Why do some people believe smartphones and social media are harmful?

I try to read and listen to critiques of smartphones and social media with an open mind. Typically, these critiques note the addictive qualities of these technologies and lament their effects on our abilities to engage in deep, sustained contemplation and substantive social interaction. A decade of experience conducting research on the uses and effects of social media has taught me to be skeptical of these claims. The first thing we would expect to see, if these claims were true, would be vast differences between those who use smartphones/social media a lot and those who use them a little or not at all. Among younger folks, we'd expect differences in academic achievement. Among everyone, we'd expect differences in happiness, well-being, depression, and/or the nature of their relationships with others. Even if such differences existed, this would not necessary suggest that these technologies caused changes in individuals. Perhaps individuals possess some existing characteristics (such as a lack of a clear sense of purpose in their lives) that, ten years ago, would have caused them to watch a lot of television and be unhappy, and that now causes them to spend a lot of time on Facebook and be unhappy. When I look at the sum total of what studies have found over the past ten years, I don't even see much evidence of the correlations you would expect to see if the claims were true. To the extent that there are correlations between use and negative outcomes, the magnitudes of the effects tend to be small (far smaller than is suggested by the level of concern they've prompted among many).

This doesn't rule out the possibility that within the more recent past (say, within the last year or two), smartphones and social media may have started to have the kinds of negative consequences about which many people worry. Research moves at a slow pace, and the technologies and the ways people use them are changing. Personally, it's hard to look at some of the freshmen I teach in large lecture classes, who are seemingly unable to stop using their phones, and not think, 'Maybe the worriers are right after all. Maybe we had to wait until a generation of young people had a chance to develop technology use habits at a young age to really see the effects of the technologies on people.' I'm passionate about doing whatever we can to establish solid evidence of the effects of smartphones/social media use on mental health, academic achievement, and relationships. I'm passionate about improving our measures. I don't want to set the bar for evidence of pernicious effects unrealistically high. I just want to see solid evidence before I believe the worriers.

At the same time, I think it's worthwhile for those who worry about the effects of smartphones/social media to consider alternative explanations for what they see. If there turns out not to be evidence of smartphones and social media's pernicious effects, why might it seem as though they have those effects?

I think part of it has to do with the people that worriers observe. Often, they observe young people: children and adolescents. The adults they observe, including themselves, often have the types of jobs (academic jobs; journalism; social media managers) that allow them flexibility in how they spend their time. This is what children and journalists have in common with one another: they have flexible schedules. There are no clear boundaries between work, play, and social time. Under these circumstances, social media, it would seem, can be pernicious. It can be habit-forming to an extent that feels addictive, crowd out deep thought with shallow distractions, put you on a hedonic treadmill that feels impossible to get off.

But these are not the circumstances of the average person.

Most people, in the United States and in the rest of the world, have more structured lives. They spend large periods of the day working or care-taking family members. Do they use smartphones/social media while they work and care-take? I'm sure some of them do. In the absence of smartphones/social media, would some of those folks have engaged in other non-work/non-care-taking activities such as socializing with co-workers face-to-face or watching television? Probably. In any case, it's clear that research on leisure use of smartphones and social media at work ('cyber-loafing' is the humorously antiquated name for this) and use while care-taking is important, but also clear that we should not assume that social media plays the same role in the lives of individuals with more structured lives as it does in the lives of those with less structure.

What I suspect is that many people, perhaps most people, spend most of their days engaged in work that is not especially stimulating or fulfilling, but that pays the bills. At the end of the day, they want to relax. Ten or twenty years ago, they might sit down in front of the television and unwind. Today, they might break out their smartphones (perhaps while also watching TV) and sift through social media posts, exchange messages with friends, and catch up on the day's events. This kind of use would serve roughly the same function as TV use ten or twenty years ago - relaxing after a hard day's work - while helping them to feel connected to far-flung friends and family (an especially valuable perk to those who work at home and may feel isolated).

Does their smartphone/social media use come with some bad side effects, such as exposure to an aggressively polarized online culture war, or exposure to plenty of misleading or untrue information? Sure, but when was it otherwise? Didn't exposure to TV come with plenty of bad side effects, such as exposure to a skewed version of reality, one that often trafficked in violence and ugly stereotypes? I don't mean to rely on the TV comparison as a way of excusing the many problems with online life. But I think it's worthwhile to bring up so as to correct the belief that our leisure time, in the past, tended to be especially productive and pro-social.

Perhaps the lives of certain people (those with flexible schedules) have changed a great deal due to the popularization of smartphones and social media. Perhaps they are suffering and they're angry at the creators and supporters of smartphones and social media, and in their anger, overreach in their claims about the effects of smartphones and social media. Perhaps not! But I hope to make the case that to believe that smartphones and social media are not problematic for the majority of their users is not something that only industry shills do. There is a sensible reason, if an untested one, to believe this.

What Does Everyday Media Use Look Like? (and why this might bias our perception of digital media's effects)

Two brief anecdotes:

1: I’m sitting in Railroad Park in Birmingham, enjoying a breezy, temperate Saturday morning. A few folks pose for a photo that someone else takes with a smartphone. I guess I notice these people first in part because I cannot take a picture with my smartphone - the camera in it is broken. There is nothing like being robbed of something that you have taken for granted to get you to notice it more and to think about it more. I see a few other people in the park typing messages on their smartphones. Other people talk to one another face-to-face. Others stand around and take in the landscape, pet other people’s dogs, read a magazine or a book. And here I sit, typing on a laptop. What do we look like to each other? What kinds of assumptions might we be making about each other based on what we're doing in a public place with or without media technologies?

2: I'm enjoying a beer and a musical performance at Band of Brothers, a new brewery here in Tuscaloosa. The beer, the music, and the general vibe are all great. At the end of the performance, the lead singer, an elegant, attractive, charismatic young woman sits down at a table near the stage, gets out her smartphone, and seems to instantly transform herself into a zombie, hunched over a tiny screen that illuminates her dead-eyed stare.

It isn't hard to find people who are concerned about excessive media technology use (in particular excessive smartphone use). The most popular books about digital media use and the most popular articles take a pretty dim view of it. If there was a utopic moment in the history of such technologies, that moment seems to have passed. This recent commercial for Cisco feels like a relic of a time before we became so deeply suspicious of digital media (perhaps it's a response to that suspicion. Why else would we need a "pep talk" about the virtues of technology?). 

Where do we get these ideas about media use? Or: why are we so keen to agree with, and so reluctant to question, those who provide anecdotal evidence of its ill effects?

Often times, we are heavily influenced by our direct observations: we look at the people around us, the students in our classes, the family members at our cookouts, the friends at parties, the kids at our friends' houses, and the people in the park. Direct observation informs our intuition, and we seek out confirmation of that intuition in the books, blogs, articles, and documentaries we consume.

I've been thinking about how the relationship between our typical first-hand observations of media use and the actual fact of media use (regardless of whether or not it is observed by others) has changed over the years, and how this might influence our opinions of media use and its effects and may, in part, account for the dystopic view that seems to be dominating public discourse on the topic. 

One change: media use has become more public, and hence more visible. People watched a lot of TV before, teens used instant messenger a lot before, but they engaged in these activities mostly in their own homes. The ascendant variety of media use, mobile media use (primarily smartphones), is much easier to observe than TV use or AIM use on a home computer. Thus, we may think that there is a lot more media use going on than there was before, but this may be distorted by the fact that it is simply more easily observed. Evidence suggests that average screen time is increasing, but by the way people talk about digital media, you would think we spent very little time staring at screens before the smartphone, or that smartphones have doubled the amount of time people spend looking at screens (the real change in average screen time among Americans over the past 4 years is probably around 7%).

There are, of course, older media that are used in public: books, newspapers, and magazines. But there is an important difference between print media and smartphones: in the case of print media, it is easy for observers to know precisely what the print media user is reading while it is difficult for observers to tell what users are doing with mobile media. Observers cannot see the screens of smartphone or tablet users; even when observers physically can see the screens, there is an expectation that they do not look too closely at them. So, observers know that the other person is using media but they don’t know how they are using it: work email, liberal news, conservative news, nearby places to eat, connecting with family members on social media, bragging on social media, looking up how to build a bomb, how to build a raised-bed garden, etc.

