We Don't Have to Doomscroll
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Matilda Temperley
Back in 2017, psychologist Jean M. Twenge published a book, iGen, that aimed to raise the alarm about how smartphone use was affecting the youth. Her argument at the time, which was excerpted in The Atlantic, was that kids and teens were using smartphones in ways that would almost certainly lead to a mental-health crisis.
Almost a decade later, we’re there.
According to the World Health Organization, globally, “depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents.” In fact, 70% of 10- to 19-year-olds worldwide have at least one mental illness. And, for those in the 15-to-29 age group, suicide is the leading cause of death. There are many complex factors that play into youth mental health, of course, but the consensus is that Twenge wasn’t wrong; the phones are a problem.
Maybe not only the phones, notes Kaitlyn Regehr. But very much the phones. An associate professor at University College London and the institution’s program director of digital humanities, she’s one of the world’s leading experts on the cultural impacts of social media and the author of a new book, Smartphone Nation: Why We’re All Addicted to Our Screens and What You and Your family Can Do About It. Part advice manual, part political and economic history of the internet, part ‘digital nutrition’ manifesto, Smartphone Nation helps explain why we’re all so obsessed with our phones, but more importantly, it offers a very compelling, no-nonsense argument that we don’t have to be, and that change is possible. I recently chatted with Regehr about why adults also need boundaries around their tech use, the politics of analogue life and why we have more control than we think we do.
As you note in your introduction, there is already a lot of literature and thinking about smartphones and the internet and why we are all so addicted. So, why did you want to write this book?
We do talk a lot about the problems with the digital space. We understand the problems, [and that they] will be different for different people based on their circumstances. They might look like a polarized society for some people, they might be around body image and how much we look at our faces, they might be around young people and self-harm or pornography. What I wasn't seeing a lot of was work helping people take the next step. I wasn’t seeing the solution.
Because of the work I do, I could not get through a playground date or a dinner party without someone asking me for advice around the digital space. So, I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I'll write this down for myself as a parent, and for my friends.’ And it turned out, it wasn’t just my friends who wanted to read it. A lot of other people wanted to take that next step too.
The book is framed around families, and especially parents and children. I'm not a parent, although I have many children in my life that I love, but I still found a lot of this really useful for myself. Why do adults also need a better understanding of how the internet actually works, and the importance of boundaries in the digital space?
A lot of time and attention has been directed at children's digital mental health and well-being, which is, of course, incredibly important. Children and teenagers tend to be on the sharp edge of the knife when we talk about online harm. But I am also very concerned about adult digital mental health and well-being. I think that has been a phenomenally under-discussed area, and lest we forget, it was not children who stormed the Capitol. Adults are not immune to disinformation. Adults are not immune to echo chambers. They are not immune to issues of body dysmorphia. So yes, there's been a lot of media attention on the impacts on children, and we should continue to be concerned about that. But it's also important that we address the implications this has for adult digital mental health and well-being.
This is anecdotally obvious based on my own smartphone use, but there is also plenty of data around loneliness, political polarization and poor mental health, all of which are associated with rising phone use. But… I have also seen some pushback on the idea that our phones are the problem. So, how do we know that it is the phones?
When [people say] it's not the phones, I think generally what they mean is, it's not only the phones. And I do agree with that. In fact, although the book is called Smartphone Nation, it really transcends device because we have multiple screens in our lives. Oftentimes, very young children are introduced to algorithmic processes long before they are on a smartphone. They [watch] YouTube shorts; they are on tablets; they are on algorithmically driven streaming services on their parents’ televisions.
I’m really interested in intentional, empowered use, and moving people away from being passive consumers that just consume whatever is algorithmically fed to them toward being active participants, and I mean that in a trans-device way. There's a big difference between sitting with a child watching a David Attenborough documentary and putting them on YouTube, on a tablet, with headphones on, alone in their room. One is selective and community-building. It is generally educational content. Ideally, we're pausing for breaks. We're talking about what we're seeing. We're using that viewing as a form of socialization. The other is isolated. It's short-form, generally low-quality content, and it's on an algorithmic feed.
We should all be thinking in those terms. It is a different experience to sit down together as a group of friends or as a family to watch The Sound of Music than to sit alone, scrolling through an algorithmic feed into the wee hours of the night. That is a different form of screen consumption.
Smartphones are the devices that best facilitate that kind of unhealthy practice, but they are not the only space, particularly when we're talking about young kids who don't have phones yet. We know that about 80% of kids in the U.S. are on YouTube from the age of three. They're more frequently inhabiting algorithmically driven spaces than they are inhabiting what I would call good quality children's programming, like TVO. So what I encourage people to do, whether it is usage for children or their own usage, is to realize that every time you open up a screen, you are actually making an active decision. And since you're making a decision, you can choose to make a different one.
I want to talk more about that, because I definitely feel some hopelessness our increasingly online lives. It feels like this is just what the world is like now, and how we have to live. It feels like there isn’t a choice.
If we decide that social media is totally bad and we're all doomed, but we're just going to keep using it anyway, we're basically living out this self-fulfilling prophecy that turns us all into zombies, and we all end up in our polarized silos. It's a dystopian nightmare. The thing is, the only value in constantly talking about the harms of social media is if we actively make a change around it, right? Yes, we need to understand the harms around digital usage, and we need to educate our children to be wary of these harms. But we also need to empower them, and ourselves, into thinking that we can take control over these things.
And we can. We can decide what we want on our feeds. We can actively game our algorithms and curate our digital experience, and we should. We do this all the time for other things in our lives. We curate what we wear, what we eat—we make decisions. We can, and should, be thinking about this in the same way, because we are putting this content into our bodies, and is it impacting who we are and what we believe and how we view ourselves. It's kind of crazy that we don't take control.
Here's a concern about where we go next, though: it already feels like teaching your children to take control of their digital usage is a position of privilege. The people who are going to be able to have that empowered, intentional relationship to the internet as a whole are the people with the most money, the highest education levels, the most time. Actually, we’re kind of already seeing that, because tech moguls are creating products that force us online, while their children have very strict boundaries about how much time they can spend in digital spaces.
Yes. We used to talk about digital poverty as people who didn't have access to technology, and I think increasingly, what the discussion will move towards is the divide between those who have the privilege to engage with more intentional forms of usage and those who are essentially being turned into zombies because of over-usage. Increasingly, we will see that digital divide in the form of usage and how active you can be in those choices.
Now, I think education goes a really long way, [so we need to] invest in education. Ideally, we should also be regulating digital spaces as well. But, the hope is that we make these ideas publicly available, because if they are widespread enough, you start to close up that poverty divide.
Even thinking about my own social circles, and how I see my friends parent their children, there are lots of rules around screen time, around the type of activities they can engage in. And I keep having conversations about how I want to do things that don’t involve being on a screen. We’re talking about how we should maybe do a craft, you know? So, in my bubble, it feels like we've reached a real tipping point around tech usage in general. But that's clearly not the case for everyone.
You're right, and we will increasingly move that way. I definitely think for people who are millennial parents of primary-age children, there is a notable difference between how that parenting is working versus parents who already have kids in secondary school. That means that we are seeing a shift, and my hope is that we will continue to see a shift, and we will see this kind of revaluing of analogue life. What you're talking about is analogue living—let's do things with our hands. Let's get a home phone. Let buy an analogue clock. I'm very interested in revaluing the analogue with my kids, and I think you will increasingly see that.
But it is, for the moment, still a space of privilege. I think it's akin to eating organic food. Unlike organic food, there actually isn't a high price [to function as a barrier]. There’s no price to play in the dirt. But access to outdoor space, free time, childcare, capacity—those things that do come at a cost. And we need to be really honest about that. If you have to pay for outdoor programs for your kids, if you don't have the childcare, a screen often is childcare. But with support, with regulation, we can start to revalue the analogue life and we can start to make profound cultural shifts.
In the book, you offer practical advice about how to avoid targeted advertising, how to protect your privacy, why you should think carefully about ‘sharenting,’ or sharing photos and videos of your kids online. But you don't actually advocate for restriction or moderation of screen time. Why?
The guidance around screen time, which is limiting the ‘dosage’ of screen time, generally, to one to two hours a day, was based on some good research around childhood physical health, specifically around obesity and diabetes. That advice, which most parents still use, was really good for getting kids moving. That is to say, if a kid is sitting in front of a screen all the time and not running around outside, that is bad for their physical health. That is still true. But what that guidance did not account for was mental health and well-being. It was only about the quantity of consumption, not about the quality.
So, this book, and my work, does not say that screen time guidance is bad. It’s just limited in that, yes, we need to think about how much time we are on screens. But we also need to think about what is on those screens, because not all screen time is equal. There has not been sufficient emphasis placed on the quality of consumption, which is something that we should be thinking about, not just as parents, but also for ourselves. Like, what are you actually putting into your body by way of screens?
It's just like outdated diet guidance, which was just ‘reduce, reduce, reduce.’ Now we know that's not great guidance and actually, we should be thinking about a balanced diet. Screen time guidance really should be the same. That’s why this book has a digital diet pyramid, which helps people break down their types of consumption, so that we can be more nuanced in our approach to what we are consuming, not just how much of it.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Smartphone Nation: Why We’re All Addicted to Our Screens and What You and Your Family Can Do About It by Kaitlyn Regehr is out now.
Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter! Still looking for intersectional pop culture analysis? Here are a few ways to get more Friday:
💫 Upgrade to a paid subscription to support independent, progressive lifestyle media, and to access member-only perks, including And Did You Hear About, a weekly list of Stacy’s best recommendations for what to read, watch, listen to and otherwise enjoy from around the web. (Note: paid subscribers can manage, update and cancel their subscriptions through Stripe.)
💫 Follow Friday on social media. We’re on Instagram, YouTube and (occasionally) TikTok.
💫 If you’d like to make a one-time donation toward the cost of creating Friday Things, you can donate through Ko-Fi.