Recent research from the department of sociology at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) shows that for adolescents, no online time is worse than moderate time online. It reminded me of that famous story told by David Foster Wallace at the 2005 Kenyon university commencement address. An older fish greets two younger fish with, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
The two fish swim on and then one says, “What the hell is water?”
The online world is our children’s water, and increasingly, ours, too, even if we have little idea what we are swimming in. But if our adolescent children are not swimming at all, they are most likely drowning in terms of their socialising because so much of life is now lived online.
One of the TCD study’s co-authors, Prof Richard Layte, has also pointed out that people want to paint all teenagers who spend excessive time online as loners and losers. The truth is that people who spend a lot of time interacting online are likely to have more friends offline, too. No one wants to hear that because we are so used to the idea that smartphones, in the words of researcher Jean Twenge, are destroying a generation.
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Mind you, the Trinity study does find that high amounts of time spent online have negative impacts on mental health, with girls more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, and boys more likely to suffer from symptoms of hyperactivity or oppositional behaviour. The degree of damage is likely affected by the kind of activity engaged in, especially solitary versus sociable activities.
But how much time is too much time online?
The TCD press release about the study talks about the “Goldilocks” hypothesis’; that there is a point between low and high use that is “just right” for young people, somewhere around an hour to two hours. My first thought on reading the study is that I know very few young people who are online as little as the study participants who self-report their usage, and in the case of the younger participants, report weekday use only. Heavy online engagement is described as more than three hours a day. Eight hours a day would be common for young people.
In fact, many adolescents I know are never truly offline because their phone is present in all activities. Schools may fool themselves that mobile phones are locked in the locker. Even in schools where there are supposedly foolproof methods such as see-through safes attached to locker fronts, some students just use a different mobile phone instead.
Parents are even easier to fool. Some parents insist mobile phones are charged downstairs at night, unaware that their children are sneaking down to retrieve them. Second-level students are often awake half the night checking their phones, leaving them with sleep deprivation as serious as constant jet lag.
If heavy online use predicts poor mental health, then both adolescents and adults are in trouble. Moreover, the old distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants, originally coined by Marc Prensky to describe a generation for whom technology is their native language versus those who grew up without it, is now seen as simplistic. Prensky himself said that digital wisdom is a more helpful term: an ability to use technology wisely.
How many of us are digitally wise? We tend to focus, perfectly reasonably, on the really egregious aspects of time spent online, on the bullying, the emptiness generated by constantly viewing carefully curated images of other people’s lives, and the brutal exploitativeness of violent and misogynistic porn. But even in the unlikely event of peace, joy and love breaking out on Twitter on a permanent basis, constant online living changes us. We are just not quite sure how.
The debate about whether the change is good or bad used to be typified by the interactions between psychologist Jean Twenge and author Nir Eyal. Twenge believes that there is a correlation between the rise of adolescent mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, and the related behaviours, especially self-harm and suicide, that began around 2012/2013 when smartphones became common.
Eyal believes correlation is not causation and that the internet has brought lots of positive things, including dropping teenage pregnancy rates. His view is perhaps unsurprising given that he wrote Hooked, a book considered to be the bible on how to create addictive digital media. In fairness to Eyal, and indeed to Twenge, when taken as a whole, the research is inconclusive about the real impact of social media. Nor does the TCD study offer practical suggestions about how to reduce online time to between one and two hours.
What are parents to do? Use our common sense, for starters. If human beings have thrived on real life, face-to-face meaningful connections for thousands of years, we should surely be putting down our phones long enough to encourage our children to put down theirs, too.
And when we take up our phones, it’s no harm to remember that while Foster Wallace’s fish did not need swimming lessons, just awareness of water, we humans floundering in this new element certainly do.