Unlocked: The Real science of Screen time (and how to spend it better)
Screens, we are told, are harmful. Social media makes us and our teenage children anxious and depressed. The blue light from our smartphones keeps us awake at night by suppressing the release of melatonin. Phones should be banished from our bedrooms, and certainly from our children’s bedrooms. There should be strict limits on the amount of time we spend sitting in front of our computers. All this seems like common sense.
Except that there are a few problems with this view of technology. For a start: there is almost no evidence to say that screens are bad for us – even much-maligned social media. On the contrary, it looks as though, 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. According to the best research, social media use correlates with depression to the same degree as eating potatoes does – which is to say, not very much at all.
Second, we live with screens. The Coronavirus lockdowns made it clear that it is through our computers and phones, on email, social media, Minecraft servers and video conference calls, that much of our working and social lives will now play out. 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 it certainly isn’t something we should feel guilty about. In UNLOCKED, we will see that 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. We have internalised a narrative about screens that simply isn’t true.
So stop worrying about scrolling through Twitter, stop feeling guilty for not doing a digital detox, and feel free to read this book on your phone, at night, in bed – because the stuff about blue light from screens preventing you from sleeping is not what it seems.
Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and how to spend it better) is Pete's second book, to be published by Piatkus in 2024.