Digital technology is now inextricably woven into the fabric of society, and for many of us, this doesn’t always feel like a good thing. As the number of screens has increased, our concerns about them have become more evident and urgent. But what if we’re focusing on the wrong kinds of concerns? Here are five frequently asked questions about screen time, the answers to which can help us more accurately frame the relationships we have with our technology.
Should we be worried about screen time?
The thing about screen time is that when you really start to think about what it actually is, it turns out to be a pretty meaningless concept and therefore not something we should be overly concerned about per se. Because of its simplicity, screen time is an intriguing and pervasive idea that saturates our conversations about our online lives. But the amount of time we spend on some form of screen-based technology tells us nothing about what we do with that time, the quality of the content we consume, why we consume it, or the context we’re in. we use it. If we focused on these issues rather than how much we use screens, we could better understand where the benefits and risks lie.
Are we addicted to our smartphones?
Smartphone addiction, internet addiction, social media addiction etc. We talk a lot about various digital “addictions” such as: None of these are formalized clinical disorders and there are no widely accepted medical or scientific definitions, so in the strict medical sense, no, you are not addicted to your smartphone. But we’ve been faced with a situation where we find it difficult to talk about our relationship with smartphones, as we tend to focus on screens for the majority of our time and therefore worry that there’s too much of that time. anything other than dependency terms. This is compounded by the fact that we often use the word “addiction” in a non-clinical, everyday sense; What we really mean is that we really like something, but perhaps we feel like we have or have had something before. He did too much.
Screens are just one part of our attentional ecosystem: Sometimes they can have positive effects, sometimes negative ones.
This is also an issue that has clouded the research literature. That is, because we have framed public conversations around digital technology in terms of addiction, many researchers have made the assumption that addiction necessarily exists. Over the past few decades, a large body of research literature has emerged attempting to categorize and define various digital addictions, but because there is an implicit assumption that they actually exist, little attempt has been made to critically and consistently understand their definitions. properties or develop a logical theoretical framework for studying them. Instead, research has increasingly moved towards the medicalization of normal daily behavior; that is, we are stuck in a cycle of identifying things that people do with digital technologies, wondering if they can do too much of them, and therefore assuming that if we use digital technologies. There are so many of these, they must be addictive.
None of this is to say that there aren’t some people who are at risk of developing harmful or maladaptive relationships with digital technology. Moreover, for most of us, we are not addicted to our smartphones.
Have screens stolen our attention?
This is something we are often told; that digital technologies are designed to steal our attention and, as a result, our attention spans are narrowing. There is a story that claims that our attention span is now a second shorter than that of a goldfish, and that digital technologies are to blame. Nothing about this story is true: Our attention spans aren’t decreasing, and goldfish don’t actually have short spans to begin with. This concern, like many concerns about screens, is rooted in a misunderstanding of what attention is.
From a cognitive perspective, attention is an extremely complex phenomenon, and despite a significant amount of excellent research on it (literally thousands of articles), there are still some fundamentally unanswered questions about what it actually is and how we can best characterize it. It is often oversimplified in popular science writing as a kind of spotlight that we can move around to focus on important or interesting tasks. But we find it very difficult to shift our focus of attention between multiple tasks, and our smartphones can be so distracting – with every message ringing out like a siren call, enticing us to check our social media – that we can’t help but easily lose focus on the things that matter.
There is some truth to this; The spotlight model of attention is one of the most famous and well-researched approaches to understanding visual attention in psychological research. But attention is not merely “captured” or “distracted” by salient features in our environment; Top-down information, such as our specific goals and motivations at the moment, is also important. A line of research that has emerged over the last few years has suggested that we might instead better characterize attention in terms of a “priority map” system: rather than something that can only be singularly focused on (and thus potentially “stolen”), attention is proportionately allocated and distributed to various tasks. In other words, screens are just one part of our attentional ecosystem: sometimes they can have positive effects, sometimes negative ones, but this depends on many other factors around us.
So how come we feel that digital technology is of no use to us?
This question gets to the heart of why we find it so difficult to talk about our relationship with screens. It’s all well and good to say that they’re not addictive and don’t actually steal our attention, but that narrative doesn’t quite fit the lived experiences of most of us. We all have stories of situations where we felt like we were wasting too much time—time we didn’t actually want to spend—mindlessly scrolling through content we didn’t really understand or didn’t actually want to see. We look around and see everyone is on their phones, not paying attention to anything around them, and it doesn’t feel right. So when someone claims that screens are inherently bad for us, it’s understandable that we readily agree.
But the truth is much more complex. A consistent finding in studies examining the negative effects of digital technology is that when you ask people to provide self-report measures such as mental health or attention alongside subjective reports of their screen time, researchers’ findings are much greater than when more objective measures are used. Part of the reason for this has to do with what are known as “default impact” theories: We are repeatedly exposed to very strong negative stories about the impact of screens in the media, which changes our attitude towards them, and we eventually become colored. our own personal experiences.
So over time, then, we start to feel bad about our own use of technology (and more generally, we start to have a negative perspective), not because it’s actually bad for us, but because it’s an oft-talked-about and uncritically accepted assumption that it might happen. . to be.
So you’re saying there’s actually nothing to worry about?
Not at all. There are serious problems with the way new digital technologies are developed and implemented, and often decision-making processes fall seriously short of social responsibility. But I would also argue that we spend too much time and effort worrying about (and researching) the wrong kinds of questions: It doesn’t really make sense to ask whether screen time is good or bad, or how much screen time is too much. because these questions do not reflect the reality of how we use digital technologies.
We need to start asking better questions in research, in industry, and about ourselves
Instead, an emerging line of research takes a more nuanced approach; For example, he asks, why do some people struggle online while others in seemingly similar situations thrive? Rather than thinking of screens as inherently harmful or maladaptive, it’s better to think of them as habit-forming. Habits are neutral on their own, but they can be good or bad for us depending on other contextual and situational factors. Most importantly, changing habits is much more within our personal control; It takes time and effort, but if there are things in our digital diet that we’re not happy with, we have the power to get rid of them without losing them at the same time. all the good things our online lives provide us with.
If nothing else, one of the main reasons we need to move away from the panic-driven narrative that screens are a negative force is that, rather than encouraging any positive action, such concerns can be brushed aside by the tech industry as sensationalist claptrap. Instead, if we can engage in more rational and evidence-based discussions about screens and look more sensitively at the balance between benefit and risk, we can put more effective pressure on the industry to make meaningful changes.
Many of the digital technologies we worry about are technologies of pleasure and convenience; This means that user well-being must be at the center of all design considerations. But we also need better research; Research that moves away from over-reliance on self-report data and instead combines meaningful industry data with appropriate theory and objective data obtained from individual users in a much more targeted way. This may seem like a pipe dream, but we’re already starting to see some studies showing it’s possible.
So we need to start asking better questions in research, in industry, and in ourselves. In answering these questions, we will be able to better understand where the benefits are in our own screen use, where the things we want to change are, and how we can best effect these changes.
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Pete Etchells is professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University and author of: Unlocked: The True Science of Screen Time (And How to Spend It Better), published by Little, Brown (£16.99). To support Guardian And Observer Order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply