'I dropped my phone on my baby's head'

It is early evening and a summer optimism drifts on the breeze.

family is whooping and flying a kite on the beach. An elderly couple walk by, arm-in-arm. Everyone is courteous and maintaining a social distance all the while still smiling fondly at one another. It is idyllic as hell out here under the wispy white clouds.

A young mother is pushing a pram across the seafront. The tiny baby inside gurgles. New life! She is stooping to peer at the baby; to whisper sweet nothings perhaps? But wait. No. What's that balanced on the pram? A phone, playing Netflix. And concealed in her hair? A pair of bluetooth headphones. How do I know all this? This vivacious young mother is me. Watching a show about internet addiction called Follow This, as research for this very piece.

"We'll start by closing our eyes and shifting our attention to our hearing," the narrator's voice in my ears is guiding a group of internet addicts through a meditation to reconnect to nature. Meta doesn't even cover it, friends.

Addiction is often defined as being dependent on a substance or activity, to the extent that the behaviour is having an adverse effect on our lives. How many hand-wringing studies have I hurriedly scrolled past, or articles urging me to break up with my phone have I dodged in the last few years? 'I don't have a problem, none of this applies to me. I don't even have Facebook. I didn't get a smartphone until 2016. I hate Twitter.'

Most of us have a box-fresh excuse ready at a moment's notice to fire off and deflect any questioning of behaviours that we fear might be teetering into unhealthy.

It is true though that I didn't buy a smartphone until 2016. Around the time I finally relented and got one, I noticed many of the people in my life were desperately trying to unhitch themselves from theirs: the Nokia 3210 was making an incongruous comeback for frazzled millennials desperate to return to a simpler, notification-free time.

Apps abounded that were ready to give the user a slap on the wrist should they spend too long on social media. People were swapping tips for controlling their phone usage the way we used to swap diet tips in the noughties. "We bought an old alarm clock, no phones in the bedroom!' "We charge ours in the hallway!" "No phone before 9am and after 6pm!" "I've taken my email/Facebook/Instagram off my phone!'

What was left? I was tempted to ask.

I welcomed my second baby the year I got my smartphone, and I firmly believe that phone kept me breastfeeding far longer than I would've ordinarily managed. I sat on the couch nursing contentedly, glued to my smartphone as nature intended. I could see no downsides. Well, except maybe the many, many times I dropped said smartphone on the baby's head. But who among us can, hand on heart, say they haven't? The phrase, 'I dropped my phone on my baby's head' returned 280m search results in Google, so it seems to be the done thing now.

By the time that baby was no longer being bonked on the head by the phone but instead watching In the Night Garden on it, my relationship with the phone had moved beyond the merely casual and into problematic territory. The phone had essentially replaced the baby in fact, taking up the role of cosseted newborn in my life. I slept curled around it, was never without it during the day, was endlessly checking on it and had the constant urge to pick it up. The only thing missing was my smelling it obsessively.

I was interested in how quickly my indifference had switched to obsession. I was particularly enamoured of Instagram, an app where, as near as I could tell, everyone was feverishly engaged in playing a slightly better version of themselves online.

I even ended up writing my first novel, Filter This, about this world of influencers, centred around Ali, a wannabe influencer who fakes a pregnancy to get likes and followers. As a plot, I was worried this might be too outlandish, until I began to research, and realised there is nothing people haven't lied about online. Nothing. Fake pregnancies, children, cancer, husbands, wives, being involved in 9/11 - seriously. Nothing.

While plotting my first novel, it dawned on me that I was spoofing a world almost too ridiculous to parody. In my latest book, the follow-up to Filter This called Unfiltered, I knew I wanted to drill down further into the addictive nature of our phones and these apps, and was somewhat surprised to learn that any of the treatment possibilities I dreamed up - like residential in-patient programmes - already existed for treatment of technology and internet addiction.

One such facility, in the US, costs up to $35,000 to attend. Even the traditional 12-step model has been adapted to combat this new epidemic of tech dependence. In Unfiltered, Ali attends Catfishers Anonymous in an attempt to rehabilitate her image after her fake pregnancy is exposed and, of course, such a thing already exists - Internet and Tech Addicts Anonymous.

Currently, internet addiction is not recognised as a disorder by the World Health Organisation or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - which seems bonkers considering that nose-picking is. Debate is swirling in the medical community over whether it can be considered a clinical disorder in and of itself, or whether it is more a case of underlying psychiatric disorders such as Munchausen's or factitious disorder (feigning illness for sympathy or attention) finding new modes of expression. Though surely it's only a matter of time before it becomes recognised, given many studies have shown that sufferers of compulsive internet use have displayed physical degradation such as malnourishment as a result, as well as the emotional toll.

Indeed, 'Munchausen by internet' is a phrase used by some mental health professionals to describe what happens when someone suffering from 'garden variety' Munchausen's takes their proverbial show on the road, as it were, and begins to fake illness on social media and other platforms, where there is bigger scope for ever more elaborate fictions.

