How to radically improve your digital nutrition - with Dr Kaitlyn Regehr

0:01Hi, I'm Sophie and this is Age Well with Dr Sophie Shotter, a space devoted to all things health, wellness and longevity. Because for me, ageing well is about looking and feeling like the best possible version of ourselves, inside as well as out. So together with my producer Fee, I'll be deep diving into the latest research, sifting fact from fiction. I'll also be talking to all kinds of trusted experts, tapping into their knowledge, along with bringing you conversations from a range of interesting women, and men finding out how they age well. So this is my show. Welcome along. And as always, thank you so much for listening.

0:45Caitlin, your work is as fascinating as it is important. You're an associate professor at UCL, where you lecture on digital literacy and the ethical implications of social media and AI. You've provided consultation to the House of Lords, members of Parliament and also to the Metropolitan Police. You've helped create legislation on various digital technologies. And you're now the author of this terrific book, Smartphone Nation, Why We're All Addicted to Screens and What You Can Do About It. I particularly enjoyed your Times interview where you talked about what I think is the elephant in the room, which is that it's not just children addicted to phones, it's us adults too.

1:24Something that I certainly tried to tackle a few years ago. Still probably haven't got it perfect. I wondered firstly, what are some of the habits we see in ourselves and in others that we could have this addiction? Is it things like responding too quickly to emails or continually checking for messages? Gosh, I mean, I think that our addictions present differently in different people depending on how we use our devices. For some of us, it becomes very reactive and that these are devices that we stroke. And through that stroking, arguably developed feelings of love and dependency and that it's now become a compulsion for a lot of us.

2:10Now, what that compulsion is based around and what are the specific applications that we go to will differ. And I take a pretty broad approach to social media usage and to screen usage. You know, there'll be some people who are listening today that say, well, I'm not on social media, but I would suggest that if you are consuming your news by way of a news app, which may be algorithmically fed to you, that is that although you're getting reputable news from reputable sources, you are getting a very kind of narrow view of the articles which are available, or if you are using your devices for your shopping habits, if that's where you do a lot of your purchasing, that you probably have developed, if not addiction, that you have developed a kind of compulsion to using these platforms.

3:05And that's before we even get into, you know, more traditional social media use when we're thinking about things like Instagram or TikTok, which, of course, can be incredibly addictive platforms. Thank you for that, Caitlin. And like Sophie, my smartphone addiction is something that I am trying to work on, but I'm not always succeeding. So the book is great. There also appear to be these, I guess, gateway habits to this phone obsession. For example, I love this term, sharenting, so continually posting up about our kids or just perhaps this sharing culture in and of itself, even if it's apparently a positive share.

3:45Yeah. So, I mean, let's first of all touch upon sharenting that you mentioned there. So sharenting is the process through which we share our children online. And I think there's a few things to note here. First of all, A lot of this is not our fault. Okay. We as millennial parents or Gen X parents came into our adulthoods being told that the appropriate way to celebrate a success was to share it on social media. That is what we were told to do. And so now the appropriate way, the socially appropriate way to share a birth announcement is not through taking out an article in the Times that may have accompanied our own births, but rather to make a post on social media.

4:53And that posting may even have started before the child was born. People may have posted their scan on social media or their positive pregnancy test on social media. So we have been trained to share those successes. And, of course, for most of us, our children are our greatest successes. And we are proud of them. And we want to share that. Where this becomes problematic is around how private and how protected our social media accounts are. There are several implications for this. One is that we are datafying our children from a very early age. So we tend to think about having to worry about young people online when they get a smartphone.

5:40I would argue that we are introducing them to the online space much, much earlier than that. And that goes beyond their use of tablets and their use of YouTube, which maybe we can get into in a moment, but actually often by the way we share them. And there have been campaigns to inform parents about this, particularly around sharing of back-to-school photos where you share where your child goes every day and that there could be safety risks associated with that. But there's also potential longer-term implications. Barclays Bank has come out to say that two-thirds of the fraud that they estimate that will be carried out by the year 2030 will be carried out against children currently being shared online.

6:26Wow. Because a lot of the data that a fraudster needs will be shared currently through parents' social media posts. So that might be their birth date. That might be the childhood street you grew up on, the names of your childhood pets. Most of the things that we use as our passwords. And so what we really need to be thinking about when we're talking about sharentine is not just the protection of our children now, not just even the datification of our children, but the protection of our children in the future. So around sharentine, I tend to use as a rule of thumb that if you would send a private message to that individual of your child, if you would send a picture of your child to that individual, they're allowed to be on your private family account.

7:20If you wouldn't, you might want to think about whether they should be looking at photos of your kids. So sharing teen is absolutely a practice that I think parents need to consider for themselves. Do you think that some of these behaviours that certainly I'm very guilty of are narcissistic? Certainly I share a lot less than I used to but I don't judge others for sharing more. It's just something that I think as I've maybe grown a little older and wiser, I've built a social media following of just over 41 ,000, I think, at the time of recording. I don't have 41 ,000 friends and I don't know who's on there.

8:04So, you know, I actually have curated a closer friends list. So if I want to share something more personal, which I really rarely do, I'll put it up. But it's taken real thought because, as you said, I think we all just grew up with social media and sharing in this way became the expected norm. Yes. And then it makes you think, why am I doing it? That's right. I think that's a great approach, Sophie, to kind of distinguish these two types of sharing, that we have professional forms of sharing and we have personal forms of sharing. I mean, there is some questions about whether we were ever meant to look at our faces as much as we do.

8:43Very true. We definitely look at our faces a lot. And there has been a lot of debate about whether that's, one, a good thing for us. And also what that's led to in terms of the kind of beauty cults that have come out of all of this and the pressures that we now put on ourselves simply because we not only look at our faces so much, but we look at everyone else's often filtered, highly polished photos. And so, yes, in terms particularly for young women, this is an issue, but I think it's an issue for all of us, that increasingly this constant consuming, not just of others, but of ourself, is an incredibly new phenomenon.

9:32And even within the workplace, I mean, I think the fact that we spend so much time on Zoom calls now or on Teams calls where we look at our faces as we speak all the time is a very new phenomenon. And it has led to, unfortunately for a lot of people, heightened levels of self-consciousness and body dysmorphia. and I so I don't think that it's necessarily that we're narcissistic I think we are forced to look at our faces an awful lot and I don't think that's all always such a good thing no and we also see ourselves very differently with the amount of time we see ourselves on screen now than if we were to check our appearance in a mirror when we went to the bathroom what photography does to our faces what zoom does to our faces you know just before this I was on a long video call in the kitchen where the light strikes the side of my face and you know if I didn't know better I would go oh my god what's going on with my lower face and of course what we're seeing a lot of the time isn't real but if you don't understand that really well it really affects your self-esteem.

10:48Yeah, of course. And that's a concern for all of us. It's a particular concern for teenage girls. And if we think about social media consumption, social media is, and I'm sure we'll get into this in a moment, but the whole business model is to keep us there and to keep us hooked so that advertisers can access our attention. That's the business model. And people are more likely to buy things if they feel bad about themselves. That's not new. That's not a new phenomenon. The whole advertising model is based on suggesting some kind of lack that we might have and offering a product to fulfill that lack.

11:33And I think one of a colleague of mine, Sarah Wynne Williams, who recently brought out Careless People, her book about her time at Meta, she articulates very clearly that there is a huge amount of emotional manipulation that is at play here. That's actually promoted to advertisers as a good thing. And she gives the example that if a teenage girl pulls down a picture of herself, that's probably a really good time to sell her weight loss products. This is not a secret. So I think one thing that we need to be articulating is not just that, yes, looking at images of highly polished, beautiful people might make you feel a certain way, but actually that there is a conscious, manipulative effort to make you feel bad in order to exploit that and commercialize it.

12:33So, thanks to your book, I've learned more about this concept of the attention economy. As you say, this was first talked about as far back as 1971. And this idea of, as you just said, advertisers creating revenue from someone's attention. Can you explain for my listeners what this is and how it works in really simple terms? We're not really the consumers of social media. we are the product or rather our time and attention is the product which is sold to advertisers that is the business model and what that is essentially is something that is referred to as the attention economy or what scholars like Nick Cernick have referred to as the algorithmic economy.

13:23And what my work looks at is the way in which through that attention economy, hate, harm, or disinformation can flourish. It can be algorithmically prioritized because it's more attention-grabbing. Because unfortunately, disinformation is often more attention-grabbing than truth. It will hold our attention longer or harm or things that hook into our insecurities, things that initiate an emotive response will often hold us there just a little bit longer. And it's that extra engagement, that extra attention that advertisers are paying for. And so when we're scrolling on social media, I think it's really important that we're aware of this process.

14:17We're aware that there is a very concerted effort to hold us there, to make us feel a certain way, and that we want to be as much as possible, as much more active in these processes. So we move away from being a passive product into being an active participant so that we become much more intentional about what is being algorithmically fed to us. And that's how we kind of push back and fight back against that attention economy. Yeah, you talk a lot about algorithms. Can you firstly offer a simple explainer on what an algorithm is? Because we all mention this word, but I'm not sure whether everyone fully understands it.

15:03And also anything interesting about algorithms. But also, second part, why and how we need to, as you brilliantly put it, game our algorithms. So an algorithm is simply a recipe, really. It's simply a set of rules through which something, and in the case of social media, something is offered to us. So based on our behaviors online, based on what we do, what we view, what we linger upon, algorithms make decisions on what to feed us next. And I think we can see these ideas from a really early age. I mean, I talked to my reception age daughter about this, that algorithms make our choices for us in the digital space and we want to make our own choices.

15:51So when we talk about gaming our algorithm or what some refer to as algorithmic resistance, what we're doing is we're simply making our own choices. So we're going to decide what we want to see more of and what we want to see less of. And then we are going to be active about that. So you actively search for things that you want to see and you quickly move past things you don't. Don't linger upon it. Don't comment on it. Quickly move past those things so that you're actually training the machine learning. You're switching it up and it will readjust. And that's what we want to do in our own lives.

16:39And that's what we want our young people to be doing so that they're becoming much more intentional about their use of technology and they're not just consuming whatever is algorithmically fed to them. I had no idea it was even possible to adjust what's shown to you on social media. And I remember, I think it was Rosie Green, an amazing journalist and author, who posted about this. And so I could go through and actually say, actually, I don't want to see adverts about this or that. And I think that's really empowering as well. It is really empowering. Yeah, that we can become much more active in these processes.

17:18And that's really just, you know, making the decision to do so. It's deciding, actually, I don't want to doom scroll. I don't want to be consuming or putting into my body, into my mind, whatever algorithms want me to, but rather I'm going to be much more intentional about this. and that is a really empowering place to be you don't have to eat everything that it feeds you and I would encourage people not to. Can you also briefly explain cookies and targeted advertising and any wider thoughts about protecting our own privacy and not being tracked any practical tips would be really useful but I also wonder about the flip side which is how useful it feels when relevant content does crop up for example when my laptop remembers my address for online shopping yeah so I mean and this is the difficult thing about tracking or even about you know algorithms there's a lot of times that we really like it we find it useful and that so much data is being kept about us.

18:30And it's really, I think, up to the individual how much tracking or how much data you are comfortable. If you feel that targeted advertising is not a good thing for you, you don't like the amount of ads you receive, there are things you can do about that. you could decide that you want to use different browsers. So you could use one browser for work and one browser for your online shopping and one browser for doing things around your kids and your life admin. You might do that. You can also use the do not track functions on some applications. But the other thing you can do is you can move away from platforms like Google, those really mainstream platforms and you can move towards something like a DuckDuckGo, which, for example, won't track you in the same way.

