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Episode 15- Screen time with Professor Pete Etchells
811 Plays6 months ago
We welcome Pete Etchells, one of the UK's foremost experts on the effects of screen time and screen-based activities, to talk about his new book, 'Unlocked'.
We talk about attention, screens, and take a few detours along the way.
Pete's book can be found here:
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello. Hello. I'm Max Davey. And I'm Tess Davey and I have the hiccups. Yes. And this is the ADHD Science podcast. Hooray. Yes, correct. It is. We've passed on the first 30 seconds of this episode. We are going to do one more episode and then go and have a summer break because somebody has A levels.
00:00:30
Speaker
I can't think who that might be. Clue, it's not me. The dog? Look at him. He's not going to do A-levels. They can't see him. It's just audio. He's too sleepy. Anyway, yes.
Debunking Screen Time Myths
00:00:43
Speaker
We are going to do an interview today, back to our interview format, with Pete Etchells. Pete Etchells. So Pete is someone that I've known for a few years and he has recently written a brilliant book called Unlocked, which basically
00:00:59
Speaker
Debunks all the nonsense about screen time that is currently going on in the news. So this is a really important interview I'm a big debunker So enjoy let's not have too much more chatter because I need to go and revise Enjoy the interview enjoy Right a big ADHD science welcome to professor Pete echols
00:01:29
Speaker
Thank you for having me. All right, no worries. Professor Pete is professor of psychology and social science communication at Baths Bar University and the author of Unlocked. So I think the well, tell me what the science is, the real science of screen time. Is that correct? I always forget it. I can't remember. It's the real science of screen time and how to spend it better. Exactly right. OK.
00:01:55
Speaker
So a great book that I have reviewed and really enjoyed and I thought I would get Pete on to talk about the relationship between screen time and attention. This of course being an ADHD podcast. So it's not, it's a bit of a sideways move for us because it's not directly about ADHD, but I think it's something, it's a topic that I get asked about a lot in my ADHD, with my ADHD families and ADHD clinics.
00:02:20
Speaker
And with this being such a sideways episode, we're asking different questions. I know. Which has really thrown me off. But I think I can cope with it.
Understanding Attention
00:02:31
Speaker
Right. Shall we start? Yeah, let's go for it. Okay. Our first question is what seems like quite a simple question, but then you kind of get into it and you realize. So what is attention?
00:02:45
Speaker
I don't know. It's no, it's a great question because I think it and this is like a running theme in my book, right, which maybe feels like a bit of a cop out at times, but
00:03:06
Speaker
Attention is it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people so it's weird thing right where you talk about attention in day to day life and everybody knows what talking about but if you just stop to some point and said can you define attention i think we don't really struggle with it would probably come up with lots of different.
00:03:25
Speaker
definitions of what we actually mean by that. From like a research point of view, a psychological point of view, it feels like there's a bit of an existential crisis in the literature at the minute because the same thing's happening. So lots of people, like there are literally thousands of studies published on attention.
00:03:47
Speaker
But they're all slightly different types so you have some studies that maybe look at selective attention and a classic example of this is what's called the cocktail party effect so this idea that you know if you're in a party.
00:04:02
Speaker
and you're chatting to somebody and there's lots of background noise going on but somebody else nearby says your name you kind of tune into that and pick it up right so you've got this radar that's sort of going off all the time attending to to your surroundings but you know there's other things like
00:04:19
Speaker
spatial attention, visual spatial attention, audio attention, divided attention, sustained attention, and things like that. But because all of these things, and they're very different things, are called attention in some ways, say, shape or form. Because we use that terminology, there's this underlying assumption that they're all part and parcel of a singular system.
00:04:44
Speaker
And that doesn't seem to be the case. And there's this sort of big, almost philosophical argument in the literature at the minute around whether attention as a thing actually exists in the brain or whether it's what we might call an emergent phenomenon. And sort of a classic example of what you might think of as an epiphenomenon is
00:05:12
Speaker
I can't remember which famous philosopher it was now, but talking about consciousness, that if you're an alien being and you land in the north of England in the 1800s and you wander over a hill and you see a factory and above the factory, you see a cloud of smog. You might assume that the smog cloud is above the factory, so it controls what's going on in the factory in some way, shape or form, because it's linked to it by this big stick.
