Josh MacAllister is a new Labour MP. As with many nebies , he’s keen to make his mark with legislation and has proposed a Bill that would:
• Raise the minimum age of "internet adulthood" (to create social media profiles, email accounts, etc) from 13 to 16
• Legally ban smartphones from classrooms
• Strengthen Ofcom's powers to protect children from apps designed to be ‘addictive’
• Committing government to review further regulation if needed of the design, supply, marketing and use of mobile phones by children under 16
We have a problem
I have been following the screentime debate since 2009, when I read Susan Greenfields’s scaremongering book, where she claimed screentime was making is cognitively stupid. I blogged about it then and the debate has only got worse. Year after year potboiler self-help books appear demanding we digital detox, limit screen time, ban screens in schools. How we deal with technology, especially around children, is an important issue but its is so often reduced to self-help platitudes.
I thought then, and think now, that the idea that smartphones damage our cogntitive systems suggests that the evolved mind is so delicate that they could be damaged by a switch in modality. We don’t say this about books or the cinema. The evolution of our minds has taken million sof years of selection, if it were that easy to make us stupid we’d never have got here.
I’ve seen plenty of people make money by writing about the dangers of ‘screentime’. Whethere it’s smartphones, video games or social media, there’s always some moraliser who wants to tell us to digitally detox (it doesn’t work) and what to do with our time. Susan Greenfield was one, Jean Twenge another – there’s a long list. You can’t help but feel they start with almost an almost religious zeal and end up preaching.
The story they tell themselves is ‘screentime – bad, f2f – good’. Yet there’s rarely any real definition of what is meant by ‘screentime’. It is a complex issue. Neither is there much breadth to the research they quote – often the same cherrypicked pieces, mainly surverys that show correlation and weak effects, sometimes neutral, even positive! Turns out the evidence that screentime is harmful is as thin as gruel.
Unlocked
He claims there is almost no evidence to say that screens are bad for us. On the contrary, up to a certain limit, the use of social media correlates with wellbeing, and that some is better for us than none. And where there are negative correlations, such as that between social media and depression, or the amount of time we sit at a computer each day and our sense of our overall wellbeing, they are almost vanishingly weak.
Our children already inhabit a landscape that is unrecognisable in the context of an earlier version of childhood. But this isn’t something to be afraid of - and isn’t something we should feel guilty about. Screens are ubiquitous and here to stay.
There is a problem with ‘screentime’, as there are lots of different types, with different uses, in different contexts. Etchells thinks we have nothing to fear, and a great deal to gain, by establishing a positive relationship with our screens (and our children’s screens) and thinking about screen time sensibly and critically. Screentime is NOT the key driver behind apparent declines in mental health and wellbeing. People tend to bring their own biases to the ‘screentime’ debate, so we rush to conclusions and point the finger at the nearest candidate. Indeed, the Royal College of Paediatric and Mental Health came to the same conclusion as there was no clear ‘evidence’ for the toxic effect of screentime.
Distraction, attention & sleep
Turns out the research on attention and distractibility, Parry And Roux (2021), is incredibly weak. South Korea tried banning the internet between midnight and 6am. – it actually increased the amount of time they spent on the internet during the day! And don't fall for the blue light arguments – it is not true. One study from Montana University (2022) showed blue block glasses reducing the amount of sleep, another showed no differences in subjective sleepiness the morning after. Other research showed small effects. The research is not worth losing sleep over.
Digital detox
Clearly derived from the dieting industry. Shaw (2020) looked studies in this area and found that fe colected real data from smartphones and devices. – they are almost all questionnaires. Her clever experiments showed that people tended to ‘report’ mental health issues when asked. The results quadrupled and tripled when surveys were used, as opposed to data collection. Thomee (2018) showed that 70% of studies on screen time relied on questionnaires and not real data from devices. There is a puritanical strain in all of this – wanting to control others.
Addiction
The debate is not helped by calling it an ‘addiction’. Etchells explains why this is medically wrong. Equating smartphone use to heroin is not helpful. Let’s make this clear – you are not ‘addicted’ to your smartphone. Technology is not a pharmaceutical and when we get the reductive talk about dopamine – one should really despair. That is far more complex that shallow PPTs at learning conferences make out. Talk of addiction is overused and implies a lack of agency, as it it is a biological phenomenon.
The 2017 article by Jean Twenge (picked up by Haidt) was the catalysts for the panic. It was based on her wpork with data sets, that did indeed show correlations but the results were weak (on scale -1 to 1 for correlation – 0.01 to 0.06). The problem with correlations, like ice crem sales and crime (both go up in Summer) is they don’t tell us much about causality. Orgers & Jensen (2019) showed mixed results in the studies looking at the connection between mental health and screentime – some positive, some negative, sone neutral. Even in the positive studies the results were weak. They note the difficulty in establishing a link on such a multivariant topic. A further meta-study by Ferguson (2021) concluded thare was no established proof of the link between smartphones, social media and mental health. Thay also noted an absence of rigour in the studies.
Conclusion
Orben called it the ‘Sisyphean cycle of technology panics”. I’ve been though many. We need to look at the evidence and stay calm. Screentime is an unhelpful concept and Etchells recommends looking at screen ‘habits’ there are problems with misuse and certainly harm to children through inappropriate use and content. It is important to be precise and not react to angry, knee jerk reactions. Don't buy into these narratives assuming they’re all true. We have a long history of politicians trying to make this claim from Foulkes in 1981 who had a bill called ‘Control of Space Invaders'. It was narrowly defeated. MacAllister is the new Foulkes.
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