The case of Australian wellness blogger, Belle Gibson, who was a big source of inspiration for the character of Ali, is one of the most famous incidents.

Gibson rose to internet fame when she began documenting her "cancer journey" on social media. She had been diagnosed with multiple cancers which she opted to treat with diet and a so-called clean lifestyle, and while that sounds preposterous and reckless, her online following exploded. And it wasn't just hapless insta-huns endorsing her with likes and follows. Enormous brands were dying to get in on it with Gibson.

In 2015, Apple struck a deal and her app, the Whole Pantry, came pre-programmed on the Apple Watch. Penguin coughed up a juicy advance for Gibson's book, also called the Whole Pantry, and it was estimated that over $1m was made in sales between the two.

Things began to sour however when rumours surfaced of charitable donations that Gibson had promised never materialising. Accusations of faking altruism were soon the least of Gibson's problems when it emerged that not only did Gibson not cure her own cancer as she'd claimed, she'd never had cancer to begin with.

Gibson eventually admitted to having had a "life-long struggle with the truth" and many speculated that she had factitious disorder. The illness is not new, but the internet is undeniably offering new horizons for people with these issues to stretch their legs with their compulsive stretching of the truth.

One psychologist, Dr Mitchell Byrne, described to Australian news.com.au how social media can exacerbate the problem."Factitious disorder is self-driving and self-perpetuating, maintained by the attention that people receive," Byrne said. "Sufferers who use social media have a wider audience and therefore a greater propensity to receive the attention they are looking for by pretending to have the illness."

The internet name for Belle Gibson is a catfish - a person who assumes a fake identity online and goes to often incredible lengths to create a fictional online life. Vast casts of characters (often referred to as sock puppets), fake social media accounts populated by fake friends, posting ostentatiously tragic storylines - often to no obvious or logical end. While arguably Gibson's motivation was financial gain - and often people lying online are, in a misguided way, trying to find sexual partners - for many catfishers, it is a compulsion as baffling to themselves as to others.

While internet addiction might seem like almost a whimsical affliction compared with alcoholism or drug addiction, in fact it can be every bit as damaging - in extreme users acute depression is often reported, as well as malnourishment and in some of the worst cases: fatal neglect of their own children. The motivation behind the compulsive behaviours appears similar, with many internet users seeking the same kind of escape and oblivion as those turning to drugs and alcohol.

When a group of internet-hoax hunters uncovered the lies of a particularly prolific catfisher called Emily Dirr - who had, over 10 years, created an entire fake family, one that had been besieged by a litany of outlandish tragedies, from murder to illness, garnering the sympathy of thousands of followers online - she wrote a public apology.

"This all started 11 years ago when I was a bored kid looking for an escape from the pain and heartache I saw in my own family," Dirr explained. "It started almost as fiction writing, but the more time I spent escaping to it, the more 'real' it became. I am so sorry it hurt so many real families, and so many people out there."

The hoax-hunters were particularly incensed as Dirr had invented a sick seven-year-old son for the family - his facebook page was called Warrior Eli - and had accepted donations for his cancer treatment, though the amount was small.

While faking cancer and sick children is utterly heinous and baffling, I can see the lure of inhabiting these fictitious online lives. While I have yet to overtly lie online, I have at times found myself tempted to edit my life to appear better.

Recently, I was taking a picture of the doors to my yard. The light was nice, in the picture you couldn't hear the wall of screaming that living with three boys under six creates; the toys and the mess were, for once, out of shot. I looked at the picture before sharing it to my instagram. There, dangling from the window frame was a manky electrical wire because, well, because I'm lazy and live in a perfectly normal house. I was tempted for a moment to try and photoshop the wire out. The picture would look better without it. My life would look better without it.

Thankfully, sanity prevailed and I got over myself but, insignificant example as that is, I could see what a slippery slope shaping and editing our lives online can be especially because of the cycle of validation that underpins all our online interactions. Likes, retweets, follows and comments reward our every post. I can even perhaps see how someone can go from saying, "I feel well because I eat healthy food" to saying "I got well (from cancer) from eating healthy food". Kind of.

We now know that receiving likes and followers online triggers real physiological reactions. Dopamine is released in our brains when we get likes exactly like when humans use cocaine or methamphetamine. For many users, posting online can rapidly become like a hit, and as the dysfunctional behaviour escalates (perhaps from photoshopping out electrical wires, to completely altering your physical features - a practice all too common among women influencers), users need greater expressions of validation: more likes, more followers, more, more, more.

In researching for my books, I have at last become somewhat more aware of my own urges when using social media. Many of my peers will be well aware of the scourge of the 'doin' it for the 'gram' trap - thinking about our daily life events in terms of the content they might provide for our social media accounts. For example, my children's birthday parties serving as the perfect excuse to show off my incredible talents in the baking department (seriously, I decorate a good cake - check out my feed) rather than a lovely moment to celebrate them.