What they are doing with media really matters. If they’re being social and supporting others while staring at the plastic rectangles in their hands, then this is very different than obsessing over how many people like what they've just posted on social media, and both these things can be done on the same website or application (e.g., Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit). There is such a broad range of activities in which a public media user could be engaged. My sense is that an anxiety arises simply because observers know so little about others that they share space with.

Then there's the question of what people would be doing if they weren’t using their phones. How do the particular activities in which they are engaged on their smartphones stack up to those other possibilities? If they weren't engaged in those media use activities, would they be talking to other strangers face-to-face? Would they be reading a magazine? Would they have spent time in deep, productive contemplation? Would they have stood there and dwelt on a mistake they made the day before? Would they have stayed home and watched TV? I ask these questions not in a rhetorical sense, to assert that the fear and resentment so many feel about media use is exaggerated. I raise them because I honestly don’t know, and that I believe that one cannot honestly say whether the fears about increased screen time and smart phones are justified or not without evidence that speaks to these questions. 

What about witnessing the media use not of strangers, but of someone more familiar to us: a friend, spouse, parent? Our observations of strangers are largely free of interpersonal influences; whether two people at the park talk to one another or ignore one another and stare at their smartphones doesn't directly affect our interpersonal relationships with them or anyone else. It's simply a snapshot of behavior in our society. When we witness the media use of someone with whom we have some sort of relationship, there is an emotional component to our judgment of their use. Commonly, we compare their media use to one particular alternative: having a good conversation with us.

This view ignores other alternatives. If they didn't have a smartphone or laptop, perhaps they would have elected to watch television, or would have elected to leave the room and call a friend on a landline phone in the other room, or would have read a book, newspaper, or magazine. Perhaps we would have had all of their attention instead of some of it, but perhaps we would have had none of it. We only see that they are not talking to us, which is something we wouldn't see and be reminded of if they were not in the room with us.

Compare the experience of sharing a room with someone you know while that person uses a smartphone to the experience of watching TV with someone you know. In the case of the TV-watching friend, we know what our friend is watching; we're watching it, too. In the case of the digital media user, we're likely to fear the worst when we can't see what the other person is doing on their smartphone or laptop, and the fear (of not really knowing this person and what they're up to) likely has a greater impact on us when it is a close friend, spouse, child, or parent. TV can spark conversation, but then again, so can smartphone use. During my casual observations of smartphone use at bars and coffee shops, I've noticed frequent "screen sharing" behavior in which phone use serves as the impetus for conversation rather than an alternative to it. I've also participated in such "phone-aided" conversations at home with my wife.

When we see other people using smartphones and laptops, we feel ignored. We often compare the situation to ideal alternatives rather than making the effort to determine what the likely alternatives might be. We don't think about what the person is doing with the media (often because the expectation of privacy prevents us from knowing this). When we see the elegant, charismatic performer transformed into a hunched-back zombie, we feel a visceral repulsion. This is what we do by default. We then seek out justification for these feelings in anecdotes, books, articles, documentaries, etc.

Making any sort of correct judgment about the impact of media technologies on society necessitates that we recognize the ways in which we respond emotionally to the sight of other people's media use. By the looks of the most popular opinions on smartphone and laptop use, many of us have yet to take that step.

Instant Gratification & Digital Media: An Assumed Connection

At this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference, I attended a panel about the connection between instant gratification and digital technology. While these types of gatherings are great because they bring together people from so many different disciplines (e.g., education technology designers, academics, filmmakers, bloggers, etc.), this can result in conversations in which folks are talking past one another rather than listening and responding to one another.

The panelists at this talk tended to fall into two camps: "hand wringers" and "digital media apologists". The hand-wringers spent their time listing concerns about the ways in which overuse of digital technologies would lead to a society in which people could not delay gratification (which was assumed to be necessary to forge lasting, fulfilling relationships and for general social harmony). They relied on the growing body of evidence supporting the importance of gratification delay and grit (i.e., persistence in the face of multiple setbacks) in a variety of domains, including work and relationships. The apologists pointed out how the instantly gratifying digital media badmouthed by the hand-wringers (e.g., Twitter) connects and empowers formerly disenfranchised members of our society and gives rise to important social movements like #blacklivesmatter.

I kept waiting for a more nuanced discussion to break out, but it never happened. The experience did, however, make me think about how the conversation about this topic would benefit from some clarification of arguments and concepts. So, here would be some starting places:

1. Is there solid evidence of any kind of link between digital media use and any of the effects discussed (namely, reduced attention span and reduced ability to delay gratification)? The connection between these things is assumed to exist by almost everyone. Even many the digital media apologists assume that it exists, but differ in that they think that in addition to these effects, there are positive effects as well. I've found there to be a link among American college students between self-control and social media use as well as digital video viewing,  but I didn't find a connection between self-control and cell phone use. This data was gathered before smartphones became truly dominant, so I might find different connections if I replicated the study.

But what about this assumed connection between grit (or lack thereof) and digital media use? Has anybody even tested this yet?

2. Does this affect young people or every user? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the habits we acquire as younger people affect our behavior later in life, and that greater neuroplacticity of younger brains mean that media affects young minds, habits, and other behaviors more profoundly. But it is possible that adults who start using digital media in adulthood may be affected by it (specifically, may experience reduced ability to delay gratification as a result of heavy use of digital media).

3. Lowered attention span vs. Inability to delay gratification. Many people seem to conflate these two. Some experimental designs would conflate the two (e.g., an experiment in which people had to choose between reading for homework, which often requires sustained attention AND an ability to forego something more immediately gratifying, and a video game, which provides greater engagement and novelty as well as an immediate sense of accomplishment and pleasure). But it is worth testing these two things separately. It could be that digital media presents us with short bursts of information, and so it hurts our ability to concentrate on or pay attention to anything for a sustained period of time, and/or it may hurt our abilities to forego more immediately gratifying options for less immediately gratifying ones.

4. Hedonic experiences vs. habitual "empty" experiences vs. social surveillance. As the hand-wringers were talking about how digital media provides us with so many opportunities for feelings of accomplishment and affirmation and stimulation, I thought, "what about email?" Email seems to be one of the hardest habits to break, and yet almost everyone I know hates using it. It may be "gratifying" to check one's email in the way that scratching an itch may be gratifying, but I wouldn't call it pleasurable or hedonic. I'd imagine many people feel similarly about social media use: they don't like it, and they don't want to be doing it, yet they feel compelled to do it.

This gets me thinking about designations between things we have to do (like work), things we want to do (like reading a book or climbing a mountain), and things we end up doing (like channel surfing or frittering away time online). It also gets me thinking about the use of the term "addiction" in the media context. When we say that we are addicted to some kind of media use, maybe this just means that it's something we do but don't have to do, like work, nor do we want to do it (i.e., it doesn't give us pleasure), like having a blast with friends. It's value isn't immediately apparent in the way that the value of work or the value of hanging out with friends is. And yet, it could present us with some value: the value of social surveillance, of knowing where we stand with those around us, our family, friends, and co-workers. Email and social media provide us with relevant information about where we stand with these folks.

At the same time, there may be a "purely habitual" component to email and social media use. That is, through repetition, one might do it without thinking about what value it holds. It just is what you do when you pick up your phone, when you sit down at your laptop, or when you aren't otherwise engaged. There is evidence to suggest that when we aren't otherwise engaged, our brains "default" to self-reflection. Perhaps our seeking out of information on where we stand with others (i.e., the standing of our social self) is a symptom or a consequence of this kind of thinking.

5. Do the effects of digital media use carry over to non-digital contexts (e.g., eating), or does the inability to delay gratification assume that digital media is available at all times? When we talk about the poor decisions that people who have reduced ability to delay gratification make, is it because they are choosing some proximate digital instantly gratifying option, or is it because the use of digital media has reduced their abilities to delay gratification of any kind (not just digital kinds). If it were the former, then simply taking the digital temptation out of the environment would immediately reduce the harm, but if the effects of digital media use manifest themselves in other domains, then changing one's ability to delay gratification would take a bit longer, and you would need to take the digital temptations out of the environment for a longer period of time to change the habits of the individual in all domains.

So, going to the talk made me want to think more carefully about how to test these connections. It also reminded me of how easily discussions of this topic can fall into something repetitious, resembling age-old battles between hand-wringing finger-waggers and apologists. Keeping an open mind going into the process of inquiry is essential, but so is greater specificity regarding the concepts and claims we are putting to the test.

