Evolution_attachment_and_smartphone (1).pdf

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” accompanying short film available soon on YouTube, MySpace and other file sharing websites

Mark Wheeler

State Registered member of B.A.A.T Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society www.phototherapy.org.uk © 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 1 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk Mark Wheeler, photographer, Art Psychotherapist and systemic consultant, based in England will be making a talk, based on this text available to you all on the internet on content sharing websites (e.g. search on YouTube and MySpace for “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone”). Such broadcasting media would have been the preserve of large TV and film companies only a few years ago. You are attending the PSYforte phototherapy conference in Moscow in May 2012 and yet you will be listening to me standing in a field in Derbyshire.

Russia is closer to Western Europe, physically, culturally and emotionally, than to any other part of the world. Britain (the United Kingdom) and Russia have been allies in most circumstances over the last few centuries. Now linked by the internet, 3G networks (and the soon to arrive 4G networks), we are closer than ever.

Using the technology of digital capture, the internet and social networks, this presentation is being brought to you as an exemplum of the subject we are talking about today. Every piece of technology used to bring you this presentation is owned by the school children who are operating it for me. These same young people edited the film with technology now available in most homes in the developed world and in many in the developing world.

The human species, our species, evolved as hunter-gatherers for over 150,000 years. If that were the represented by the length of a typical conference room, the scale is 150,000 years to 10 metres. For the whole of that journey we were evolving into very successful nomadic hunter gatherers, moving about together in social groups following the seasons and the food supply.

Human beings are great observers of patterns and we soon spotted the pattern that if we took a seed from the top of this food plant this year and stuck it in the ground we would have more food next year. We also observed that we could keep animals in fields for a predictable supply of food rather than wandering about hoping to find an edible animal.

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 2 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler FRPS: Derbyshire sheep

That observation became our daily practice about 6,000 years ago, when we ceased our nomadic existence and began to settle in groups to farm the land. At that time we also started building permanent structures in which to live and in which in which to gather and to make sense of the seasons and the universe around us.

© 2012 Mark Wheeler FRPS: Best House Winner

So if the 10 metre long conference room represents 150,000 years of evolution as huntergatherers, the length of your forearm from elbow to fingertip would represent the time we have been settled farmers. Clearly we have had more opportunities to evolve as nomadic hunter-gatherers than as farmers. The length of your forearm is a fraction of only 1/25 (or 4%) of the room, which represents the comparative durations of human evolution as settled farmers, compared evolution as hunter-gatherers. As farmer we remained close to

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 3 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk our group, our parents, our lovers and our children for much of everyday. For most ordinary people, most hours of most days would rarely have us more than a walk from each other.

Joseph Wright of Derby: The Orrery, 1766

Then the industrial revolution began, here in the English midlands in towns like Derby just 250 years ago, with water powered mills and factories like this one in Belper, Derbyshire. It was 100 years later that steam power enabled this industrialisation to spread widely throughout Europe and North America from 150 years ago.

© 2012 Mark Wheeler FRPS: Belper East Mill

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk 4

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk So we spent 150,000 years successfully evolving as hunter-gatherers and we spent 6,000 years successfully evolving as farmers, living in close communities where we would see our loved ones throughout every day. Using our scale, where: •

a 10m room length represents our evolution as hunter-gatherers

•

tour 40cm forearm represents our evolution as settled farmers

•

the thickness of a mobile telephone represents our brief evolution as an industrialised species

We have not had time to begin evolve to adapt to the way we live now. We work (and travel to work) typically about 10 hours of at least 5 days out of every 7 days. Since industrialisation we are daily away from the people we love and we are away from them for more than the hours of daylight in Winter.

Human attachment, the primary indicator of good mental health, has spent nearly 160,000 years evolving to suit the briefest of absences from our loved ones in our daily lives. By contrast, for about 100 years, the demands of industry and factory timetables (even offices are just paperwork factories in this context) have meant we have to spend typically 10 waking hours every day away from those we love, returning to eat, talk and sleep for the remaining 14 hours.

