My Interview with Lawrence Ampofo, digital ethics and digital wellbeing consultant

Q: How did you get interested in the work of digital mindfulness?

A: I got interested in this through Academia. My PhD was on computational propaganda. I wanted to understand the ways you could see political behavior taking place online and of course that is really passé now because of the obvious. But in 2006, when I submitted the proposal, there was no Twitter. Facebook was not yet out of colleges, so you had very rudimental social media. 

Once you start to look at that behavior and technology, you start to understand where the technology has politics or not. That was the thing that really got me into digital well-being. If social media embodies the biases and the politics of the designers and the engineers. If you are a twenty something in Silicon Valley and your programming something you are going to put in, liberal, democratic, capitalistic biases. I wanted to know then what impact that would then have on people in general. There were very few people who were actually studying this. Around 2012, I finished. There were lots of people who were writing articles saying that, “Yes, the internet is making us stupid.” It is really easy to find stuff like that, the critical stuff. In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a famous article Is the Internet Making Us Stupid? It was in the Atlantic. He and Sherry Turkle wrote Alone Together, Alex Pang, you probably know all of these books. There were lots of people saying, “Yes, the internet is bad,” but no one was saying, “What do we do about it?” Not only that, but also what is the science behind this? That is really how I got invested into this because on the one hand you had people saying the internet is bad and social media is really bad. We need to do things like digital detoxing to get rid of it. On the other hand, you had the optimists who were saying we need to rush head long to the singularity. That was the jumping off point. What is the intersection between the two?. What affect does this have on our mental and physical well-being?

Q: How do you believe social media is impacting wellbeing?

A: With regards to mental health, I have seen both the positive and negative firsthand. I’ve seen when people post things like“It’s my birthday,” or “Look I’m in Bali for my wedding,” and the positive reinforcement that people actually feel when they get hearts and likes. On the other hand, I’ve seen bullying. It is more long lasting  and is really pervasive. That is not something you had in the early 2000s. If you shut the computer off, that was it, it was over. Lastly, the thing that I’ve seen most is the aspiration culture. For example, now everyone has their own channel, and everyone can be a superstar to four people or four million people. Number one, people want to be stars more and they want that social recognition from people that you get from social media. It is very much drug-like. The other thing I also see is people wanting to aspire to be people they think are like them e.g., influencers.

Q: Would you consider their comparing themselves a positive or negative thing? When they are comparing themselves to other people, are they inspired by them? Do they say, “I’m not like this person, I need to be better,” or “I’m not good enough to be like this person?”

A: I’m going to be really boring and sit on the fence with this one. I think it really does depend. For example, I know with things like sports it is much easier now to get much closer to sports stars, understand how they train, and what their mindset is like. On the other hand, I see especially with girls especially, I have a couple of nieces as well, that impulse to want to dress like certain girls and use certain types of makeup. Aspirations of trying to dress and act like people do on social media and thinking that it’s real life. These are some of the effects that I’ve seen and I think it is both positive and negative. 

The greatest impact I have seen on social media is at a very small level, the atomic level. When I was doing my PhD, we looked at big, massive social movements like the Arab Spring and all these terrorist activities. There was this whole debate of can social media shift good or public opinion one way or the other? That is a really hard study and hard to prove. One of the things that we found that really powerful was the Dunbar Number.

Robin Dunbar is an Oxford anthropologist. In the 80s, Dunbar did a lot of work on network analysis and tried to understand what is the maximum amount of connections that a human being can sustain. He found that the number is about 150 people that people regularly talked to on a monthly basis. I think on Facebook it is way less -  something like twenty. That is where the impact is the biggest – when you are sharing amongst that trusted group of people. That is when the mind and heart shift. 

Q: What is one piece of advice you would give on managing social media?

A: There are a few academic articles on the ways that social media actually enriches human well-being and they are quite interesting. Some of them are actually funded by Facebook, but Facebook actually does a lot with the academic community. One of the pieces of work that they did was they said that social media tends to be unhealthy when you’re passively using it. So basically, if you are going on and its an automatic reflex action and you are just scrolling. That is when social media can negatively impact your social well-being. Now, they say the opposite is true. When you are using social media meaningfully, so when you are connecting with that tight circle of trusted people that you have and you’re actively, meaningfully talking about things and sharing things that are important to you. It goes back to the mindfulness thing and really being intentional about who you are talking to, why you are talking to them, and sharing things that are meaningful. 

I don’t believe in digital detoxes myself. I live in London. I just don’t think it’s feasible, but I think rather intentionally using your time is really important. Also, spend some time even if it is just like an hour of meaningfully curating what you see is super important. I get a lot from my Twitter feed and from my LinkedIn feed because I have spent so much time figuring out who I want to follow and the information I want to see. I do follow people that I don’t agree with, but I only follow people that are articulate. I don’t follow people that just want to shout for the sake of it. Spend some real time curating your social media in terms of who is the person I want to be in five years and does the information reinforcing that. 

Q: Are there any books that you would recommend for readers who want to learn more about digital mindfulness? 

A: The first book is James William’s Stand Out of Our Light. I interviewed James. He was one of the co-founders of Time Well Spent and worked at Google years ago. He is at Oxford University now really focused on the intention economy and how that relates to digital ethics. Another thing that I found that was useful for me is a booked by a woman named Elaine Kasket. That book really opened my mind. It is called All the Ghosts in the Machine and it’s a book about what happens when you die on Facebook. Apparently, I think it is in about 20 years time, there are going to be more profiles of dead people than there are of people alive. What is really interesting is what happens to that when you die. For example, in your will you can’t say I give my iTunes music collection to my son and my daughter because it is not property. It is not your property to give, you just have access to it. None of this stuff is your property, but it is a representation of you. It is really incredibly interesting and it makes you think a lot about data, ownership, and property. It is really great.