31 March 2012 | NewScientist | 27

an electoral mandate and is entitled to enact its programme. But it should also welcome robust debate about its policies, and the reality is that the government is stifling that debate by restricting its scientists’ ability to speak frankly about their work.

Environment Canada’s media protocol, introduced in 2008, requires scientists to get official approval before talking to the press – a demand that often delays an interview well beyond journalists’ deadlines and results in the public never hearing from the scientist at all. It also can lead to the scientist being forced to parrot the official line on an issue. The protocol states: “Media relations will work with staff on how best to deal with the call. This should include asking the programme expert to respond with approved lines.” Other departments, such as Fisheries and Oceans Canada, have similar policies.

The result is that Canadians – and the rest of the world – have been denied the chance to hear from some of the most authoritative scientific voices on important issues ranging from the Arctic ozone hole to radiation after the Fukushima Daiichi reactor accident in Japan, and even the effect of aquaculture on wild salmon.

What’s worse, the silence comes just when the government’s environmental policies are most in need of vigorous public debate. The effect has been stifling. According to a leaked Environment Canada internal document, media coverage of climate change has fallen by 80 per cent since the policy came into force.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, many liberals in the US regarded Canada with envy. Canadians who care about science and the environment now know exactly how they felt. n

Bob Holmes is a consultant for New Scientist based in Edmonton, Canada

Comment on these stories at newscientist.com/opinion

The “productivity apps” you have devised are causing quite a stir. Tell me about them.Freedom is an application that locks you out of your internet connection for a set time, and the only way to circumvent it is to reboot your computer. Anti-Social is similar except it blocks distracting websites like social networks, which are leeches of our time when we are trying to get things done. They are apps that force you to work.

What motivated you to create these apps?Social media is very distracting, and our computers are getting more distracting by the day. I thought it would be an interesting idea to develop something that would cut off the internet. If you can’t get to the distracting sites and videos, you are forced to work. I wanted to hack my computer back to just a typewriter so I could write my dissertation.

So Freedom was born. What happened next? I put it on the web. Plenty of people said this was a terrible idea, a sign that our society has truly lost its self-control. But other people said it was a great idea and started using it. More than 300,000 people have downloaded Freedom so far, and 125,000 have tried Anti-Social.

It’s quite something when people will pay to be locked out of the internet… There are a couple of ways to think about it. One is that humans are more easily distracted – we don’t have any self-control. I don’t really buy that. Our computers are just getting more distracting, with multimedia and rich content. Social media is all about obligation – your obligation to respond to messages and so on. Knowing there is this constant social hum in the background drives us to these sites, and away from our work.

Why can’t we just rely on willpower? I don’t think we had the willpower or the inherent skills to deal with this hot, rich media in the first place. We are social beings – we want to interact with others – so tools that allow us to be constantly social appeal to core parts of our humanness.

One minute with...

Fred Stutzman

Famous writers including Dave Eggers, Naomi Klein and Nick Hornby have raved about Freedom. Have you hit a nerve, a craving to escape from constant connectivity?I think that social media and information overload are real things. To take the long view, we are only at the beginning of adjusting to the information environment we have found ourselves in for the past 10 to 20 years. One of the main reasons people use Freedom is pretty utilitarian – to actually get work done – but I think it does reflect this larger trend of people wanting to disconnect and have a little time to themselves.

Do you think there will come a time when cafes boast that they don’t have Wi-Fi?Absolutely. I think there’s a larger zeitgeist around this idea of switching off, because it’s increasingly hard to get away from these connections. They are everywhere, especially if you have a smartphone. You can’t go to the far corners of the Earth and get away. Interview by Alison George

Struggling to find the willpower to avoid online procrastination? There’s an app for that, says its developer

ProfileFred Stutzman is a researcher focusing on social media at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. He created the Freedom and Anti-Social “productivity apps”, and co-founded ClaimID, an online identity service

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