00:05:42
Speaker
chimney and they seem to be and it's moving about a lot and it's really active and the factory seems to be quite static so you you you misunderstand the situation right it seems like this cloud is this kind of smoke is something meaningful when actually it's a byproduct of what's going on in the factory and there are some arguments in the literature that the attention is a little bit like that right there are lots of other processes going on
00:06:07
Speaker
And the net effect of that is this thing that we experience as unified attention, but it doesn't actually really sit anywhere in particular in the brain. So that's that. There's another line of thinking that kind of ties in with this, right? Which is that rather than thinking of like an attention center or attention centers within the brain,
00:06:36
Speaker
that what we think of attention is almost like a heat map system. So you've got lots of different parts in your brain that represent the outside world. So the back of your brain is the visual cortex right in the back.
00:06:52
Speaker
And actually what goes in the visual cortex is that what we call the occipital pole right at the back in the center, that corresponds to your central field of vision. And as you radiate out, as you go to the peripheral bits of the primary visual cortex.
00:07:08
Speaker
that represents the bits of your vision in the periphery, in the wider space. It literally does almost provide a cortical map of what it is that you're looking at. If you see something appear in one area, if I'm looking at my screen and something appears over here,
00:07:27
Speaker
it will kind of get represented by electrical activity in the corresponding area of my visual cortex. So there's this emerging line of thinking that maybe attention works in this way. So if you imagine
00:07:41
Speaker
your or my desk, your desk around you at the minute. And there's lots of stuff on it. There's a computer screen. You know, I've got two computer screens. I've got a light. I've got my phone. You've got a Lego thing. And every time something happens in one of those things or somebody comes into the room, you kind of see a spike in activity on that attention map.
00:08:04
Speaker
as it were, your attention is kind of distributed across this area. But if there's like a big spike in something, then you'll move your focus to that thing. So there's some neuroscience research that kind of finds these sort of what we call priority maps or heat maps in the brain. And there's lots of different types of them at different layers and they all kind of overlay each other.
00:08:31
Speaker
and I can't get my head around that concept quite easily because things become really complex really quickly. So I talk about this in the book because there's this long-running idea that one way of characterizing attention is in a slightly different way in what's called the spotlight metaphor of attention. This idea that
00:08:50
Speaker
You imagine that you're, I don't know, like you're out at sea on a boat and you've got a big, a big searchlight, right? And you're searching for something like an island or another boat in the sea. And wherever you point in the spotlight, you can see what's going on in that really clearly, but everything else is completely pitch black and it might as well not be there.
00:09:11
Speaker
And the analogy is that our attention is like that. So whatever I might be kind of looking at or focusing on at that particular point in time has my attention and I'm kind of ignoring other things. So when we talk about things like smartphone use, if WhatsApp pings on, if I'm trying to write something or I'm talking to you guys on my computer, but my phone, an alarm goes off, that will grab my attentional spotlight and I'll look at my phone
00:09:41
Speaker
And then I'm stuck on that then, I'm looking at that thing for a while and it's very hard to get back to the thing that I was doing. And certainly that feels like the experience that we have a lot of the time that phones really distract us or games distract us and it's hard to kind of get back on task a lot of the time because we're distracted by social media or whatever.
Task Switching and ADHD
00:10:02
Speaker
Whereas the idea with this sort of priority map way of thinking is that it's not just
00:10:09
Speaker
that the bottom up visceral, does it make a pinky noise to attract your attention that that grabs your attention? There's other things that factor into that things like what are your goals? What's your motivation at the time? I see. Yeah. So you have these kind of top down processes that impact on it. So it's a very long labored example of this in the book where I try and really work this through and go, you know,
00:10:37
Speaker
If I've got my computer up and I'm trying to write a book in this case or whatever it is that I'm doing and my phone pings off in some scenarios, I'll look at my phone because in a way I kind of want to be distracted.
00:10:51
Speaker
I'm finding this piece of writing really hard and I want a bit of a distraction for a bit, something like that. Or you want a break or something. Or you want a break, yeah, or actually, you know, you've been waiting for an really important message from friend or family member or something like that. So it has inherent value.
00:11:09
Speaker
Whereas in other situations, you know, actually I've got a deadline coming up and I really need to focus on this. I know the other day I got distracted quite a lot, so it's really important to me that I finish this task that I'm doing. You phone things off on your attention priority map, it's much less of a spike because you've got these top-down goals keeping you on focus and maybe in that scenario you don't look at it.
