Digital technology is now inextricably 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 numerous, the concerns we have about them have also become more salient and urgent. But what if we focus on the wrong kinds of concerns? Here are five frequently asked questions about screen time. The answers to these can help us more accurately map the relationships we have with our technology.
Should we worry about screen time?
The problem with screen time is that, when you really think about what it actually is, it turns out to be a fairly meaningless concept – and therefore not something we should worry too much about in itself. Because of its simplicity, screen time is a compelling and ubiquitous idea that permeates 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 anything about what we do with that time, the quality of the content we consume, why we consume it, or the context in which we consume it. we use it. If we focused on those things instead of just the extent to which we use screens, we would be much better able to understand where the benefits and risks lie.
Are we addicted to our smartphones?
We talk a lot about different types of digital “addictions” – smartphone addiction, internet addiction, social media addiction, and so on. None of these are formalized clinical disorders, and there are no generally accepted 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 enormous amount of time we spend on screens – and therefore worry about how much time is too much – we have found ourselves in a situation where we find it difficult to think about it at any given moment. our relationship with smartphones. everything except addiction terms. This is made worse by the fact that we often use the word ‘addiction’ in a non-clinical, everyday sense, when what we really mean is that we really like something, but perhaps we feel like we’ve had something or too done a lot of it.
Screens are just one part of our attention ecosystem: sometimes they can have positive effects, sometimes negative effects
This is an issue that has also clouded the research literature. That is, because we frame public conversations around digital technology in terms of addiction, many researchers have made the assumption that the addiction therefore necessarily exists. Over the past few decades, a vast body of research literature has emerged attempting to categorize and define various digital addictions, but because it is implicitly assumed that they actually exist, little attempt has been made to critically and consistently understand their defining addictions. characteristics, or to develop a sensible theoretical framework within which they can be studied. Instead, research has increasingly focused on medicalizing normal everyday behavior – that is, we’re stuck in a loop of identifying things people do with digital technologies, wondering whether they’re doing it too much. can do, and therefore assume that if we do, If you overuse them, they must be addictive.
None of this is to say that there aren’t people who are at risk of developing harmful or maladaptive relationships with digital technology. It’s more that for the vast majority of us, we’re 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 have collapsed. 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. Nothing about that story is true: our attention spans aren’t getting shorter, and goldfish don’t actually have short attention spans to begin with. Like many concerns about screens, this concern is rooted in a misunderstanding of what attention is.
From a cognitive perspective, attention is an enormously complex phenomenon, and despite a significant amount of excellent research on it – literally thousands of papers – there are still a number of fundamentally unanswered questions about what it actually is, and how best to characterize it. Popular science texts often oversimplify it as a kind of spotlight that we can move to focus on important or interesting tasks. However, we find it very difficult to shift our attention between multiple tasks, and because our smartphones can be so distracting – with each message pinging like a siren and tempting us to check our social media – we can’t help but lose focus easily on the things that matter.
There’s some truth in that: the spotlight model of attention is one of the most celebrated and well-researched approaches to understanding visual attention in psychological research. But attention is not only ‘captured’ or ‘distracted’ by salient features in our environment; Top-down information, such as our specific goals and motivations at the time, is also important. An emerging line of research in recent years has instead suggested that we might better characterize attention in terms of a ‘priority map’ system: rather than something that can only be focused (and therefore potentially ‘stolen’) in a singular way ), attention can be divided proportionally and distributed across multiple 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 a wealth of other factors around us.
So why is it that we often feel that digital technology is not doing us any good?
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 that they don’t really rob our attention, but that narrative doesn’t sit well with the lived experience that many of us have. We all have stories about situations where we feel like we spent too much time – time we didn’t really want to spend – mindlessly scrolling through content we didn’t really consume or want to see. We look around and see everyone on their phones, without doing anything around them, and it just doesn’t feel right. So it’s understandable that when someone comes along and claims that screens are inherently bad for us, we readily agree.
But the reality is much more complex. A consistent finding in research looking at the negative effects of digital technology is that when you ask people to give subjective reports of their own screen time, along with self-report measures of mental well-being or attention, for example, the correlations researchers find are many larger than when more objective measurements are used. Part of the reason for this has to do with so-called ‘perceived influence’ theories: we are repeatedly exposed to very strong negative stories about the impact of screens in the media, which changes, and ultimately discolors, our attitudes towards them. our own personal experiences.
Over time, we start to feel bad about our own technology use (and have negative views of it in general), not because it is actually bad for us, but because there is an oft-spoken and uncritically accepted assumption that it could happen. are.
So you’re saying there’s really nothing to worry about?
Not at all. There are very real problems with the way new digital technologies are developed and implemented, and often the decision-making processes involved deviate significantly from social responsibility. But I would argue that we also spend a lot of time and effort worrying about (and investigating) the wrong kinds of questions: asking whether screen time is good or bad, or how much screen time is too much, doesn’t really get clear. us anywhere, because these questions do not reflect the reality of how we use digital technologies.
We need to start asking better questions – in research, industry and ourselves
Instead, an emerging line of research takes a more nuanced approach, asking, for example, why some people struggle online while others thrive in seemingly similar situations. Rather than viewing screens as inherently harmful or maladaptive, it is better to view them as addictive. Habits are neutral in themselves, but can become good or bad for us depending on a range of other contextual and situational factors. Crucially, changing habits is much more within our own personal control – it takes time and effort, but if there are things in our digital diet that we don’t like, we have the power to get rid of them without sacrificing them at the same time. to lose things. all the good that our online life offers us.
One of the main reasons we need to move away from the panic-induced rhetoric around screens as a negative force is that, rather than promoting positive action, such concerns can be dismissed by the tech industry as sensational baloney. If we can instead have more rational and evidence-based discussions about screens, if we can look at the balance between benefits and risks more sensibly, we can more effectively pressure the industry to make meaningful changes.
Many of the digital technologies we worry about are technologies of pleasure and convenience, which means that user well-being must be at the heart of all design considerations. However, we also need better research – research that moves away from an over-reliance on self-report data, and instead combines meaningful industry data with appropriate theory and objective data gathered from individual users in a much more targeted way. This may seem like a pipe dream, but we have already seen some studies showing that it is possible.
So we need to start asking better questions – in research, the industry and ourselves. And by answering those questions, we’ll be able to better understand where the benefits of our own screen use lie, where there are things we’d like to change, and how we can best make those changes happen.
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Pete Etchells is Professor of Psychology and Science Communication at Bath Spa University and author of Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and How to Spend It Better), published by Little, Brown (£16.99). In support of the Guardian And Observer Order your copy at Guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply