Check It Out: Digital addiction - an under-discussed problem

By Joan Janzen

While out for lunch at a restaurant, a wife watched her husband as he was preoccupied with his phone. When she suggested he was addicted, he replied, “I am soooo not addicted to my phone because I have an app that warns me if I’m turning into an addict, and it hasn’t gone off yet.”

But the reality is most of us have become glued to our phones, so much so that if I send certain people a text and do not receive a response within a half hour, I get concerned about their physical well-being. And social media statistics verify those concerns.

Statistics for 2023 reported the average Canadian spends two hours a day on social media, with 24-35-year-olds being the most active group. It also showed there are 33.1 million social media users in Canada, 36 million Canadians are on the Internet, and 72 percent of Canadians use Facebook.

So how can we ensure that technology in our lives brings a positive impact rather than a negative one? Well, a group of volunteers from the tech industry have produced a network in Canada that is providing service with a positive impact. The CEO and founder of Faith Tech, James Kelly, described how the network began in an interview on Faytene TV.

“About seven years ago, I discovered every month 8,000 people in Canada would search these words - ‘How to Kill myself,’” James recalled. He discovered the top result was an article entitled “7 Easy, Painless Ways to Kill Yourself”.

“I remember the moment so vividly and wondered if it was for real!” James said. Just a couple of months later, he was hosting a retreat for technology geeks to get together and build technology. It was there that he presented his findings. While he had no idea what to do, he knew he had to do something.

“Amazingly, four people at the retreat got together: two developers, a communications manager and a psychotherapist,” he said. The foursome gave up their weekend and got to work.

They purchased the website “How to kill yourself,” but on the website, they put the banner title “You’re Not Alone.” The website provided sources of help which people could contact.

About a month later, one of the web developers from the team had coffee with a friend and was telling her about the website she was building. Her friend interrupted her and asked for the website’s domain name. When she told her friend it was called “How to Kill Yourself,” her friend immediately started to cry. She said she had gone online the evening before and asked Google the question, “How to kill myself.”

“I found that website, and it saved my life,” was her friend’s tearful response.

Seven years later, Faith Tech has a network in 37 cities around the globe, is in 14 nations, and continues to grow. It consists of hundreds of people who work at Google, Facebook and other organizations and donate their time to create innovative technology.

“We’re very action-oriented. We’ve got about a hundred products being built, all by volunteers. It’s amazing!” James said. “The Faith Tech community loves to solve big problems. The solutions we bring are things most organizations aren’t thinking about.”

One of those organizations is Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), a charity that brings medicine, food, and doctors to help transform people’s lives in developing nations. They found their donors wanted to know how their funds were being used to affect change, but the organization also realized it was very difficult to measure impact. Faith Tech Developed an ultra simple-to-use app that gathered impact numbers.

A pilot from MAF said he was impressed with their dedication. “We record flight data, the hours we’ve flown and number of landings. It helps us focus on what we do,” he said. A member of MAF said he was impressed that a handful of volunteers got together and were committed to making the app, which otherwise would have cost the charity tens of thousands of dollars.

Volunteers who help at Faith Tech expressed different reasons for helping out. “I had the skills, but I didn’t really have the opportunity to apply them,” one volunteer stated.

James agreed, saying, “We saw there were tech people who were highly skilled but were not using their gifts.”

“We’ve done a ton of events on digital addiction, which is a very under-discussed but significantly present problem right now,” James continued. “We take drug addiction very seriously, and yet there’s this digital realm that has emerged so quickly. Hopefully, we can point people in the right direction. We may not be the experts, but we have many friends in our network who can help.”

The organizations’ volunteers all come from different backgrounds, but they have one common goal that bonds them together. Faith Tech volunteers make sure they’re mastering tech and tech is not mastering them.

“Big tech is extraordinarily powerful; I don’t think we’ve ever seen this kind of power in an industry. It’s remarkable how powerful a few people can be in the world,” he noted.

James recognized concerns centred around Artificial Intelligence (AI), whereby people believe computer-generated images are real and share those images. “That’s a negative use of it,” he explained.

However, he said there’s also something called ‘Liars Dividend’, and he continued to explain. “Now it’s more common that a real thing gets questioned and gets claimed as fake. That’s the growing trend. Now, the truth becomes questioned more than things that are fake are assumed to be real. It undermines truth at the deepest level,” he explained.

But when asked how we can see transformation in big tech, he replied: “You can approach this from a legal perspective with regulations.” But James prefers the bottom-up approach. Instead of everyday people being focused on complaining about technology, Faith Tech is a group of volunteers who are passionate about transforming the industry. “I’m proud of the work we’ve done,” James concluded.