Children now have to cope with both Mummy and Daddy continuously absent for 6 to 10 hours a day. Husbands and wives no longer see each other, working side by side, in fields and eating together. We have not had time to evolve to meet the loneliness of modern daily existence. This has contributed to marriage breakdowns, affairs, drug and alcohol misuse and a sharp rise in depressive mental illness.

The same technology that led us into factories and industrialised working patterns by the clock, rather than by daylight, also offers us the temptation of a new solution. Daily contact by text and by Facebook (other networks are available) have become normal behaviour throughout the world.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have looked across the skins being stretched over © 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 5 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk their tent and made eye contact and smiled at their partner hundreds of times every day. The subsistence farmers would look across the field and see their partner and children also working together there.

And now the office worker can glance sideways from their desktop computer as the screen of their smartphone lights up with a picture message from their partner who has posted an image of a tree in blossom as they went out for lunch. This is the context in which such images are made and viewed.

© 2012 Wheeler & Stein

The psychology of photography, and the psychological aesthetics of making and viewing photographs, is currently changing fast. We are no longer surprised in restaurants when

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 6 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk diners celebrate the arrival of their food, not by “saying grace” – a prayer of thanks, but by lifting their smartphone, from its place by their cutlery, and snapping the dish. Before taking fork to food they take pictures, which they immediately upload to their social network page, so their friends can share their joy or look on in envy.

To photograph food in a restaurant would have provoked a strong response from the proprietor a few years ago, who might have imagined the photographer was a magazine food critic. Now the waiter might offer to take snaps of the group with their phones. Food may be more colourful and cosmopolitan in 2012 than 1972 but this alone does not explain this global shift in human behaviour.

In Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, patrons attending concerts were searched for cameras and recording devices which were permanently confiscated if found. Now, not only are they commonplace and held aloft to record the actions on the stage, but 'Zippo' lighter apps are held up during the encore, in place of the traditional lighter flames held high until the concertgoers fingers burned.

Steven Colburn is a PhD student at Sussex University, working on a doctoral thesis on people who film concerts and post the footage on YouTube. He states, "They accept that in filming the concert they're withdrawing from the live experience but they are also taking away those memories. And then they're uploading it onto YouTube, demonstrating their attendance at the event."

Global giant electronics manufacturer, Samsung, estimate there are now 2.5 billion digital camera owners in the world, and over half of these are camera phones. The most popular camera used on the photo-sharing website Flickr, is actually an iPhone, according to the technology site wired.co.uk. The fixed lens digital camera is obsolete. The inclusion of a camera on every mobile phone means that no one need carry two pieces of equipment, a camera and a phone.

Interchangeable lens cameras, like the four-thirds systems and the bigger digital SLR © 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 7 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk bodies, are still toted by enthusiasts and professionals to mark their status as 'serious' photographers, much like the superfluous wearing of stethoscopes by junior doctors.

At football matches the crowd provides an alternative commentary and live video clips to their friends, who no longer have to wait for the edited highlights, later that day on terrestrial TV. These changes mark a dramatic shift in everyone's consumption of images, of data and of ideas. The apparent truthfulness (verisimilitude) of the image experienced on screen has reinforced the unquestioning consumption of photographs by viewers.

The instant feedback, of seeing an image on the phone screen, shifts that unquestioning consumption by an order of magnitude, towards a delusion of unmediated reality. This builds on nearly 200 years evolution of encounters with photographic images, and a phenomenological evolution, ever reinforcing their power.

When 100 years ago, photography made its first step towards ubiquity and universality, the day that George Eastman's company unveiled the Kodak Brownie, it was to a world that had not yet realised that everyone would soon want one. Those cameras were marketed especially to children. Those children's grandchildren and great-grandchildren are the phone photographers of today, steeped in this relationship with the photographic image, now reinforced by the immediacy of capture and screen confirmation, reinforced many times every day. And repetition makes memory.

