice job, Mr. Roth.)

"We've known for some time now that multitasking does not work," said Clay Shirky, a professor in journalism and interactive telecommunications at New York University. "People keep doing it because it's emotionally pleasant to multitask even though it's cognitively damaging. So that makes it parallelized procrastination."

For those with a libertarian slant (let others do what they want as long as it doesn't harm me), Professor Shirky has an alarming rebuttal.

"There's a secondhand-smoke effect from multitasking," he said. "If one person at a table opts out of the conversation by looking at their phone, it affects everyone there." As you might expect, in Professor Shirky's household, which includes two children, no devices are permitted at mealtimes and screens are turned off after 9 p.m.

Taylor Ho Bynum, a musician and composer in New Haven, has so fervently adopted the disconnection model that he has written a manifesto about it on his website. In it, he observes that, for him, "it is so much easier to spend the day" doing administrative busywork "than it is to leap off the cliff into the terrifying unknown of 'artistic inspiration.' "

"For composing music," he said in an interview, being digitally connected doesn't help. "Ellington didn't have this," he said. "Beethoven didn't have it, Bach didn't have it, and they all wrote a lot more music than we do. Particularly in the arts, both the creative engagement and solitude necessary are very much at odds with the expectations of the field now."

But doesn't he need the Internet to reach his listeners?

"Our generation may be great at getting in touch with the audience, but we're not great at creating the material for the audience," he said.

"Most of the media platforms serve a shallow engagement for a wide audience. What I'm going for is deep engagement by a small audience," said Mr. Bynum, who described his own music as "weird."

His experience jibes with my own. I wrote my most recent novel on an ancient laptop without Internet connectivity in a silent, shared writers' space, where I confined myself to a small desk in a carrel and had nothing to entertain myself with other than my own imagination. So far, I've been writing a new one from home with the Internet on. I can't speak for the results, but as Jonathan Franzen wrote in The Guardian, "It's doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction."

What about the image-makers among us? Julie Weitz, a visual artist in Los Angeles, was questioning the necessity of being connected when she went on a 10-day meditation retreat last year. "Going in, I was really concerned - it was hard to imagine not responding to email," she said. But by the time she left, she recalled, "I couldn't touch my phone for a few days."

Now that she works from home, she recognizes that she struggles with "how to integrate social media into my life, because I'm in isolation," she said. "One thing I did was completely knock out Facebook. I decided the connection that was there was superficial and didn't do anything for me except distract me or incite unnecessary feelings. You discover who's really important when you disconnect."

Ms. Weitz thinks her creative focus has improved since unplugging, and she has even incorporated ideas "about how the screen is a filter that's a dissociative element" into her work, she said. She is not the only artist to do so. A 17-minute film, "Noah," by Canadian film students Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg, which went viral online this fall, is set entirely on a teenager's computer screen. A wrenching breakup is narrated via Facebook, GChat, Skype and a number of other mediating and alienating applications.

But going cold turkey is probably not the best option for most people, Professor Shirky said.

"Like dieting, people are going to find that daily moderation is going to work better than reverse-bingeing," he said. "But that's not a particularly American method. Americans want solutions."

Alena Graedon, a Brooklyn writer, may have negotiated an un-American compromise. Her coming debut novel, " The Word Exchange," is "about the dangers of being too digitally connected," Ms. Graedon said, yet she recognizes that she is "as susceptible to the quicksand of Onion headlines and contrarian Slate headlines and cute pictures of baby animals as anyone else."

Because Ms. Graedon has to use the Internet to fact-check even for creative work, she tries "to get up as early as I can and, when possible, I stay off everything but essential digital media until the middle of the day," she said. "I accept that I'm pretty useless after lunch anyway, so I feel fine being sucked into the vortex after that."

During the rest of my mostly offline week, I cheated two days when I had to check email three times, fell off the Internet wagon each of those instances for a short period, and also watched two episodes online I had missed of "Parenthood." (Yes, I watch "Parenthood.") Most disturbingly, I found myself mesmerized by an unchanging screen in a friend's lobby displaying which apartments had packages waiting for them.

When I left my static, physically finite, Dorothy-in-grayscale-Kansas print universe and returned online, I felt myself emotionally responding to the allure of the gloriously dynamic, vast and Technicolor Internet, with its constantly refreshing reminders of the outside world.

Returning to the harder-earned pleasures of Emersonian self-reliance proved challenging. When you commit to disconnecting, you wean yourself off the Pavlovian dopamine rush of external affirmation and information, but it must be a deliberate choice. Simply having it withheld from you (such as being on a plane without Wi-Fi) does not work, as evidenced by the customary reaction of passengers quick-drawing their phones upon landing like Wild West gunslingers.

And perhaps the real issue for most of us isn't our phones and computers, but an older and less mobile device.

"Television is still the medium where Americans are most likely to binge," Professor Shirky pointed out, and Nielsen data backs him up. Then why all the uproar over our supposedly out-of-control Internet and phone addictions?

"People are freaking out because it's a new problem," he said.

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels "The Love Song of Jonny Valentine" and "Kapitoil." Future Tense appears monthly.