19:31So I think it's really, again, it's about being much more intentional about these processes. And I think one thing that has happened in the digital space, because the usability is so great, because it's so easy to use that we often will just kind of go with whatever is offered to us. We click yes on all the terms and conditions. And we don't so much stop and think about what parts of this do we like, what parts of this do we not like, and reject the bits we don't like, just like we do in the offline world. We do that much more in the offline world. And I'd like to encourage people to do more of it.

20:20I mean, there is an application you can go to, which is specifically about terms and conditions. And you can type in your most frequently used applications. And it will highlight to you some of the things you should be worried about. You know, some of those red zone things that you would have, I think it's called terms and conditions did not read because none of us do. And it actually spells out for you, you know, here's the bit you should have read. And this is something you might want to be concerned about. And, you know, that's just another way that we can become much more informed and much more intentional about these processes.

21:00It sounds to me like a lot of us need to take, I don't know, half a day, couple of hours and just really look at some of this and look at our digital hygiene and actually put into place some of the things that you're talking about. And I think, Sophie, that's why you wanted to have Caitlin on the podcast, because we talk about health from all kinds of perspectives, and we hadn't yet covered digital health. So it's really good to chat to you. Do our phones, Caitlin, listen to us? Because I'm convinced from content on my social media, following conversations with my husband, that they do. No. I mean, what you're experiencing is the kind of incredible accuracy and the incredible sensitivity of these processes.

21:47They are incredibly predictive. So these applications often will predict that we want to buy a new swimsuit before we even fully know we want to buy a new swimsuit. That is how they are able to often predict that we are pregnant before anyone else knows that we're pregnant. And I think the thing that bothers me most about the amount of information and how hyper predictive these systems are is that we don't have a great line of communication or any consistent line of communication between what these companies know and safeguarding responsibilities. And so that we accept that they will know what trainers we want next season.

22:39We accept that they will know that we are pregnant. But do we also accept that they know if our child is self-harming, for example, or that our child is suicidal? Probably not, but of course they do. And so I think, again, to go back to becoming much more informed about these processes is that you can decide whether you're comfortable with you being so predictable to these systems. Are you comfortable being that predictable? And if you're not, you might want to change your user behaviors so that you are not tracked in the same way and so that you are not so easily targeted in these ways. So the big question then is how do we improve, as you call it, our digital nutrition?

23:30Chapter five of your book offers some really inspiring new thoughts and ideas. So I'd really encourage people to buy the book. I have a copy and it's brilliant and there's a lot there that can really help. But for the podcast, can you pick out just a handful of tools or new habits that we can introduce? Sure. Thanks so much for that. I mean, I think in writing the book, what I wanted to do was offer people some guidance that was really tangible and that was useful. So you mentioned we need to take half a day to sort these things out. That's not even what I'm asking people to do. I've tried to make it as easy as possible in bite-sized chunks to implement some safe and healthy tools into their lives to take greater control over these processes.

24:19With respect to digital nutrition, that idea came about because researchers were increasingly suggesting that screen time, that is the old guidance we used to give people that we should try and limit our screen consumption to a certain amount a day was based on some very good childhood obesity stats. So that is to say, if kids in particular were in front of screens all the time, then they weren't running around as much. And that was probably bad for their physical well-being. And that's absolutely right. Obviously, running around outside is probably better for kids than being in front of a screen.

25:04But what that guidance didn't do was talk very much about mental health well-being. And it only talked about quantity and not about quality. So it talked about the quantity of screen consumption, not the quality. So by that old style guidance, you could have one individual watching a David Attenborough film with their family stopping for breaks, doing collective viewing, and another individual on an iPad with headphones watching YouTube shorts. And by that old screen time guidance, that consumption would have counted as the same. And it's not the same. The other thing is that screen time guidance did not do a lot for adult health and well-being.

25:46It was really focused on kids. And so with digital nutrition, I offer kind of an old style food pyramid, like a food guide, and it breaks down different types of consumption into categories. And that there are some types of consumption that can be good for us, like FaceTiming your grandmother and or interactive forms of viewing. And then there are passive forms of viewing, which is more like junk food or worse, potentially depending on what that content is. Generally, what we want to do for both kids and adults is as much as possible have engaged active viewing, which is interactive educational forms of engagement, kind of much more nutritious forms of engagement, engagement that makes you feel good and positive versus passive forms of kind of scrolling, particularly with short-form content, fragmented attention spans, and that makes you feel not so good.