The Kodak Brownie enabled Photography to move quickly from the specialist professional and artistic market into the drawing rooms of Edwardian England and pre-war France, into the middle class apartments of the USA and across Europe into the salons of Prague and Vienna.

In Russia, while still fighting the First World War, political upheaval at home was documented for the first time by cameras. The new political class in Russia quickly recognised this value of the photographic image and avant-garde photographers of the day were employed to document, and extol, the virtues of whatever bright idea the © 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 8 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk politicians were trying to promote.

This led to some of the most imaginative photography of its period. The work of the soviet photography pioneers inspired the Modernists of the Bauhaus, leading to Laslo Moholy Nagy's seminal book “A New Instrument of Vision”.

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 9 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk

Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Shukhov (yes, he of radio tower fame), Max Penson,

and

company,

still

inspire

photography students today. Equally, the British War Office recognised the power of a photograph in raising morale among troops, and on 'the home front', and provided communication

channels

between

the

trenches to the loved ones left behind, with makeshift studios set up behind the battle lines and trenches to enable prints to be sent home.

The power that these images carried was made possible by over 70 years of heated debate about the role of photography. Debates about its value as an art form, regardless of the position they took, all served to reinforce the story that photographs have a linear relationship with the observed world and lay claim to 'contain' a version of reality. The nineteenth century pioneer of the negative-positive process Fox-Talbot, made Calotypes and Talbot-types that he held up as idealised imitations of the real world.

Art tells us more about psychology than psychology can tell us about art. Art often alerts us of the human condition before we are informed by philosophy or psychology. In the early 20th century, photography became a prime instrument of what Viktor Shklovsky termed ostranenie (остранение) in 1917, the defamiliarisation of the world. By concentrating the camera lens on the subject to roughen its texture, the viewer is forced to look with fresh eyes at what they might have taken for granted previously. This is precisely what therapy often hopes to achieve. Thus Art may even tell us more about psychotherapy than psychology can.

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 10 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk So while throughout Europe and North America, the shopping streets of towns boasted photographic portrait studios by the end of the 19th century, the new practices of psychoanalysis grew up alongside the new practices of photographers.

© 2012 Mark Wheeler FRPS: Old Photography Studio, Derby

The cornering of the home photography market by Kodak was reflected in the figures; in 1976, the company sold 90% of the photographic film in the USA along with 85% of the cameras. In 1975, Kodak engineer Steven Sasson created what the company described as the first digital camera. This was a toaster-size prototype, capturing black-and-white images at a resolution of 0.1 megapixels. This is contradicted by a photoblog entry, credited only to Roger (Devon, UK) who says, “I am afraid I have to disagree with the comment that Kodak invented the Digital Camera. If anyone should take credit it is NASA... In fact the CCD chips were only being made by one company.” Whichever version is true, Kodak underestimated the speed of technological advancement and the public desire for the instant gratification of snap and view. Now Kodak are in financial trouble, a representative of the old guard, as a revolution has swept image making, and like most revolutions, there is a vacuum left by the old players as hundreds of new players rush in, producing hardware and apps. Big global electronics giants compete head to head with the traditional camera makers. At

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 11 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk first, they partnered with lens makers like •

Zeiss (Sony),

•

Leica (Panasonic) and

•

Schneider (Samsung)

but are now designing and sourcing their own optics. Phone-cameras no longer marketed on the strength of optics, nor their pixel counts but are now marketed on the accessibility of software (apps) for image management, such as face recognition or panorama construction. So Welcome to the brave new world of 21st century image making •

more democratic than ever before

•

more accessible than ever before

•

more open to commercial exploitation than ever before

If a company spends 100s of thousands of Euros on a slick TV advertising campaign, it will reach an audience only of TV viewers who have chosen to watch a particular programme or genre of programmes. Those viewers are familiar with TV commercials and have evolved their own psychological filters to reduce the impact of TV commercials on their buying habits. Indeed so many get up to make a cup of tea during TV commercial breaks that electricity supply companies expect a surge in demand for power at those times.