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Future Tense At first blush I may not seem like a prime candidate for a digital detox. I got a smartphone only a few months ago and don't permit push notifications on it, nor do I have many apps. I'm a sporadic Facebook and Twitter poster.

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Imagine that two people are carving a six-foot slab of wood at the same time. One is using a hand-chisel, the other, a chainsaw. If you are interested in the future of that slab, whom would you watch?

This chainsaw/chisel logic has led some to suggest that technological evolution is more important to humanity's near future than biological evolution; nowadays, it is not the biological chisel but the technological chainsaw that is most quickly redefining what it means to be human. The devices we use change the way we live much faster than any contest among genes. We're the block of wood, even if, as I wrote in January, sometimes we don't even fully notice that we're changing.

Assuming that we really are evolving as we wear or inhabit more technological prosthetics-like ever-smarter phones, helpful glasses, and brainy cars-here's the big question: Will that type of evolution take us in desirable directions, as we usually assume biological evolution does?

Some, like the Wired founder Kevin Kelly, believe that the answer is a resounding "yes." In his book "What Technology Wants," Kelly writes: "Technology wants what life wants: Increasing efficiency; Increasing opportunity; Increasing emergence; Increasing complexity; Increasing diversity; Increasing specialization; Increasing ubiquity; Increasing freedom; Increasing mutualism; Increasing beauty; Increasing sentience; Increasing structure; Increasing evolvability."

We can test the "Increasing" theory by taking a quick trip up north, to an isolated area south of the Hudson Bay. Here live the Oji-Cree, a people, numbering about thirty thousand, who inhabit a cold and desolate land roughly the size of Germany. For much of the twentieth century, the Oji-Cree lived at a technological level that can be described as relatively simple. As nomads, they lived in tents during the summer, and in cabins during the winter. Snowshoes, dog sleds, and canoes were the main modes of transportation, used to track and kill fish, rabbits, and moose for food. A doctor who worked with the Oji-Cree in the nineteen-forties has noted the absence of mental breakdowns or substance abuse within the population, observing that "the people lived a rugged, rigorous life with plenty of exercise." The Oji-Cree invariably impressed foreigners with their vigor and strength. Another visitor, in the nineteen-fifties, wrote of their "ingenuity, courage, and self-sacrifice," noting that, in the North, "only those prepared to face hardship and make sacrifices could survive."

The Oji-Cree have been in contact with European settlers for centuries, but it was only in the nineteen-sixties, when trucks began making the trip north, that newer technologies like the internal combustion engine and electricity really began to reach the area. The Oji-Cree eagerly embraced these new tools. In our lingo, we might say that they went through a rapid evolution, advancing through hundreds of years of technology in just a few decades.

The good news is that, nowadays, the Oji-Cree no longer face the threat of winter starvation, which regularly killed people in earlier times. They can more easily import and store the food they need, and they enjoy pleasures like sweets and alcohol. Life has become more comfortable. The constant labor of canoeing or snowshoeing has been eliminated by outboard engines and snowmobiles. Television made it north in the nineteen-eighties, and it has proved enormously popular.

But, in the main, the Oji-Cree story is not a happy one. Since the arrival of new technologies, the population has suffered a massive increase in morbid obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes. Social problems are rampant: idleness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide have reached some of the highest levels on earth. Diabetes, in particular, has become so common (affecting forty per cent of the population) that researchers think that many children, after exposure in the womb, are born with an increased predisposition to the disease. Childhood obesity is widespread, and ten-year-olds sometimes appear middle-aged. Recently, the Chief of a small Oji-Cree community estimated that half of his adult population was addicted to OxyContin or other painkillers.

Technology is not the only cause of these changes, but scientists have made clear that it is a driving factor. In previous times, the Oji-Cree lifestyle required daily workouts that rivalled those of a professional athlete. "In the early 20th century," writes one researcher, "walking up to 100 km/day was not uncommon." But those days are over, replaced by modern comforts. Despite the introduction of modern medicine, the health outcomes of the Oji-Cree have declined in ways that will not be easy to reverse. The Oji-Cree are literally being killed by technological advances.

The Oji-Cree are an unusual case. It can take a society time to adjust to new technologies, and the group has also suffered other traumas, like colonization and the destruction of cultural continuity. Nonetheless, the story offers an important warning for the human race. The problem with technological evolution is that it is under our control and, unfortunately, we don't always make the best decisions.

This is also the principal difference between technological and biological evolution. Biological evolution is driven by survival of the fittest, as adaptive traits are those that make the survival and reproduction of a population more likely. It isn't perfect, but at least, in a rough way, it favors organisms who are adapted to their environments.

Technological evolution has a different motive force. It is self-evolution, and it is therefore driven by what we want as opposed to what is adaptive. In a market economy, it is even more complex: for most of us, our technological identities are determined by what companies decide to sell based on what they believe we, as consumers, will pay for. As a species, we often aren't much different from the Oji-Cree. Comfort-seeking missiles, we spend the most to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. When it comes to technologies, we mainly want to make things easy. Not to be bored. Oh, and maybe to look a bit younger.

Our will-to-comfort, combined with our technological powers, creates a stark possibility. If we're not careful, our technological evolution will take us toward not a singularity but a sofalarity. That's a future defined not by an evolution toward superintelligence but by the absence of discomforts.

The sofalarity ( pictured memorably in the film "Wall-E") is not inevitable either. But the prospect of it makes clear that, as a species, we need mechanisms to keep humanity on track. The technology industry, which does so much to define us, has a duty to cater to our more complete selves rather than just our narrow interests. It has both the opportunity and the means to reach for something higher. And, as consumers, we should remember that our collective demands drive our destiny as a species, and define the posthuman condition.

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of "The Master Switch." This is Part II in a series on technological evolution. Part I was "If A Time Traveller Saw A Smartphone."__

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Illustration by Hannah K. Lee.

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As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse?

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Imagine that two people are carving a six-foot slab of wood at the same time. One is using a hand-chisel, the other, a chainsaw. If you are interested in the future of that slab, whom would you watch?

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Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka

Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka

Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka

LATE last month, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a brief post on Facebook at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, asking his friends for forgiveness not just for his personal failures but also for his professional ones, especially "the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together." He was heeding the call of the Jewish Day of Atonement to take stock of the year just passed as he pledged that he would "work to do better."

Such a somber, self-critical statement hasn't been typical for the usually sunny Mr. Zuckerberg, who once exhorted his employees at Facebook to "move fast and break things." In the past, why would Mr. Zuckerberg, or any of his peers, have felt the need to atone for what they did at the office? For making incredibly cool sites that seamlessly connect billions of people to their friends as well as to a global storehouse of knowledge?

Lately, however, the sins of Silicon Valley-led disruption have become impossible to ignore.

Facebook has endured a drip, drip of revelations concerning Russian operatives who used its platform to influence the 2016 presidential election by stirring up racist anger. Google had a similar role in carrying targeted, inflammatory messages during the election, and this summer, it appeared to play the heavy when an important liberal think tank, New America, cut ties with a prominent scholar who is critical of the power of digital monopolies. Some within the organization questioned whether he was dismissed to appease Google and its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, both longstanding donors, though New America's executive president and a Google representative denied a connection.

Meanwhile, Amazon, with its purchase of the Whole Foods supermarket chain and the construction of brick-and-mortar stores, pursues the breathtakingly lucrative strategy of parlaying a monopoly position online into an offline one, too.

Now that Google, Facebook, Amazon have become world dominators, the question of the hour is, can the public be convinced to see Silicon Valley as the wrecking ball that it is?

These menacing turns of events have been quite bewildering to the public, running counter to everything Silicon Valley had preached about itself. Google, for example, says its purpose is "to organize the world's information, making it universally accessible and useful," a quest that could describe your local library as much as a Fortune 500 company. Similarly, Facebook aims to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." Even Amazon looked outside itself for fulfillment by seeking to become, in the words of its founder, Jeff Bezos, "the most customer-obsessed company to ever occupy planet Earth."

Almost from its inception, the World Wide Web produced public anxiety - your computer was joined to a network that was beyond your ken and could send worms, viruses and trackers your way - but we nonetheless were inclined to give these earnest innovators the benefit of the doubt. They were on our side in making the web safe and useful, and thus it became easy to interpret each misstep as an unfortunate accident on the path to digital utopia rather than as subterfuge meant to ensure world domination.

Now that Google, Facebook, Amazon have become world dominators, the questions of the hour are, can the public be convinced to see Silicon Valley as the wrecking ball that it is? And do we still have the regulatory tools and social cohesion to restrain the monopolists before they smash the foundations of our society?

By all accounts, these programmers turned entrepreneurs believed their lofty words and were at first indifferent to getting rich from their ideas. A 1998 paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then computer-science graduate students at Stanford, stressed the social benefits of their new search engine, Google, which would be open to the scrutiny of other researchers and wouldn't be advertising-driven. The public needed to be assured that searches were uncorrupted, that no one had put his finger on the scale for business reasons.

To illustrate their point, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page boasted of the purity of their search engine's results for the query "cellular phone"; near the top was a study explaining the danger of driving while on the phone. The Google prototype was still ad-free, but what about the others, which took ads? Mr. Brin and Mr. Page had their doubts: "We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

There was a crucial need for "a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm," and Google was set to be that ivory tower internet tool. Until, that is, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page were swept up by the entrepreneurism pervasive to Stanford - a meeting with a professor led to a meeting with an investor, who wrote a $100,000 check before Google was even a company. In 1999, Google announced a $25 million investment of venture capital while insisting nothing had changed. When Mr. Brin was asked by reporters how Google planned to make money, he replied, "Our goal is to maximize the search experience, not maximize the revenues from search."

Mark Zuckerberg took a similar tack back in the early days of Facebook. A social network was too important to sully with commerce, he told The Harvard Crimson in 2004. "I mean, yeah, we can make a bunch of money - that's not the goal," he said of his social network, then still called thefacebook.com. "Anyone from Harvard can get a job and make a bunch of money. Not everyone at Harvard can have a social network. I value that more as a resource more than, like, any money." Mr. Zuckerberg insisted he wouldn't give in to the profit seekers; Facebook would stay true to its mission of connecting the world.

