Digital technology is now inextricably woven into the fabric of society, and for many of us, that does not always feel like a good thing. As screens have become more numerous, so the anxieties that we have about them have become more salient and pressing. But what if we are focusing on the wrong sorts of worries? Here are five common questions about screen time, the answers to which may help us to frame the relationships we have with our tech more accurately.
Should we be worried about screen time?
The thing about screen time is that, when you start really thinking about what it actually is, it turns out to be a fairly meaningless concept – and therefore not something that, in and of itself, we should be overly concerned about. Because of its simplicity, screen time is a compelling and pervasive idea that saturates the conversations we have about our online lives. But the amount of time we spend on some form of screen-based technology does not really tell us anything about what we are doing with that time, the quality of the content we are consuming, why we are consuming it, or the context in which we are using it. If we focused on those things instead of simply how much we use screens, we would be much better placed to understand where the benefits and risks lie.
Are we addicted to our smartphones?
We talk a lot about various sorts of digital “addictions” – smartphone addiction, internet addiction, social media addiction, and so on. None of these are formalised clinical disorders, and there are no widely agreed medical or scientific definitions, so in the strict medical sense, no, you are not addicted to your smartphone. But because we have a tendency to focus on the sheer amount of time we spend on screens – and therefore we worry about how much is too much – we have ended up in a situation where we find it difficult to talk about our relationship with smartphones in anything other than addiction terms. This is compounded by the fact that we often use the word “addiction” in a non-clinical, day-to-day sense, when what we actually mean is that we really like something, but maybe we feel like we’ve had or done too much of it.
This is a problem that has also muddied the research literature. That is, because we frame the public conversations around digital technology in addiction terms, many researchers have made the assumption that the addiction therefore necessarily exists. Over the past few decades, a vast amount of research literature has built up that attempts to categorise and define various digital addictions, but because there is an implicit assumption that they do actually exist, little attempt has been made to critically and consistently understand their defining features, or to develop a sensible theoretical framework within which to study them. Instead, research has increasingly moved towards medicalising normal everyday behaviour – that is, we’ve become stuck in a loop of identifying things that people do with digital technologies, wondering whether they can do them too much, and therefore assuming that if we do use them too much, 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. It’s more that for the vast majority of us, it is not the case that we are 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’s 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 reducing, and goldfish don’t actually have short ones to begin with. Like many worries about screens, this concern finds its basis in a misunderstanding of what attention is.
From a cognitive perspective, attention is a hugely complex phenomenon, and despite a significant amount of excellent research on it – literally thousands of papers – there are still some fundamentally unanswered questions about what it actually is, and how best to characterise it. In popular science writing, it’s often oversimplified as a sort of spotlight that we can move around to focus on important or interesting tasks. We find it very hard to shift our focus of attention between multiple tasks, though, and so because our smartphones can be so distracting – with each message pinging like a siren’s call, wooing us to check our socials – we can’t help but easily lose focus on the things that matter.
There’s a kernel of truth in this – the spotlight model of attention is one of the most celebrated and well researched approaches to understanding visual attention in psychological research. But attention isn’t just “grabbed” or “distracted” by salient features in our environment – top-down information, such as our particular goals and motivations at that moment in time, are important too. An emerging line of research over the past few years has instead suggested that we might better characterise attention in terms of a “priority map” system: rather than something that can only be singularly focused (and therefore potentially “stolen”), attention can be proportionally allocated and spread over several tasks. In other words, screens are but one part of our attentional ecosystem: sometimes they can have positive effects, sometimes negative effects, but that is dependent on a wealth of other factors around us.
How come we often feel as if digital technology isn’t doing us any good then?
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 aren’t actually robbing our attention, but that narrative doesn’t fit well with the lived experience many of us have. We all have stories of situations where we feel as if we’ve spent too much time – time that we didn’t really want to spend – mindlessly scrolling through content we’re not really taking in or didn’t actually want to see. We look around us and see everyone on their phones, not engaging with anything around them, and it just doesn’t feel right. So it’s understandable that when someone comes along proclaiming that screens are inherently bad for us, we get on board with that easily.
But the reality is much more complex. One consistent finding in research that looks at the negative impacts of digital technology is that when you ask people to provide subjective reports of their own screen time along with self-report measures of, for example, mental wellbeing, or attention, the correlations that researchers find are much larger than when more objective measures are used. Part of the reason for this relates to what are known as “presumed influence” theories: we’re repeatedly exposed to very strong negative stories about the impact of screens in the media, which changes our attitudes towards them, and in turn ends up colouring our own personal experiences.
Over time, then, we start to feel bad about our own tech use (and take a negative view of it more generally), not because it is actually bad for us, but because there’s an oft-spoken and uncritically accepted assumption that it might be.
So you’re saying that there’s actually nothing to worry about?
Not at all. There are very real problems with the ways new digital technologies are developed and implemented, and often the decision-making processes involved drift quite drastically away from social responsibility. But I would argue that we are also spending a lot of time and effort worrying about (and researching) the wrong sorts of questions: asking whether screen time is good or bad, or how much screen time is too much, doesn’t really get us anywhere, because those questions don’t reflect the reality of how we use digital technologies.
Instead, an emerging line of research is taking a more nuanced approach, for example asking why some people struggle online, whereas others in seemingly similar situations thrive. Rather than thinking of screens as inherently harmful or maladaptive, instead it’s better to think of them as habit-forming. Habits are neutral in and of themselves, but can become good or bad for us depending on a range of other contextual and situational factors. Crucially, habits are something much more within our own personal control to change – 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 simultaneously losing all the good things that our online lives afford 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 worries can be waved away as sensationalised baloney by the tech industry. Instead, if we can engage in more rational and evidence-driven discussions about screens, if we can look at the balance between benefits and risk in a more sensible manner, then we can apply pressure more effectively on the industry to make meaningful changes.
Many of the digital technologies that we worry about are technologies of pleasure and convenience, which means that user wellbeing should be at the core of any and all design considerations. We also need better research, though – research that moves away from an overreliance on self-report data, and instead combines meaningful industry data with appropriate theory and objective data obtained in a much more targeted way from individual users. This might seem like a pipe dream, but we’ve already started to see some studies showing that it is possible.
So we need to start asking better questions – in research, of industry, and of ourselves. And in answering those questions, we’ll be better able to understand where the benefits in our own screen use lie, where there are things we would like to change, and how we can best effect those changes.
Pete Etchells is a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University and the author of 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
