Digital Footprints in Cyberspace: Benefits and Drawbacks for Mental Health

As part of Brain Awareness Week, I would like to discuss an exciting lecture I attended this week. It was entitled “Smartphones: What they can tell us about our Brains and our Minds” presented by Neuroethics Canada as part of the 2019 Dana Foundation Distinguished Neuroethics Lecture and given by renowned neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. Thomas R. Insel, ex-director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and co-founder and President of the tech company Mindstrong. 

I had been excited about this talk ever since it was announced about more than a month ago and I had circled the date on my calendar (both print and virtual) to ensure that I would attend it and that nothing would get into the way of my attending this event.

Why was this seminar so important to me? There are various reasons for this. As someone who occasionally feels steamrolled by the drastic and dramatic changes over the past decade or so regarding technology, I wanted to get clearer and more fact-based information about how this was affecting us emotionally and mentally.

Also, I was a bit worried since I and all my loved family members are rather immersed in this technology. To an extent, whether we notice it or not, we are all dependent on these little devices that we carry around and consult and play with on a continuous basis. 

Some of us use them even during the night; however, I have tried to demarcate a clear line and boundary by having my smartphone in the other room being relatively far away from the bedroom and my sleeping space (though I occasionally sneak into the living-room for a late-night check of my Twitter status and whether I received a like or retweet here and there).

The amount of time we generally spend on these gadgets and their effects on our brain was part of my concern. The other part was regarding what would - and could - my smartphone usage possibly say about me and the status of my mental health. Would it be potentially alarming and worrisome?

In today’s high-tech world, we are and should be concerned about personal data, i.e. the information that we make accessible online, whether in public or private form. As we have seen with recent scandals regarding the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, these personal details can be exploited and in turn used and abused to manipulate us, whether we are aware of this or not.

Moreover, our personal data may make us vulnerable since we have become constant prey to advertising companies and businesses; in this consumer culture of ours, our digital footprints could accurately predict what advertising methods would work best to lure us into buying the products, which we may – but most likely may not – actually need in our lives.

This second point I used to shrug off because, previous to this talk, I felt indifferent whether people had information about my personal interests, likes and dislikes. In many ways, I was already willing to share them on Social Media like Twitter as well as on digital platforms like this very blog you are currently reading. What did I have to fear since I had nothing to hide? Who cares if they had that piece of information about me?

But it turned out, that I was wrong and that there was reason to be afraid, or at the very least to be concerned about my digital footprint. Whether we can do something about it is another matter, but at least we can be aware of it and see past its mechanisms.

Let’s backtrack for a moment to put things into perspective. Dr. Insel started the lecture by giving us an outlook of the myriad changes that have occurred ten years into this technological revolution. For instance, merely twenty-five years ago, the most advanced supercomputer that the world had at its disposal was doing a mere fraction of what our smartphone is capable of doing today!

Plus, it used to be more costly, much bulkier as well as much more expensive; today’s smartphones may be expensive, but they have become much more affordable for the public. Moreover, they are indeed mobile, meaning they do not require a whole air-conditioned room for storage as they fit rather comfortably in our front pocket.  

And they have grown in number. Current estimates assume that there are close to three billion smartphone users with about two billion of them actively using and engaging with social media giant Facebook. This number was in the millions only about a decade ago and has grown at an incredibly high speed.

The other point to mention is its diversity. Smartphones have become much more ubiquitous and exist on nearly every part of the world. Dr. Insel was indeed surprised to see them in a farming community in Tanzania. He asked one of the farmers what they used them for as there would be no pizza or any other kinds of food delivery within close range with the closest town being a three-day walk away. The farmer replied that it helped him to keep in touch with his buddies over Facebook. In fact, smartphones and electronic gadgets may be more accessible and easier to come by than potable water!

Since it is so easily accessible and consumed by a large portion of the human population, it makes it even more important to study its effects. And some of the news, as you may suspect or know already, is not that rosy. We have seen strides and improvements in health care as well as detection and treatment of various diseases, but in terms of mental health we have taken a hit. Anxiety disorders, depression and low self-esteem are on the rise globally and even more worrisome is the increase of suicides.

There are many studies that relate social media use with higher incidents of depression. This is also from the fact that we continue to isolate ourselves from nature as well as face-to-face contact with others. In fact, our smartphones are certainly smart, but they barely qualify as phones anymore. 