Seven years later, Mr. Zuckerberg, too, had succumbed to Silicon Valley venture capital, but he seemed to regret it. "If I were starting now," he told an interviewer in 2011, "I just would have stayed in Boston, I think," before adding: "There are aspects of the culture out here where I think it still is a little bit short-term focused in a way that bothers me. You know, whether it's like people who want to start companies to start a company, not knowing what they like, I don't know, to, like, flip it."

Ultimately, however, the founders of Google and Facebook faced a day of reckoning. Investors hadn't signed on for a charity, and they demanded accountability. In the end, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page agreed under pressure to display advertising alongside search results and eventually to allow an outside chief executive, Mr. Schmidt. Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to include ads within the news feed and transferred a favorite programmer to the mobile-advertising business, telling him, "Wouldn't it be fun to build a billion-dollar business in six months?"

Turns out that there were billion-dollar fortunes to be made by exploiting the foggy relationship between the public and tech companies. We all knew there was no such thing as a free lunch, an insight memorably encapsulated in 2010 by a commenter to the website MetaFilter, as, "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." But, really, how can you tell? So much of what is happening between the public and Silicon Valley is out of view - algorithms written and controlled by wizards who are able to extract value from your identity in ways you could never do for yourself.

Once Mr. Brin, Mr. Page and Mr. Zuckerberg reversed course on pursuing profits, they reported an odd thing - the public didn't seem to care. "Do you know the most common feedback, honestly?" Mr. Brin said in 2002 when asked about the reaction to Google's embrace of advertising. "It's 'What ads?' People either haven't done searches that bring them up or haven't noticed them. Or the third possibility is that they brought up the ads and they did notice them and they forgot about them, which I think is the most likely scenario."

Growth becomes the overriding motivation - something treasured for its own sake, not for anything it brings to the world.

Interactions between people and their computers were always going to be confusing, and that confusion would be easy for programmers to exploit. John McCarthy, the computer-science pioneer who nurtured the first hackers at M.I.T. and later ran Stanford's artificial intelligence lab, worried that programmers didn't understand their responsibilities. "Computers will end up with the psychology that is convenient to their designers (and they'll be fascist bastards if those designers don't think twice)," he wrote in 1983. "Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it."

Call it the Eliza problem. In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at M.I.T., unveiled a computer program, Eliza, which imitated a psychotherapist. It would, by rote, inquire about your feelings toward your parents or try to get you talking by rephrasing what you said in the form of a question. The program immediately touched a nerve, becoming a national phenomenon, to the surprise of Mr. Weizenbaum. For example, The New York Times swooned: "Computer Is Being Taught to Understand English."

Eliza understood nothing, in truth, and could never reach any shared insight with a "patient." Eliza mechanically responded to whatever appeared on the screen. A typical therapy session quickly devolved into a Monty Python sketch. (Patient: You are not very aggressive, but I think you don't want me to notice that. Eliza: What makes you think I am not very aggressive? Patient: You don't argue with me. Eliza: Why do you think I don't argue with you? Patient: You are afraid of me. Eliza: Does it please you to believe I am afraid of you?)

Imagine Mr. Weizenbaum's surprise when his secretary looked up from her computer and interrupted her exchanges with Eliza to say to him, "Would you mind leaving the room, please?" She wanted privacy for a conversation with a machine! Mr. Weizenbaum, appalled, suddenly saw the potential for mischief by programmers who could manipulate computers and potentially the rest of us. He soon switched gears and devoted his remaining years to protesting what he considered the amorality of his computer science peers, frequently referring to his experiences as a young refugee from Nazi Germany.

In his epic anti-A.I. work from the mid-1970s, "Computer Power and Human Reason," Mr. Weizenbaum described the scene at computer labs. "Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice," he wrote. "They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers."

He was concerned about them as young students lacking perspective about life and was worried that these troubled souls could be our new leaders. Neither Mr. Weizenbaum nor Mr. McCarthy mentioned, though it was hard to miss, that this ascendant generation were nearly all white men with a strong preference for people just like themselves. In a word, they were incorrigible, accustomed to total control of what appeared on their screens. "No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful," Mr. Weizenbaum wrote, "has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops."

Welcome to Silicon Valley, 2017.

As Mr. Weizenbaum feared, the current tech leaders have discovered that people trust computers and have licked their lips at the possibilities. The examples of Silicon Valley manipulation are too legion to list: push notifications, surge pricing, recommended friends, suggested films, people who bought this also bought that. Early on, Facebook realized there was a hurdle to getting people to stay logged on. "We came upon this magic number that you needed to find 10 friends," Mr. Zuckerberg recalled in 2011. "And once you had 10 friends, you had enough content in your newsfeed that there would just be stuff on a good enough interval where it would be worth coming back to the site." Facebook would design its site for new arrivals so that it was all about finding people to "friend."

The 10 friends rule is an example of a favored manipulation of tech companies, the network effect. People will use your service - as lame as it may be - if others use your service. This was tautological reasoning that nonetheless proved true: If everyone is on Facebook, then everyone is on Facebook. You need to do whatever it takes to keep people logging in, and if rivals emerge, they must be crushed or, if stubbornly resilient, acquired.

