by Digital technology is now woven into the fabric of society, and for many of us, that doesn’t always feel like a good thing. As screens have become more successful, our concerns about them have become more prominent and urgent. But what if we are focusing on the wrong types of anxiety? Here are five common questions about screen time, the answers to which may help us more accurately frame our relationships with 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 becomes a fairly meaningless concept – and therefore not something we should, in and of itself , be too worried about it. Because of its simplicity, screen time is a powerful and pervasive idea that transcends the conversations we have about our online lives. But the amount of time we spend on some form of screen-based technology doesn’t really tell us what we’re doing with that time, the quality of the content we’re consuming, why we’re consuming it, or the context in which is. we are using. If we focused on those things rather than simply on how much we use screens, we would be much better able to understand where the benefits and risks are.
Are we addicted to our smartphones?
We talk a lot about different types of digital “addiction” – smartphone addiction, internet addiction, social media addiction, and so on. None of these are formalized clinical disorders, and there are no widely agreed upon medical or scientific definitions, so in a strict medical sense, no, you are not addicted to your smartphone. But because we tend to focus on the amount of time we spend on screens – and therefore worry about how much is too much – it’s hard for us to talk about our relationship with smartphones in the end. anything but addictive terms. This is made worse by the fact that we often use the word “addiction” in a non-clinical, day-to-day sense, when what we really mean is that we really like something, but maybe we feel like we’ve had or done too much of it.
Screens are just one part of our attentional ecosystem: sometimes they can have positive effects, sometimes negative effects
This is a problem that has plagued the research literature as well. That is, because we frame public conversations about digital technology in terms of addiction, many researchers have assumed that addiction is necessary as such. Over the past decades, a large body of research literature has been created that attempts to categorize and define various digital addictions, but because there is an implicit assumption that they actually exist, little effort has been made to critically understand their definition and consistently. aspects, or to develop a sensible theoretical framework for studying them. Instead, research has grown towards healing ordinary everyday behavior – that is, we are stuck in a loop of identifying what people do with digital technologies, wondering if they can do too much, and so assuming if we use it. them too much, they must be addicted.
That is not to say that there aren’t some people who are at risk of developing a harmful or maladaptive relationship with digital technology. It is more than that, for most of us, it is not the case that we are addicted to our smartphones.
Have screens stolen our attention?
We are often told this – that digital technologies are designed to capture our attention, and as a result, our attention spans have become obsolete. There is a story that claims that our attention span is now about a second shorter than that of a goldfish, and that digital technologies are to blame. There’s nothing true about that story: our height spans aren’t shrinking, and goldfish don’t have short heads to begin with. Like many anxieties about screens, this anxiety finds its basis in a misunderstanding of what attention is.
Cognitively, attention is an extremely complex phenomenon, and despite a significant amount of excellent research on it – thousands of papers – there are still some fundamental unanswered questions about what it actually is, and how best to do it. to characterize. In popular science writing, it is often oversimplified as a kind of spotlight that we can move around to focus on important or interesting tasks. However, we find it very difficult to shift our focus of attention between multiple tasks, so because our smartphones are so enticing – with every message pushing in like a siren call, asking us to check our social – we cannot help easily. lose focus on the most important things.
There is a grain of truth – the attention model is one of the best known and most researched approaches to understanding visual attention in psychological research. But it’s not just “attention” or “attention” by salient features in our environment – top-down information, such as our particular goals and motivations at the time, is also important. Emerging research in recent years has suggested that it may be better to focus attention on a “priority map” system: rather than something that can only be focused on in isolation (and therefore “stolen”), it is possible attention allocated proportionally and spread over several tasks. In other words, screens are just one part of our attention ecosystem: sometimes they can have positive effects, sometimes negative effects, but that depends on the wealth of other factors around us.
How do we often feel if digital technology is not doing us any good then?
This question gets to the heart of why it is so difficult for us to talk about our relationship with screens. It’s nice to say that they’re not addictive, and that they’re not really stealing our attention, but that doesn’t sit well with the life experience of many of us. We all have stories of situations where we feel like we’ve spent too much time – time we didn’t really want to spend – mindlessly scrolling through content we didn’t really accept or didn’t want to see. We look around and see everyone on their phones, not engaging with anything around them, and it just doesn’t feel right. It’s understandable, then, that when someone comes in announcing that screens are fundamentally bad for us, we easily get on board.
But the reality is much more complicated. One consistent finding in research looking at the negative effects of digital technology is that when you ask people to provide subjective reports of their own screen time along with self-reported measures of, for example, mental well-being, or attention, the correlations researchers do. finding is much greater than when more objective measures are used. Part of the reason for this has to do with theories called “presumptive influence”: we are repeatedly exposed to strong negative stories about the influence of screens in the media, which changes our attitude towards it, and ends up coloring it. our own personal experience.
Over time, therefore, we begin to feel bad about our own technology use (and generally take a negative view of it), not because it is bad for us, but because there is an often-spoken and unaccepted assumption with him critically that he could. be.
So you’re saying there’s nothing to worry about?
Not at all. There are real problems with the ways in which new digital technologies are developed and implemented, and the decision-making processes involved often deviate significantly from social responsibility. But I’d argue that we’re also spending a lot of time and effort worrying (and researching) the wrong questions: asking whether screen time is good or bad, or how much screen time is too much, it doesn’t get Seriously. nowhere for us, because those questions do not reflect how we use digital technologies.
We need to start asking better questions – in research, industry, and ourselves
Instead, an emerging line of research is taking a more modern approach, such as asking why some people struggle online, but others succeed in similar situations. together. Rather than thinking of screens as inherently harmful or maladaptive, it is better to think of them instead as forming a routine. Habits are neutral in themselves, but they can turn out to be good or bad for us depending on a range of other contextual and situational factors. Changing habits is much more than our personal control – it takes time and effort, but if there are things about our digital diet that we’re not happy about, we have the power to get rid of them without losing them at the same time. all the good things that our online life brings us.
If nothing else, one of the main reasons we need to move away from panic-driven rhetoric around screens being a negative force is that, rather than promoting any positive action, such anxiety can away as baloney sensationalized by the technology industry. Instead, if we can engage in more rational and evidence-based discussions about screens, if we can consider the balance of benefits and risks more sensibly, we can more effectively apply pressure on the industry to make meaningful changes.
Many of the digital technologies we are concerned with are technologies of pleasure and convenience, which means that the well-being of the user should be at the heart of any design consideration. However, we also need better research – research that moves away from an over-reliance on self-reported data, and instead combines meaningful industry data with appropriate theory and objective data obtained in a much more targeted way from individual users . This may seem like a pipe dream, but we have already begun to see some studies that show that it is possible.
So we need to start asking better questions – in research, industry and ourselves. By answering these questions, we will be able to better understand the benefits of our own screen use, where there are things we would like to change, and how we can best implement those changes. force.
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Pete Etchells is professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University and an author Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (And How to Spend It Better), published by Little, Brown (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
