It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. This hour, our digital lives.

Take a minute to think about how much time you spend online. If you're like most of us,

you check your email or log into social media pretty much first thing in the morning. And we both

love and hate that connection, right? And I can

catch up with an old friend on Facebook or see what's happening halfway around the world in real

times through Twitter. And that's great. But I also worry about what all that time online is doing

to my attention span and my real human relationships. So we'll talk about that in a bit.

But first, maybe there's something even more important to worry about.

In her new book, The People's Platform,

filmmaker Astra Taylor argues that our digital life is undemocratic,

that we've handed our political and economic power

over to giant tech corporations

who make money off of our posts and tweets.

In other words, there's a reason we just can't get enough of the internet.

I think we need to talk about the way that these devices and these platforms and these websites are actually addictive by design.

Every aspect of a website like Facebook has tested to see what gets us to engage the most. So

everything from the color schemes to where buttons are placed. And they need to maximize our

engagement to maximize our clicks because they get data from that. And that's actually the business

model of these sites. They're advertising financed. And so they need us to engage and to give more

information and to like as many things as possible because that's where the profit comes from. So I think

it's important to shift that to go, this is not just about us being unable to control our impulses. It's

more like the way sugary cereals are stocked on the bottom

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