We need to break up these online monopolies because if a few people make the decisions about how we communicate, shop, learn the news, again, do we control our own society?

Growth becomes the overriding motivation - something treasured for its own sake, not for anything it brings to the world. Facebook and Google can point to a greater utility that comes from being the central repository of all people, all information, but such market dominance has obvious drawbacks, and not just the lack of competition. As we've seen, the extreme concentration of wealth and power is a threat to our democracy by making some people and companies unaccountable.

In addition to their power, tech companies have a tool that other powerful industries don't: the generally benign feelings of the public. To oppose Silicon Valley can appear to be opposing progress, even if progress has been defined as online monopolies; propaganda that distorts elections; driverless cars and trucks that threaten to erase the jobs of millions of people; the Uberization of work life, where each of us must fend for ourselves in a pitiless market.

As is becoming obvious, these companies do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. We need greater regulation, even if it impedes the introduction of new services. If we can't stop their proposals - if we can't say that driverless cars may not be a worthy goal, to give just one example - then are we in control of our society? We need to break up these online monopolies because if a few people make the decisions about how we communicate, shop, learn the news, again, do we control our own society?

Out of curiosity, the other day I searched "cellphones" on Google. Before finding even a mildly questioning article about cellphones, I paged down through ads for phones and lists of phones for sale, guides to buying phones and maps with directions to stores that sell phones, some 20 results in total. Somewhere, a pair of idealistic former graduate students must be saying: "See! I told you so!"

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Opinion | Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

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Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka LATE last month, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a brief post on Facebook at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, asking his friends for forgiveness not just for his personal failures but also for his professional ones, especially "the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together."

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In the winter of 1906, the year San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake and SOS became the international distress signal, Britain's Punch magazine published a dark joke about the future of technology.

Under the headline, "Forecasts for 1907," a black and white cartoon showed a well-dressed Edwardian couple sitting in a London park. The man and woman are turned away from each other, antennae protruding from their hats. In their laps are little black boxes, spitting out ticker tape.

A caption reads: "These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady is receiving an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results."

The cartoonist was going for broad humour, but today the image looks prophetic. A century after it was published, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone. Today, thanks to him, we can sit in parks and not only receive amatory messages and racing results, but summon all the world's knowledge with a few taps of our thumbs, listen to virtually every song ever recorded and communicate instantaneously with everyone we know.

More than two billion people around the world, including three-quarters of Canadians, now have this magic at their fingertips - and it's changing the way we do countless things, from taking photos to summoning taxis. But smartphones have also changed us - changed our natures in elemental ways, reshaping the way we think and interact. For all their many conveniences, it is here, in the way they have changed not just industries or habits but people themselves, that the joke of the cartoon has started to show its dark side.

The evidence for this goes beyond the carping of Luddites. It's there, cold and hard, in a growing body of research by psychiatrists, neuroscientists, marketers and public health experts. What these people say - and what their research shows - is that smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines in work-life balance and hours less of family time.

They have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively. They make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense then for all intents and purposes.

Consider this: In the first five years of the smartphone era, the proportion of Americans who said internet use interfered with their family time nearly tripled, from 11 per cent to 28 per cent. And this: Smartphone use takes about the same cognitive toll as losing a full night's sleep. In other words, they are making us worse at being alone and worse at being together.

Ten years into the smartphone experiment, we may be reaching a tipping point. Buoyed by mounting evidence and a growing chorus of tech-world jeremiahs, smartphone users are beginning to recognize the downside of the convenient little mini-computer we keep pressed against our thigh or cradled in our palm, not to mention buzzing on our bedside table while we sleep.

Nowhere is the dawning awareness of the problem with smartphones more acute than in the California idylls that created them. Last year, ex-employees of Google, Apple and Facebook, including former top executives, began raising the alarm about smartphones and social media apps, warning especially of their effects on children.

Chris Marcellino, who helped develop the iPhone's push notifications at Apple, told The Guardian last fall that smartphones hook people using the same neural pathways as gambling and drugs.

Sean Parker, ex-president of Facebook, recently admitted that the world-bestriding social media platform was designed to hook users with spurts of dopamine, a complicated neurotransmitter released when the brain expects a reward or accrues fresh knowledge. "You're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology," he said. "[The inventors] understood this, consciously, and we did it anyway."

Peddling this addiction made Mr. Parker and his tech-world colleagues absurdly rich. Facebook is now valued at a little more than half a trillion dollars. Global revenue from smartphone sales reached $435-billion (U.S.).

Now, some of the early executives of these tech firms look on their success as tainted.

"I feel tremendous guilt," said Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president of user growth at Facebook, in a public talk in November. "I think we all knew in the back of our minds... something bad could happen.

"The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works," he went on gravely, before a hushed audience at Stanford business school. "It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave."

None of the Bay Area whistle-blowers have been louder than Tristan Harris, a former star product manager at Google. He has spent the past several years of his life telling people to use less of the technologies he helped create through a non-profit called Time Well Spent, which aims to raise awareness among consumers about the dangers of the attention economy, and pressure the tech world to design its products more ethically. Judging by the momentum his movement is suddenly building - he receives hundreds of requests for speaking engagements a month - his message is being heard.