Popular internet advertising campaigns will now reach consumer's mobile phones. If the advertisements are entertaining enough, consumers will do the advertising for them, by forwarding the adverts to all their friends or embedding it on their Facebook page. Facebook's algorithms will also identify that user's interests and target advertising of interest especially to that user.

That personal recommendation by a friend is much more valuable than an impersonal slot between 2 parts of a TV programme. The viral advertisement will be viewed when the consumer has time to watch it, rather than half seen as the TV viewer returns from the toilet. © 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 12 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk

The presentation of images made commercially, side by side with images made by consumers themselves, changes our relationship with both. The wedding album is less often a leather bound tome than an online gallery available to all the guests within a few hours of the ceremony. It is more likely to be viewed on a smartphone than on a desktop computer.

In 2005 there was a brief craze called “happy slapping”. This craze consisted of assaults on random passers-by, filmed by phone and immediately uploaded onto the internet. The perpetrators believed that their assaults were amusing to viewers, like the funny home videos shown as cheap laughs on television channels. However, the 'happy slappers' were assaulting unwilling participants on the street. It was the existence of the technology that encouraged their dissemination of the random acts of violence they might previously have committed unseen. Viewing these incidents can best be described as ugly voyeurism.

Such ugly voyeurism is also at the heart of online bullying or cyber-bullying in schools and the workplace. In my practice as a psychotherapist in a Child & Family Therapy clinic, I sometimes hear accounts of school bullying that extends beyond the school gates into the child's bedroom via social network sites. Derogatory statements or derogatory captions attached to images made in school are common forms of attack.

© 2012 Mark Wheeler FRPS: Reflecting Team in the Consulting Room

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk 13

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk

If working with young people and their parents, a programmed reminder, or 'alert', that their parents have said to the young person that “they are there to talk”, might reduce the likelihood of self harm and increase the likelihood of them talking. While that negotiation takes place in the therapy room, if the young person uses their phone to take a picture of their parent, this will serve as a much more powerful reminder than words alone.

In working with people who have suffered brain injury from accidents, from strokes or are suffering with degenerative neurological disorders like Alzheimer's Syndrome (or other dementias) The mobile network can be used to send prompts to patients who are trying to live independently. If they do not respond within a certain period, a careworker can be despatched to check that the patient is well. The prompts might be to get up in the morning or to wash or to eat. This enables the patient to have a better sense of their own autonomy and also reduces costs to the care agency.

Using images in this context will be more powerful than words alone.

These are just two simple examples of using smartphones, and the images than can be stored by them, or sent to them. Both these examples build on the attachment made by the client to the therapist, which the client experiences as being reinforced every time they receive a message with a picture from their therapist.

The smartphone and social networking potentially change many things in human attachment and therefore equally in psychoanalysis & psychotherapy. Human systems behaviour may actually have to adapt less to this change than to the change from huntergatherer and farming life to modern industrial life. Modern daily disconnection from loved ones by work and distance may be mitigated by our smartphone connections and image sharing.

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 14 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk

© 2012 Mark Wheeler: “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone” PSYforte Phototherapy text & talk www.phototherapy.org.uk

Conclusion Smart phones may represent an opportunity to reclaim and reinforce attachment patterns that have been damaged by modern life. Our cultural Attachment Deficit Disorder, may at last be mitigated by psychologically aware use of mobile technology.

Mark Wheeler. MA, BA, PGDip AT, PGDip SP, FRPS

This will soon be available as a short talk on youtube, myspace and other file sharing locations. Search for “Evolution, Attachment and the Smartphone”

© 2012 Mark Wheeler text and images, except those images used under terms of Creative 15 Commons Attribution-share alike 3.0; www.phototherapy.org.uk