Now, if I catch my thoughts straying into 'that would make a great post for Instagram' territory, I am hyper-aware and able to interrogate it - why do I need to tell all these strangers about the good time I'm having? Just focus on the good time, Sophie!

Some groups are now calling for a user warning to become mandatory for many tech products, as with the imagery used on cigarette boxes. This probably sounds hysterical - except that the very makers of these apps have admitted that the apps are designed to be addictive and the biggest critics of the tech agenda have come from inside Silicon Valley.

Tristan Harris is probably the most well-known, a former 'design ethicist' for Google. Harris famously left Google to found the Center for Humane Technology (formerly the Time Well Spent movement), an advocacy group lobbying the tech industry to align with societal well-being and not just the bottom line.

He has called out the "persuasive design practices" that are creating an addicting experience for users, likening platforms like Facebook and Instagram to Vegas slot machines. In The Atlantic he wrote: "They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. Slot machines make more money in the United States than baseball, movies, and theme parks combined...When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we're playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got... When we pull to refresh our email, we're playing a slot machine to see what new email we got."

Of course, it is too simplistic to simply blame the internet and smartphones for the large-scale lying and catfishing of the likes of Belle Gibson. Humans have always been despicable, we'll be despicable in any medium we can find. We will lie and con people; the internet has just made it so much more convenient to do these things.

When I first watched the documentary Catfish, it was 2010 and the internet was another country. A place we still 'went' to. Do you remember that? When we described it as 'going' online. It was a location separate from us. We logged on, there was a dial-up, a process to getting there.

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Nev Schulman

Getty Images for Kylin Pictures

Nev Schulman

Catfish documented the relationship between Nev Schulman and the family of a young child prodigy artist he had befriended on Facebook, including his falling in love with the child's older sister.

Now, with 2020 vision, the pay-off of Catfish - that the child prodigy and a whole cast of family members and subsidiary characters were all fantasy, the work of one woman - seems practically quaint. "Of course, she's not who she said she was," we yell at the TV. "You're on the internet!!!!"

Ten years ago, when Catfish came out, the internet was not so intrinsically knit into our lives and the various nefarious ways we can be manipulated online - whether by catfishers or big tech - had yet to occur to us.

Now the idea of real life and online life being separate, distinct things seems charming but unattainable. Our local takeaways now text like friends, reminding us to order. If we accidentally like something wedding-related online we can expect to be served up a lifetime supply of ads for wedding paraphernalia. Algorithms rule how and what we consume online. Social media no longer feels optional or even like fun. For a writer like me, 'online presence', one's own 'personal brand' and an 'audience' isn't a boon it's an imperative. And it's a lot of work.

Trying digital detoxes and the like feels as futile as a fad diet. Our lives don't allow us to be offline. We hear the phrase 'always on' so often that its meaning has virtually been sapped, but consider it carefully. We are always on. We have reached a peak of such always on-ness that people who email us can tell not only that we've received their email, but can also tell when, and how many times, we have opened that email. Creepy. And it's not like we can opt to not have email.

Famously the filmmaker Christopher Nolan doesn't have email - "I've never been interested," he has loftily said - but eschewing it is an option only for the very privileged and very powerful.

If we want to hustle and be relevant and take part in this world (or even just set up a supermarket delivery online) we must have an email. It's a problem faced by graduates of the residential recovery programmes for tech addicts.

Abstinence for alcoholics seems like an easier solution then the careful, managed re-integration preached by Restart and Internet and Tech Addicts Anonymous. Many in recovery from these addictions cite the impossibility of balancing their phone use post-treatment and even ask trusted friends to intensively monitor them.

The always-on culture we're living in also means that addictions like these can be insidious, often hiding in plain sight. Just like the drinking culture in Ireland, the internet is so knit into the social fabric it must be nearly impossible for addicts to unhitch themselves.

"I think we're going to have an epidemic of people with the same problems I had that they won't be able to recognise... because it's the new normal," one of the recovering addicts announces in my ears as, beyond my phone, my new baby blinks up at me from the pram. I stop to look around, more conscious than ever of how many of us are out here in the waning light buried in our phones.

I do wonder about the world I've brought my children into. Five years ago, it would have been considered rude to so much as look at our phones when in company, now all around me couples are walking each plugged into their respective devices and I'm watching TV while on a walk with my baby. The tech utopia is looking decidedly grim.

I turn the phone off and instead soak up the feeling of fresh air on my face and the sounds of the sea.

LOL. No I don't. I put on a podcast and scroll Instagram while I continue walking. Later, I notice, I've rolled the buggy straight through dog poo. What was that bit about a behaviour starting to have an adverse effect on your life? Never mind, with the right filter and a pithy caption, it'll make a good shot for Instagram.

'Unfiltered' by Sophie White, published by Hachette, €13.99, is out now in all good bookshops and on Kindle and Audible

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