Policy makers and government leaders are among those listening. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Mr. Harris at the Global Progress Summit in Montreal last September. The PM's office wouldn't provide details of the session, but if the federal government is considering restrictions on cellphone use, it wouldn't be alone. This fall, France plans to ban mobile phones from primary and secondary schools, including between classes and during lunch breaks. "We must come up with a way of protecting pupils from loss of concentration via screens and phones," said French education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer.

Business leaders are grappling with the issue, too. In a recent blog post, Bank of England analyst Dan Nixon argues that the distraction wrought by smartphones may be hurting productivity. It takes office workers an average of 25 minutes to get back on task after an interruption, he notes, while workers who are habitually interrupted by e-mail become likelier to "self-interrupt" with little procrastination breaks.

The TD Centre in downtown Toronto was channelling that business case against smartphones when it placed a coaxing poster in its lobby recently. "Disconnect to reconnect," the poster read. "Put your phone down and be present."

Yes, people are always put off by the strange power of new technologies. Socrates thought writing would melt the brains of Athenian youths by undermining their ability to memorize. Erasmus cursed the "swarm of new books" plaguing post-Gutenberg Europe. In its infancy, TV was derided as a "vast wasteland."

But while previous generations may have cried wolf about new media, "it's different this time," Mr. Harris says. Unlike TVs and desktop computers, which are typically relegated to a den or home office, smartphones go with us everywhere. And they know us. The stories that pop up in your iPhone newsfeed and your social media apps are selected by algorithms to grab your eye.

Smartphones are "literally using the power of billion-dollar computers to figure out what to feed you," Mr. Harris said. That's why you can't look away.

Socrates was wrong about writing and Erasmus was wrong about books. But after all, the boy who cried wolf was eaten in the end. And in smartphones, our brains may have finally met their match.

"It's Homo sapiens minds against the most powerful supercomputers and billions of dollars .... It's like bringing a knife to a space laser fight," Mr. Harris said. "We're going to look back and say, 'Why on earth did we do this?'"

If we have lost control over our relationship with smartphones, it is by design. In fact, the business model of the devices demands it. Because most popular websites and apps don't charge for access, the internet is financially sustained by eyeballs. That is, the longer and more often you spend staring at Facebook or Google, the more money they can charge advertisers.

To ensure that our eyes remain firmly glued to our screens, our smartphones - and the digital worlds they connect us to - internet giants have become little virtuosos of persuasion, cajoling us into checking them again and again - and for longer than we intend. Average users look at their phones about 150 times a day, according to some estimates, and about twice as often as they think they do, according to a 2015 study by British psychologists. .

Add it all up and North American users spend somewhere between three and five hours a day looking at their smartphones. As the New York University marketing professor Adam Alter points out, that means over the course of an average lifetime, most of us will spend about seven years immersed in our portable computers.

These companies have persuaded us to give over so much of our lives by exploiting a handful of human frailties. One of them is called novelty bias. It means our brains are suckers for the new. As the McGill neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains, we're wired this way to survive. In the infancy of our species, novelty bias kept us alert to dubious red berries and the growls of sabre-toothed tigers. But now it makes us twig helplessly to Facebook notifications and the buzz of incoming e-mail. That's why social media apps nag you to turn notifications on. They know that once the icons start flashing onto your lock screen, you won't be able to ignore them. It's also why Facebook switched the colour of its notifications from a mild blue to attention-grabbing red.

App designers know that nagging works. In Persuasive Technology, one of the most quietly influential books to come out of Silicon Valley in the past two decades, the Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg predicted that computers could and would take massive advantage of our susceptibility to prodding. "People get tired of saying no; everyone has a moment of weakness when it's easier to comply than to resist," he wrote. Published in 2002, Prof. Fogg's book now seems eerily prescient.

The makers of smartphone apps rightly believe that part of the reason we're so curious about those notifications is that people are desperately insecure and crave positive feedback with a kneejerk desperation. Matt Mayberry, who works at a California startup called Dopamine Labs, says it's common knowledge in the industry that Instagram exploits this craving by strategically withholding "likes" from certain users. If the photo-sharing app decides you need to use the service more often, it'll show only a fraction of the likes you've received on a given post at first, hoping you'll be disappointed with your haul and check back again in a minute or two. "They're tying in to your greatest insecurities," Mr. Mayberry said.

Some of the mental quirks smartphones exploit are obvious, others counterintuitive. The principle of "variable rewards" falls into the second camp. Discovered by the psychologist B.F. Skinner and his acolytes in a series of experiments on rats and pigeons, it predicts that creatures are likelier to seek out a reward if they aren't sure how often it will be doled out. Pigeons, for example, were found to peck a button for food more frequently if the food was dispensed inconsistently rather than reliably each time, the Columbia University law professor Tim Wu recounts in his recent book The Attention Merchants. So it is with social media apps: Though four out of five Facebook posts may be inane, the "bottomless," automatically refreshing feed always promises a good quip or bit of telling gossip just below the threshold of the screen, accessible with the rhythmic flick of thumb on glass. Likewise the hungry need to check email with every inbox buzz.

