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The average American checks their phone 144 times per day.
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// The price of our attention
When tech companies profit from our attention, we pay a steep price.
The loss of time: The average American checks their phone 144 times per day. Between 2019 and 2021, 13-18-year-olds spent an average of 8 hours and 39 minutes online every day. A Pew Research study released last month found that one in five teens are on YouTube and TikTok almost constantly.
The decline in mental health: The last few years have produced both academic research and anecdotal evidence about the relationship between social media use and declining mental health. Last year, attorneys general from 33 states filed a federal lawsuit against Meta alleging the tech company encouraged addictive behaviors it knew to be harmful to young users.
The loss of focus: Gloria Mark, an attention researcher at the University of California Irvine, found that our attention spans are getting shorter. In 2003, the average attention span on any screen was 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Today, it’s averaging 47 seconds on a screen. In response, schools have implemented phone bans to improve focus and reduce distractions, but the results so far have been inconclusive.
The loss of nuance: In the competition for attention, companies are designing their platforms and evolving their content to be as attention-grabbing as possible. There’s a reason why TikTok was the fastest tech platform to reach one billion users. For digital platforms like X, there’s little space for nuance in 240 characters. What was considered, in principle, as a digital town square for important civic dialogue, is, in practice, a feed of one-liners and hot-takes.
// A healthier relationship to technology
From TikTok’s video-feed to the notifications that ping on our phone, technologies are designed to draw us in. So we can’t place the burden only on individuals, but we still have the power to take small steps to enter into a healthier relationship with our tech.
Here are a few ideas to consider in the new year:
- Improve your screen time: Project Liberty Alliance member Logoff Movement has a Guide to Improve Screen Time, with best practices on how to change phone settings to receive less notifications (and maybe even go to grayscale), new apps to download, and habits to form. They also have a campaign, Forks Up, Phones Down, designed to build awareness and “tech intentionality” by hosting events for youth across the country.
- Leverage tech: Not all tech is designed to lure you in. Digital Detox, a digital wellness company, has a list of five apps that help you limit screen time, and a 5-minute digital wellness quiz to help determine the health of your relationship with tech. Apps like Clearspace introduce a layer of friction to keep you from doom-scrolling, Forest helps you stay focused on what matters, and one sec makes distracting apps scientifically less appealing.
- Set boundaries: Setting physical boundaries between you and tech (like leaving your phone outside of the bedroom) or time boundaries (like taking a digital sabbath one day per week) are examples of boundaries that help reinforce good tech habits.
// Setting new technology intentions
A study from 2018 by researchers from the University of British Columbia found that the mere presence of phones on a table as people shared a meal, even when they were not actively used, diminished the quality of face-to-face conversations. Such a study might be demoralizing. Even when we’re not using technology, it’s still using us.
But the study, for the optimistic among us, is also an invitation not only to step into a healthier relationship to technology, but to invest deeply in the human relationships that make us most alive and to design the relational gatherings to be so nourishing and intentional that it makes any notification on our phone an unwelcome distraction.
Whether it’s through national campaigns, one-off gatherings, or daily habits, we wish you a healthy year of technology in 2024!