26:56And so first of all, we are trying to become much more nuanced in our thinking about that consumption. and then a lot of the recommendations in this book are about once you figure out what your current diet is be honest with yourself what are the ways in which you're currently consuming how do you then decide to change it one of the suggestions i give for thinking about your current consumption and your current habits is that you open one of your most frequently used social media apps with a partner, like so your spouse, you open up that application, you scroll through a normative period of usage.

27:40And if your partner says to you, huh, you're getting a lot of images of beautiful kitchens we can't afford, you might want to consider if that's the best thing for you. You might want to consider if that makes you feel good. If you're getting a lot of adverts for anti-aging products all the time, again, you might want to think about if that's the best thing for you. And I think it's really important to do that with a partner because we often think that our feeds look like everyone else's and they don't. They're specific to us and often you need an outsider to point out what's a bit strange about your feed and what's problematic.

28:25Now, this can feel really cringy for people to do this because these are hyper-personalized forms of viewing. This is not like watching the TV. This is hyper-personalized. It says a lot about us often. I'm just thinking about all the dogs, Caitlin, on my algorithm. But anyway, carry on. I mean, it's so specific to every person. I mean, I was having this conversation with a journalist one time and they said to me, you know, it's a good point because I get just, Every day I get images of beached whales and I'm just so worried about the whales. I almost can't stand it. And it was so personal to her.

29:05And that, you know, I think it's good that we open up these feeds. It's good that we open up these information silos to really recognize that we are consuming different content than the person sitting next to us on the bus or even our own sofa so that we can start to think about, is that what we want our feed to look like? And if it's not, then we go back to that gaming, that algorithm in order to make a change. Yeah. And I also really like your comments in the book about grayscaling our phones, but let's leave that to the side because I want people to, people should get the book and then they can find out more.

29:43And also, and this is kind of going into a slightly different lane, but it links into something you were saying actually. We liked your comments around families and communal viewing, for example, watching a film together versus this silent viewing you've mentioned where everyone sat together but watching very different things on their phones passively. For me, as a parent of 19-year-old twins and a 21-year-old, this deeply resonated. I'm continually telling them that they're ruining their brains and setting themselves up for digital dementia. What are your thoughts on this in terms of brain health?

30:16So this advice is going to differ depending on the age of your kids, of course. But generally, there is a lot to be said for collective viewing. And if you look at the APA, the American Psychiatric Association guidance, that is not about screen time anymore. That is about interactive viewing, as I've discussed, and collective viewing. So collective viewing is instead of sitting alone in our room with ear pods on watching short form content on TikTok, a healthier form of viewing is to sit down together in a collective space, pause for breaks, have a conversation, use that viewing as a jumping off point for a conversation so that you are encouraging socialization, you're encouraging critical thought, and you're also engaging in often longer form viewing so that maybe you're watching an old movie together.

31:17I have little kids, but I'm big into putting on movies that were made before 1975 because I think that there's a slower pace often to those films, And I think that's really good that we kind of need to focus on longer form narratives because those are better for our attention spans and those can help us focus. So I think where you can open up these silos, the fact that we have become so siloed in our viewing behaviors is a very new phenomenon. We used to watch the TV together. And before that, we used to go as a community to a cinema. and we would collectively view. And the more that you can try and replicate a more collective, interactive form of viewing, the better.

32:07The other thing I would say is where you can, particularly with younger kids, you want to get them off algorithmically driven content. So there is a big difference between consuming YouTube shorts, which is the dominant social media platform in this country for kids, it's about 80 percent of kids from the age of three are on YouTube that is a very different type of content than having your kids watch the BBC and watch regulated content that is programmed by a children's commissioner and I'm a big fan of live terrestrial TV TV that has been curated that isn't just 20 blueys all in a row, but rather there is diversity of content.