Apple has made a point of presenting the dopamine dispensers of the mobile internet in the most alluring possible package, one that people would want to and be able to use non-stop - even behind the wheel of a car. Weeks before the iPhone's launch, Apple gave out devices for senior staff to test in the real world. One engineer took the prototype on a test run to make sure it wasn't overly difficult to text and drive with, according to tech journalist Brian Merchant, who wrote a history of the iPhone .

The phone's most seductive quality was its screen. Throughout the iPhone's development, Mr. Jobs fought to proceed without a keyboard, making the screen larger and more immersive. As the product was about to ship , he slammed on the brakes and demanded the case recede infinitesimally so the screen could be made larger still. This was a jarring innovation. Time magazine's technology writer Lev Grossman was one of the first people outside Apple to see the iPhone, when he was sent to Cupertino, Calif., for a preview.

The screen's unique power to absorb attention quickly became clear, though. In his first piece about the iPhone after its launch, Mr. Grossman observed, "There's a powerful illusion that you're physically handling data with your fingers."

Though Mr. Grossman gave the iPhone some of its earliest rave reviews, that power to absorb that once seemed so dazzling, has come to trouble him. He now says the device has done more harm than good.

"We still haven't understood or accepted how completely smartphones have distorted our daily lives and our social lives, and just our relationships with ourselves and with the reality around us," he said. "We are divorced from ourselves and from the world - those relationships are now routed through our phones."

On some level, we know that smartphones are designed to be addictive. The way we talk about them is steeped in the language of dependence, albeit playfully: the CrackBerry, the Instagram fix, the Angry Bird binge.

But the best minds who have studied these devices are saying it's not really a joke. Consider the effect smartphones have on our ability to focus. In 2015, Microsoft Canada published a report indicating that the average human attention span had shrunk from 12 to eight seconds between 2000 and 2013. The finding was widely reported at the time and elicited some shock - for about eight seconds.

But John Ratey, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an expert on attention-deficit disorder, said the problem is actually getting worse. "We're not developing the attention muscles in our brain nearly as much as we used to," he said. In fact, Prof. Ratey has noticed a convergence between his ADD patients and the rest of the world. The symptoms of people with ADD and people with smartphones are "absolutely the same," he said.

A recent study of Chinese middle schoolers found something similar. Among more than 7,000 students, mobile phone ownership was found to be "significantly associated" with levels of inattention seen in people with attention-deficit disorder.

Maybe studies like these have gotten so little attention because we already know, vaguely, that smartphones dent concentration - how could a buzzing, flashing computer in our pocket have any other effect? But people tend to treat attention span like some discrete mental faculty, such as skill at arithmetic, that is nice to have but that plenty of folks manage fine without.

Valuable as it is, attention is also easy to squander. When taking in information, our minds are terrible at discerning between the significant and the trivial. So if we're trying to work out a dense mental problem in our heads and our phone pings, we will pay attention to the ping automatically and stop focusing on the mental problem. That weak attentional filter is a bigger shortcoming in the smartphone era than ever before.

The average American in 2007 was absorbing the equivalent of 174 newspapers a day, via sources as wide-ranging as TV, texting and the internet - five times the amount of information they took in about two decades earlier .

In the smartphone era, that figure can only have grown. Our brains just aren't built for the geysers of information our devices train at them. Inevitably, we end up paying attention to all kinds of things that aren't valuable or interesting, just because they flash up on our iPhone screens.

"Our attentional systems evolved over tens of thousands of years when the world was much slower," Dr. Levitin explained in an interview.

All that distraction adds up to a loss of raw brain power. Workers at a British company who multitasked on electronic media - a decent proxy for frequent smartphone use - were found in a 2014 study to lose about the same quantity of IQ as people who had smoked cannabis or lost a night's sleep.

Even people who are disciplined about their smartphone use feel the effect.

The devices exert such a magnetic pull on our minds that just the effort of resisting the temptation to look at them seems to take a toll on our mental performance. That's what Adrian Ward and his colleagues at the University of Texas business school found in an experiment last year. They had three groups of people take a test that required their full concentration. One group had their phones face down on the table, one had them in their bags or pockets and the last group left them in another room. None of the test-takers were allowed to check their devices during the test. But even so, the closer at hand the phones were, the worse the groups performed.

"It's [one] of these things that's pretty crazy and yet comports pretty well with how life feels," Prof. Ward said.

Some people might be willing to trade 10 IQ points for the pleasures of their smartphone - especially the social pleasures. We've never been so capable of constant communication with others and for extroverts, that should be a blessing.

But 10 years into this age of connectedness, we have learned something troubling: Being connected to everyone all the time makes us less attentive to the people we care about most. Nowhere is the alienating power of smartphones more troubling than in the relationship between parents and children. Put simply, smartphones are making mothers and fathers pay less attention to their kids and it could be causing emotional harm. Lactation consultants in Canada and the United States have begun noticing the prevalence of women texting and scrolling through their phones while they breastfeed, breaking valuable eye contact with their baby.

"It is a whole new phenomenon," said Attie Sandink, a breastfeeding educator based in Burlington, Ont. "It has on occasion become quite problematic."