When asked about the Top Ten uses of smartphones today, making phone calls landed outside of it at spot 11. The highest usage is the more impersonal and less intrapersonal forms of texting and messaging as well as using social media and watching – presumably a lot of cat and dog - videos on YouTube.

It is also noteworthy that millennials are becoming more and more uncomfortable when it comes to verbally communicating over the phone. In some cases, studies have shown that they even prefer psychotherapy with a bot instead of talking directly to a psychologist or psychiatrist. Considering that the aim of many therapy sessions is to open up about and discuss personal issues, the use of AI for such incidents may in fact be more of a blessing than a curse, which leads us to the more beneficial aspects and possibilities of technology.

Medical health has certainly improved dramatically. There is nearly an app for everything, and health has greatly benefited from such technology. I was surprised to find out that with certain attachments to your phone, you would be able to take pictures of your inner ear infection and send them immediately to your doctor who would then prescribe you the necessary medication - again by texting you the prescription and treatment details.

But how could mental health tap into the possibilities and advantages of the tech industry? The answer is it can do so in many ways and that is for the most part what Dr. Insel’s tech company Mindstrong is all about.

For one thing, this technology certainly facilitates the process. The patient does not need to physically go to the environment - hospital, clinic or medical office - of the mental health practitioner. Patients could be provided with the necessary details and information at the comfort of their home, which would not only be saving time and travel but also associated costs.

Using specifically tailored apps could provide the mental health expert with vital and more objective information. Instead of relying on subjective evaluations and self-reports on mood and happiness, mental health practitioners can use our digital footprint, known as digital phenotyping, to gain important and quantifiable insights about our mental state and health.

How you may ask? To do this, you can try out the website applymagicsauce.com offered by the University of Cambridge and where you can either upload your social media data or alternatively extract written text messages and emails. The site would then offer you relevant information regarding your personality. (I tried it out and put in a couple of paragraphs of one of my recent blog posts. The site predicted my exact current age - which I won’t divulge here - as well as accurate details about my personality, including that I was creative, “random” and fun to be with; however, my Twitter information spread out over various years was not so spot on and turned me into a twenty-year-old!)

There is a lot of information that is included and contained in our written communication, namely in the content we produce, the words we use and the sentence structure we employ. There is also significant information in the fluency and speed of our typing as well as any potential spelling or grammatical errors we make.

In the case of social media, our images, photos, comments and likes – collectively known as digital exhaust - give important clues not only about our personality, whether we are outgoing or introverts, more conservative or liberal, but also about our mental health, whether we are generally happy, sad, depressed, envious or angry.

There is of course an additional dimension that can be added to this diagnosis, which is our voice. Mental health experts can deduce and make accurate predictions about our emotional state based on speech content, intonation, inflection, fluency, pauses etc. There is a wealth of information that can be extracted from one’s voice and speech.

This can be rather easily achieved since many of us are already talking to our phones, asking Siri for directions or information, for instance. Our smartphones with their GPS sensor can also provide information where we are located at any given moment of time and how long we stay there in addition to what kind of videos we watch or what sites we visit or which articles we read. This wealth of information can be very beneficial for various mental health issues like addiction, bipolar depression and could help prevent suicide.

According to a recent article on Scientific American cheekily entitled “The Internet knows you better than your Spouse does” by Frank Luerweg, there is currently an app called Loki that can also track images of your face as you are looking into your phone or reacting to images or content on your phone and it can deduce or rather detect your emotional state.

This information would aid psychologists to better evaluate a patient’s emotional condition and then be able to contact the individual in real time when they sense an oncoming manic or depressive phase in that given individual; alternatively, the psychiatrist would immediately notice when a patient is not taking their prescribed medication.

As always, there are benefits and drawbacks to everything and there is no easy and quick fix or solution. There are many issues of ethics, accountability and how and in what ways as well as to what means and ends our current technology is used. If we use it to promote and establish higher and better access to overall health and well-being, then it is a certain boon.

If it is to predict and evaluate our digital footprint to manipulate, control or bribe us, then we are in deep trouble. Hence this debate on privacy and personal data, whether we choose to engage in it or not, is of paramount importance for our future and will determine the path and direction that technology shall take over the next years. In the meantime, we cannot say that we did not know nor complain that we were not forewarned.