Choose your metaphors wisely

The term "digital detox" is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. This suggests a certain cultural awareness of the concept of media overuse which, to someone studying self-control and media use, is heartening. But I wonder about the choice of words.

"Detox"'s meaning, recently, related to food consumption, or the lack thereof. When you traded in the fast food for celery and refrained from consuming anything but tea, you were "detoxing", or "cleansing". But, of course, the term detox originally achieved notoriety when it was used in reference to addictive drugs like heroin. When I think of the term, I still think of it in terms of drugs.

Even beyond that single term, we are apt to think of new experiences in terms of older, more familiar ones. More and more, I hear people talk of Facebook or Candy Crush "addiction" which, again, conjures thoughts of hopeless alcoholics or strung-out meth-heads. Perhaps, in our effort to blame anyone but ourselves for the fact that we're unable to eschew immediately gratifying options for activities that will help us achieve our long-term goals, we want to trump up the power of our indulgences, and we do this by likening our habits to the almost-literally-irresistible urge of the crack addict to smoke more crack.

If we have to understand our new experiences with habitual digital media use in terms of older experiences (and, as much as people love to bad-mouth metaphors as some sort of crutch that keeps us from seeing new things as they truly are, I think this is the only way anything new can be understood at all, at least at first), then food and dieting would probably be a better metaphor than drugs.

Information (that is, the content of all media, digital or otherwise) is like food (and unlike, say, cocaine): we need it to survive. You can't really say no to media any more than you can say no to food. Getting too much of it is bad, but not nearly as bad as injecting large doses of certain drugs. Many more people struggle with tempting foods than with tempting drugs, and I think media over-use and habitual media use should be understood as things that are as common and as benign as bad eating habits, not as rare and harmful as drug addiction.

As time goes on, we'll understand our relationship with digital media on its own terms. But until then, its important to at least consider how our comparisons to other experiences (both in thought and language) affect our perception of threats and responsibilities.

Do you have a Candy Crush Habit or a Candy Crush Addiction?

Most of my recent research concerns media habits and/or what you might call "unconscious" media use. These are the times when we open up a tab on our web browsers and go to a website without thinking too deeply about why we're doing this or considering the long-term value of such an act. Over time, such behavior become habits, and habits can be hard to break. It seems that if habits are sufficiently difficult to break, we call them addictions.

But I, like many others in the field of psychology, am not too keen on applying the term "addiction" to habitual media use. Why not? If you're playing Candy Crush Saga five hours a day and you feel unable to stop playing, what is the difference if we call this a bad habit or an addiction?

Well, I suppose it has to do with how our culture currently understands addiction. We treat it as a disease that requires professional intervention. We assume, as is the case with most diseases, that the afflicted is not responsible for their affliction and that it is unlikely that they can get better on their own. They need help. This diagnosis is well-meaning in the sense that when people are going through something bad (and the feeling of being unable to stop doing something is usually bad) it would be worse to heap the extra guilt that comes with responsibility for their current condition (and for altering the condition) on top of their existing troubles. In addition, professionals have years of experience dealing with addictions and decades of research to help develop systems for fighting addiction.

But there's something that's lost: the individual's sense of self-efficacy, the sense that they can do something about the behavior. In some cases, it's possible that self-efficacy can be an important part of altering habitual/addictive behavior, that the individual finding a way to change their behavior is more effective and efficient than sending all of those individuals to professionals and/or through a series of institutions.

As more people find themselves with habits/addictions to games like Candy Crush, it's important to address the following questions: What role does self-efficacy play in breaking habits? If we call the habit an addiction, does this diagnosis reduce the person's sense of self-efficacy thereby making it harder (or perhaps more expensive) to quit?

This isn't to say that simply labeling this kind of behavior as "habits" isn't without drawbacks. People may not take the threat that their behavior poses as seriously if they call it a habit (most of us have bad habits, after all). Even when we do call the behavior addiction, we're increasingly liberal in our use of that term which waters it down (much like the term "stalking", which is used in a casual, everyday sense).

So, whether we call this kind of behavior "addiction", I think, is not just a matter of semantics. It is possible that diagnosis affects self-efficacy, which affects likelihood of behavior change. Whether you call it addiction or habit, the end game should be the same: understanding how people stop doing things that they, at first, feel they are unable to stop doing. But it's important to recognize the role of words and diagnoses in that process.