Researchers at Cambridge University showed recently that eye contact synchronizes the brainwaves of infant and parent, which helps with communication and learning. Meeting each other's gaze, Ms. Sandink says, amounts to "a silent language between the baby and the mom." That doesn't mean breastfeeding mothers need to lock eyes with their children 24 hours a day. But while Ms. Sandink emphasizes that she isn't trying to shame women, she worries that texting moms may be missing out on vital bonding time with their babies.

"While texting or communicating on their cellphones, do mothers possibly miss some of their [infants'] feeding cues or behavioural cues? Is the mother losing the hormonal interaction or interplay that baby signals to her?" Ms. Sandink said in an e-mail. "These are important questions to ask."

Maybe it's best for children to learn young that their parents frequently find their phone more absorbing than them, because they will learn sooner or later. Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist and research associate in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, interviewed 1,000 kids between the ages of 4 and 18 for her 2013 book The Big Disconnect. Many of them said they no longer run to the door to greet their parents because the adults are so often on their phones when they get home.

And it gets worse once they're through the door. One of the smartphone's terrible, mysterious powers, from a child's perspective, is its ability "to pull you away instantly, anywhere, anytime," Dr. Steiner-Adair writes. Because what's happening on the smartphone screen is inscrutable to others, parents often seem to have simply gotten sucked into another dimension, leaving their kid behind. "To children, the feeling is often one of endless frustration, fatigue and loss."

The digital drift affecting families shows up in national statistics. The Center for the Digital Future, an American think tank, found that between 2006 and 2011, the average number of hours American families spent together per month dropped by nearly a third, from 26 to about 18.

Distracted parents may even be putting their children at risk of physical harm, Dr. Steiner-Adair says. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control found a 12-per-cent spike in injuries to children under 5 between 2007 and 2010, after a long decline. The years coincide with the crash of the American economy, but also with the infancy of the iPhone .

If there's a silver lining to all of this grim evidence, it's that the wages of smartphone addiction are beginning to take hold in people's minds. When Dr. Steiner-Adair gives public talks, as she did in Maryland recently, parents often commiserate with her afterward.

"They all say roughly, 'That was terrific and terrifying. We're changing our family's MO as of today,'" she said. "Just about everyone knows there's something terribly wrong."

She's not the only person to notice the beginning of a turning point in the way people relate to their mobile computers. Just recently, Prof. Wu was thinking of taking out a smartphone in his daughter's preschool class to play a song when he realized it would be taboo, given growing concerns about kids' screen time - like "taking out a toy gun."

"So it spreads," he said. "It's like a norm."

Prof. Wu's right: The belief that smartphones can be socially and mentally harmful - and that their overuse should be stigmatized - is spreading into the culture in little ways. A recent Dilbert cartoon showed a doctor looking wide-eyed at a medical chart and telling his patient, "The MRI shows that your brain has been hijacked by dopamine pirates." (When the patient asks, "Are you writing me a prescription," the doctor replies, "No, I'm buying stock in those companies.")

Even comedian Will Ferrell has joined the struggle. In a series of videos produced by Common Sense Media for the U.S. nonprofit's #DeviceFreeDinner campaign this fall, the actor plays a smartphone-addled father whose family tries to lure him away from his screen. In one clip, Mr. Ferrell's wife and kids persuade him to place his phone in a basket on the dinner table, but the father finds a loophole: "As long as it's in the basket, though, I can technically still touch it, right?" he says, his finger creeping toward the screen of his imprisoned device.

A culture shift is happening in Silicon Valley too. An ex-Google product manager, Ben Tauber, recently became executive director of the rejuvenated Esalen Institute, a former hippie hotel in California where techies have taken to visiting for unplugged weekends of soul searching about the plugged-in world they've created.

Still, for all the hints of change in the air, Mr. Harris remains on high alert. Billions of people continue to be distracted and turned away from loved ones thanks to their smartphones. And untold billions of dollars, wielded by some of the world's biggest companies, are devoted to keeping it that way. In fact, every financial incentive spurring the flanks of these firms is telling them to make smartphones more compulsively usable and therefore more damaging, not less.

Mr. Harris and other smartphone skeptics are starting to hatch ideas, some more plausible than others, about how the devices might be made less toxic. Imagine, Mr. Harris said, if Facebook's app delivered all your notifications at once, at a given time of day, like the mail. Prof. Wu, meanwhile, has suggested that tech companies should develop a phone designed to protect users' attention and time. He would pay double, he said.

The trouble with reforming these products, of course, is that the versions we have now are kind of amazing - fun to use and wildly convenient. That's why they're so addictive.

The lesson we're slowly beginning to learn, though, is that they're not a harmless vice. Used the way we currently use them, smartphones keep us from being our best selves. The world is starting to make up its mind about whether it's worth it and whether the sugary hits of digital pleasure justify being worse, both alone and together.

We need to make up our minds soon, Mr. Harris said.

"I worry that we're not going to get this fast enough."
DIGITAL DISTRACTIONS: MORE FROM THE GLOBE AND MAIL

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Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can't you put it down?

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A decade ago, smart devices promised to change the way we think and interact, and they have - but not by making us smarter. Eric Andrew-Gee explores the growing body of scientific evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds