From generation to generation, man makes moral panics. The content varies, but the form remains generally static.

The tricky part is that they aren’t all bogus. While notorious scares such as the wave of Satanic ritual abuse cases were indeed nothing more than products of collective hysteria, there’s certainly good reason to think that some aspects of modern living do in fact contribute substantially to the growing burden of chronic disease - both mental and physical - that afflicts societies with developed economies.

In educational circles, one of great worries of our time is the potential negative effects of too much screen time on the modern adolescent. This isn’t, on the face of it, an unreasonable fear. TV, computer games, and smartphones have all caused huge revolutions in how we spend our leisure time, and increasingly take us even further away from any semblance of the environment in which homo sapiens spent most of its evolution.

The virtue of large datasets is that they allow us to ground our suspicions in something more than just hunches, and make the useful distinction between public health crisis and moral panic. (see Kat Arney’s feature in the 20 January issue of TES for a look at the research into tech and education).

To that end, researchers from the University of Oxford used the National Pupil Database to contact almost 300,000 15 year olds with questionnaires about their technology use. Of these, around 120,000 replied, making the study’s final sample size something truly impressive.

Screen time test

After controls for child gender, ethnicity, and neighbourhood deprivation, the analysis proceeded to investigate the relevant associations, proceeding on the initial assumption that the association between adolescent screen time and wellbeing would be either uniformly negative or curvilinear.

It was in fact the second of these hypotheses that was confirmed. Across all modes of technology, the same “inverted U-shaped” relationship between wellbeing and screen time was found, with the lowest levels of wellbeing at both the lowest and highest levels of screen time, and the highest levels of wellbeing at moderate levels of screen time exposure.

The results look similar for TV, smartphone, computer, and video game usage.

What the researchers term the “goldilocks” hypothesis appears to hold, with the ideal quantity of screen time being roughly two hours a day, no matter what the mode.

Effect sizes are small, however, and even though adolescents hooked up to their tech for as much as seven hours a day do report lower well-being across all modes, the differences are relatively trivial.

We should probably look elsewhere for causes of growing psychiatric morbidity among adolescents and young adults. These findings need not be surprising if we remember that modern screen time very often involves primarily social interaction - yes, even video gaming -  and humans are nothing if not social animals.

Modern technology is popular precisely because it complements and facilitates our evolved need for intragroup interaction. It may often be a cure for 21st-century atomization, rather than another a symptom.

Cautious welcome

Such a study comes with limitations, despite its impressively vast sample size and very precise estimates of effect sizes. The data are correlational and the sample is, to a degree, self-selected. One would certainly wish that the authors had been able to apply a richer set of controls.

The paper adds to our knowledge but should not be regarded as definitive, and upon closer investigation it may well turn out that the relationship between screen time and wellbeing is essentially null. It does, however, make it rather unlikely that the true relationship between the two variables is strongly positive or strongly negative.

This paper obviously has distinct relevance in a school context. We should probably not worry too much about the nerd who is addicted to his video games, assuming he still manages to get all his work done to an acceptably high standard. Although greater use of educational technology in the classroom may or may not improve students’ learning, we probably need not fret that the technology itself will have detrimental effects.

We should be more sceptical towards technology doom-mongers. While ancient authors were doubtless correct that writing would destroy memory - who among us is an oral poet capable of memorizing extraordinarily large reams of text? - the benefits, of course, substantially outweighed the costs.

In similar fashion, though technology is and will continue to drastically reshape the norms of social interaction, we should not assume from the outset that the process will entirely be a negative one.

The current generation of youngsters may well not suffer from the same epidemic of loneliness and mental rot that currently afflicts today’s elderly, as leisure time shifts away from passive media (TV) and towards active social media. From my conservative viewpoint, progress is always rightly to be viewed with suspicion, but each instance must be evaluated on its merits.

The virtue of this paper is that it brings intellectual clarity to a debate heretofore dominated by hand-waving. It deserves to be widely read.

Andrew Sabisky is a freelance writer and independent researcher

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