00:11:32
Speaker
And presumably this also accounts for the fact that if you haven't slept or if you are emotionally in particular, in difference or unwell, that will affect the nature of your priority map and how that
00:11:46
Speaker
it's how sensitive it is to different stimuli in your environment. Yeah, definitely. And I think it affects your very short term goals, especially if you're feeling in survival mode, if you've not got much sleep, right? So that will have an impact and that will make you a lot more distractible in that sort of scenario. It kind of makes it harder to focus on work, right? So you'll do more downtimey things in that situation as well anyway.
00:12:17
Speaker
But yeah, there's not that much research that focuses on this, and in some ways it's a controversial thing to say. And I'm not saying that the spotlight attention metaphor is wrong. Again, even just on that topic, there are literally thousands of studies and decades of work.
00:12:39
Speaker
I think it's a really useful way of thinking about attention. But my worry is sometimes it gets misapplied when we talk about attention in the context of digital technology use and smartphone use and things like that. Go on. I do really wonder how that what was it you called the priority map, how that would look for somebody who did have ADHD. But more specifically, when they're like in a hyper focus,
00:13:09
Speaker
Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. Because then I feel like at that point, there's there's not even like it's a lot harder to be brought out of there. So I wonder if that would. Yeah, I think that that captures in a way what you're what you're some of what you were saying, Pete, is that there's lots of different sorts of attention. So one of the things that people with ADHD and and also
00:13:31
Speaker
other neurodevelopmental conditions find hard is switching between tasks. Sometimes there's too much switching and sometimes when you're really absorbed with something, there's not enough switching. And it's led to people rejecting the idea of ADHD as an attention deficit and thinking about it more as an attention control issue.
00:13:53
Speaker
right so it's not about you haven't got enough attention yeah it's just your attention is not as effectively under your conscious control i suppose would be then again we get back to the thing that we don't even really know what attention is so how can you have a deficit of it if you don't would exactly but it almost makes the attention deficit idea more meaningless because if you don't even know what the thing is i mean just to come back to that point that you made that there are lots of different sorts of attention
00:14:20
Speaker
My understanding from the book is that it's not even that if you're good, whatever inverted commas at one kind of attention, you're good at another kind of attention. It's not even so, you know, you could it could it could be that there's not a single area of the brain, but a person who is good at, you know, a person who's good at running a certain distance will tend to be running good at running another distance, you know, on other physical tasks. But there's not even that correlation that they're quite distinct in terms of in terms of performance.
00:14:49
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting you were saying about the idea of task switching, because I think one thing, certainly when it comes to trying to understand some aspects of social media effects and digital tech effects, one thing that you come across a lot is this idea of task switching.
00:15:09
Speaker
So there's a common refrain in certainly in the pop science around this that what's going on when you've got a phone basically is that you're switching between doing different things a lot. So it might be on your phone, you're switching between different forms of social media and a game or something like that. And then that's exacerbated by you're trying to do, I don't know, an essay or read a book or something like that.
00:15:33
Speaker
And the idea is that when you move your attention from one thing to another, there's a cost that comes with that, like a cognitive cost. It's called the switch cost effect. And there's a bunch of studies that show that you see the way that this has been
00:15:53
Speaker
framed in the in the research area is in terms of like almost like your brain power loss. You know, that when you kind of switch between if you're a heavy multimedia, media multitasker, sorry, so if you kind of use lots of different media all the time, and you're looking at loads of different screens, that's what switching between things takes slightly longer than for people who are like
00:16:21
Speaker
media multitaskers. And so we're only talking about between 1 and 200 milliseconds. Things take a bit longer. But over switching between things quite a lot, that could potentially mount up. So the idea with this very famous study that was published in 2009 that showed this, that if you look at people who describe themselves as they
00:16:49
Speaker
They're looking at lots of things at the same time when they're trying to do something. You get this very precise switch cost and it reinforced this worry that we have about screens that if you're flicking your, quote unquote, attention, if you're thinking your attention between lots of different media in parallel, the translation is usually, you know, like if you sat in your lounge and you're watching a TV program, but also you're flicking through social media on your phone or maybe you've got your switch up as well. You're trying to play a game.
00:17:18
Speaker
that that would never have been distractible. It makes you more distractible and you make more mistakes when you're trying to do something important like write an essay or something like that. And it was quite a captivating finding in the literature. But it's also one that we've not really moved on. We've not we've not learned more about since. So that paper came out in about 2009, I think. And then
00:17:44
Speaker
A few years ago in 2021, a bunch of researchers looked at that specific study, that paper, and basically were like, well, what's happened in the 10 or so years since this paper came out? And basically, the answer was not much. So you get a lot of studies that show this sort of similar effect, but this general idea that heavier, medium multitaskers have more problems with distractibility.
00:18:14
Speaker
But when you look at the size of the effect, it doesn't seem to be practically significant. So it's statistically significant. But whether it actually means anything in the real world, it doesn't seem to be the case. And was that a paper? I don't remember the paper. I think I've read about it. I think I've read the original paper.
00:18:39
Speaker
Was that just reporting how people reported that they used media? They weren't subjecting people to an experimental condition? This was an experimental study and there were a bunch of experiments within the study itself. One of the weird things about it was the way that a light or heavy media multitasker is defined is not very simple.
00:19:07
Speaker
And it took me quite a long time to get my head around it. There's quite a complicated equation in the supplementary material that they used to sort of create this weird measure. It turns out it includes, so when you're defining what sorts of media people are talking about, it includes reading books as well. And it was university undergraduate students that were measured, that were tested, right? So that sort of definition, they're all gonna be,
00:19:34
Speaker
some sort of media multitasker because they're all reading stuff in at least a couple of different formats, right? And this is the thing that you see quite a lot in this literature. If you just do like a surface level reading of the paper and they talk about heavy versus light multitasking, your initial, and I did this too. I had to read the paper like
00:19:58
Speaker
five, six, seven times to really get my head around what it was that they were measuring. But at face value, you look at that and you go, okay, right, so it's heavy multitaskers of people who use like five or more different media at the same time, and like multitaskers are three or less for the sake of argument. And that makes sense, makes more simplistic, but actually that's not what they did. That's not what they're measuring. Not what they're measuring.
00:20:23
Speaker
It's way more complicated than that. But then that's what it gets translated to when you take that paper and try and explain it in a more general pop science sense. You focus on light versus heavy multitasking, which then people interpret as if you have lots of screens on in front of you and you're trying to do too many things at once, then that's bad. And this is something that I've struggled with a lot with this book,
00:20:51
Speaker
in pretty much every single topic that I cover is I was trying to approach this as I don't have a vested interest either way into what's going on. Part of the reason I wanted to write this book was to go, everybody's freaking out about this stuff.
00:21:10
Speaker
is that justified? And if so, okay, then we know more about the science. If not, why not? And most of the time it feels like the answer is that we're focusing and freaking out about the wrong things in many ways. And what happened was that you find a paper that people talk about in
00:21:32
Speaker
in the mass media or in pop science books. They talk about this paper a lot and they say, you know, this this study shows this clear effect and this is what they did. And then you look at the paper and you can see where that line comes from because it's basically it's in the abstract, right? It's in the abstract and it's in the discussion.
00:21:50
Speaker
And then you read the paper and you look at the study that they did and the data that they collected and it doesn't match. It doesn't add up. So there's one example of this. Sorry, go on. So is there an element of scientists wanting the kind of incentive for scientists to slightly sex up their results and make them kind of a bit more eye catching?
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah, there is there is an element of that definitely and it really feels in some cases there is an element of you go into this study with a clear
00:22:23
Speaker
idea of what you're going to find. And the data don't quite match that. And literally, like in some cases, there were some studies that I had to get other colleagues to look at. So I was like, have I just lost the plot here? Because they say in this study, that blue light has a really blue light from screens has a really strong impact on sleep in this in this group of participants.
00:22:48
Speaker
be like I'm looking at the data, I'm looking at the graphs that they've drawn in the results, and they're not showing any effects. But then they said in the discussion, there's a really clear effect here. And I'm like, well, I don't it's it's bizarre.
Digital Technology and Research Challenges
00:23:03
Speaker
And part of it, I think is there's this weird paradox with digital tech in the and I've said this before about video games is the classic example here, the
00:23:16
Speaker
You know, I've said in the past to people, I do research on video games, and they kind of laugh at me a little bit. Not in a mean-spirited way, but just like, all right, okay, so you've got an Xbox in your lab, how's that? Is that fun? Yes, I do have an Xbox in my lab, and it is fun, thank you very much. But there's this sort of sense that it's kind of not a real science. It's like a soft science, and you're doing something that's not, you're doing it because you wanted an Xbox in the lab. And at the same time,
00:23:42
Speaker
Everybody's panicking about the detrimental effects of video games, right? You know, everybody's genuinely worried, understandably, in some ways, you know, the kids playing violent video games 20 years ago, is it going to make them more aggressive? Yeah. Six years ago, it was, you know, if you play Fortnite, is it addictive? You know, these are really kind of high level societal worries that we have, genuine worries that they have. But then we don't see the sciences actually serious in a way.
00:24:10
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's that there's an element of that in all digital tech research, that it's not seen as as proper science sometimes, but at the same time, we're really worried about it and really want answers. Well, I think a lot of this is around. Do we want answers or do we want to be told to have our prejudices confirmed? I suppose that's the question, isn't it? Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. I think
00:24:39
Speaker
This is one of the things that I really try to focus on in the book is why have we got into this state? Why do we worry about these things to the level that we do? I think we're going to come back to that.
00:25:01
Speaker
We kind of move we sort of need to move on from the first question that we've got. And I think I suppose what I get from what you've been saying is that first of all, there isn't that it's very difficult to say that there is a single thing called attention, that there are several models for attention that
00:25:20
Speaker
it sounds like there's a bit of a preference for the kind of priority map, which would be quite, you know, actually had fits in quite nicely with some of the ways that we talk about ADHD as well, which would be quite useful for our listeners. But and also that a lot of the research does not quite say what it purports to say. So I think we've, it's difficult, isn't it? Because we've got
00:25:46
Speaker
I think it's just important, I think it's important to take away when we talk about attention kind of practically, I've been thinking about this and I think when we talk about attention clinically, we're talking about the
00:26:03
Speaker
the sorts of tasks that we think involve a lot of attentional resources. Are you good at those or not? And what we're not trying, we're not really directly measuring attention. We're just sort of triangulating from a few different tasks that we think are probably going to require a lot of attentional resources and
00:26:23
Speaker
If you have problems with all those tasks, you've probably got a problem with the control of your attentional resources and the distribution of them. But it's really funny. You're very
00:26:38
Speaker
honest and forthcoming about the shortcomings of your kind of field. But clinically, we're just so stone age compared to that. We're just like, are you bad at these things? Oh, you've probably got an attention problem. It's very, it's quite basic, really. Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's a big issue, right? Because, you know, you've been talking about this idea of
00:27:02
Speaker
you know, attention is a limited resource in the brain somehow that you've got like a pool of attention. And that you can, you've only got maybe so much per day or so much per task or the ability to do certain things. And that that that could be that could be right. You know, it could be the case that attention is this sort of limited resource. And that it kind of acts as a cognitive bottleneck. You know, there's only so much information that you can process at a given time.
00:27:31
Speaker
But it could be the complete opposite of that. So it could be the case that we've got all of this sensory information bombarding us constantly. And there's too much coming in to process all at the same time. And you don't need to because most of it's useless. I don't need to know that there's a light here all the time because it's just a light. I can just leave it there. So we have so much sensory information coming in that attention is actually a way of dealing with that bottleneck.
00:28:00
Speaker
So attention is a way of filtering things and allowing us to focus on relevant details. And they're slightly different, but they're important ideas. And there's evidence, really good lines of thinking that track both. But the problem's bigger than that, even, because I think what we talk about, certainly in terms of digital tech use when we talk about attention,
00:28:27
Speaker
It's something else entirely, right? So yeah, we talk about attention spans and I think a lot of time when people talk about attention and this idea that our attention spans have collapsed because of our phones.
00:28:43
Speaker
that actually what they're talking about maybe is media multitasking or maybe distractability or kind of self-controlling the ability to manage those things. It's just a mess of definitions, right? Yeah, it is. Well, I think... So should we move on to another mess of definitions? Second question. Okay. Well, this one, my first instinct is that it won't be as messy, but I mean, feel free to get me wrong. What is... Go on.
00:29:12
Speaker
Okay. What is screen time? Screen time is a very easy, simple to define concept, right? Which is the amount of time that you spend on some sort of screen-based activity. And you could define it as, you know, how many minutes in the last day, how many hours in the last week or month. And that is screen time. And it is a very compelling measure for scientists to measure.
00:29:40
Speaker
Um, it is also completely meaningless. Yeah. So this is the bar. Explain why it's completely meaningless because this is, this is the sting. So we've been talking for about 45 minutes now, right? So that's 45 minutes of screen time. Um, somebody else somewhere in the world might've been watching Netflix for the last 45 minutes. Somebody else might've been watching.
00:30:07
Speaker
um you know a six-year-old might have been watching like an 18 rated movie but they shouldn't have been for 45 minutes um there might be somewhere in the world somebody who spent 45 minutes on the computer
00:30:20
Speaker
learning about something new for their homework and somewhere else, somebody spent 45 minutes on Instagram, really worrying about their body image and things like that. And in the and in the certainly, do you know, I'd say even in the past month, this this conversation has moved on a bit, but not much. And like, you know, five years ago, you look at the research in this area, and all of those people would be categorized as having one hour of screen time.
00:30:46
Speaker
And actually, you know, I, I see papers published nearly on a weekly basis where people are taking those broad strokes measures of screen time. And what they're trying to do is look at, you know, is there a relationship between this gross amount of screen time that people have, or people use, and some sort of outcome, whether it's educational attainment, or depression, or something, whatever the interesting thing of the day is. And
00:31:14
Speaker
One error of screen time in that sort of definition doesn't tell you anything useful. Because in all of those situations that I just described, there will be very different outcomes. Some of them are very clearly negative and potentially harmful to the person involved. Some of them are positive and will have a net benefit. But actually, the reality of it is that our screen time, even in those sorts of examples, isn't that simple to define.
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah. I said, yeah, we've been, we've been talking for 45 minutes now. My screen time is this conversation. I also have a computer, a secondary computer screen up here with, you know, my book open and some notes and stuff, just in case they're useful. Um, I've got my phone, so I might get pinged messages and things like that.
00:32:05
Speaker
So what's the differential effect of all those things? Because this is not actually 45 minutes of a video call for me. It's 45 minutes of a video call plus X number of minutes of reading, technically. And I try and lay this out in the book in a lot more detail in that, you know,
00:32:23
Speaker
There's this hour of screen time that I have where if you ask me in a week's time, that hour of screen time was me writing my book. But actually, at the time, I tried to, on a minute by minute basis, say what I was doing. And it was probably only 25 minutes of writing my book. And there was certainly 20 minutes of scrolling through Twitter. Or X, if we have to call it that. No one calls it X. Do you know one? No, it's terrible. Terrible name.
00:32:52
Speaker
But even in that 20 minutes of scrolling through Twitter, some of it was two and a half minutes of watching a really funny cover song video. A few minutes was clicking through to a news article that upset me about something. A few minutes of it was in private messages with some colleagues just bouncing ideas for a project. In a week's time when you get me to do a screen time study, I say I had one hour of, you know,
00:33:20
Speaker
book writing time on that Tuesday, which is completely unrepresentative of what I did. But when you start to look at it at the level of actually what was going on, you realize quite quickly that it becomes a very difficult, if not impossible task to say, OK, you've really accurately described all of those things that you did on a screen over the past hour.
00:33:43
Speaker
do we work out what the net benefit or net negative is to your mental well-being? I mean I imagine that even if you did try and break it down into like this time was spent on social media, this time was spent on like you know Google Docs, Google Slides, you still wouldn't be able to find like that this is good and this is bad because you know you could have been on like YouTube
00:34:07
Speaker
watching videos like about how to do this piece of homework that you're working on. Yeah. So even when you look at it on that level, there's you still can't make those. It's just not that simple, essentially. No. And I think I think there's a big thrust of the book, isn't it really that that actually what you're doing is, is the crucial thing when you're when you're thinking about the impact of screen time.
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, so obviously there's a big debate going on at the minute around this idea of whether social media is driving declines in mental illness, particularly in teenagers. And you look at the trajectory of that debate, and that very much started out as screens are driving this. And that's literally the case. It starts in 2017 with a very famous
00:35:02
Speaker
article published in the Atlantic. And in the article, the author writes, you know, based on the research that they've done, all it seems to be the case that all screen activities are linked to less to lower happiness and all non-screen activities are linked to more happiness. And we're literally talking about it at the level of the screen there. And that gets picked up and it gets criticized. And then the goals shift, the goalpost shift a little bit. And suddenly we start talking about social media.
00:35:31
Speaker
And then very quickly the goalposts shift again and we start talking about social media use in teenage girls. And what we kind of see over the course of that, and that's where we're up to now.
00:35:45
Speaker
People like Jonathan Hight and Jean Twenge sort of criticise the critics by saying, well, you know, it's a bit of a straw man to talk about screen time not being a meaningful concept anymore, because of course it's not, because actually, if you look at the data, the problems are here in this particular population in this situation. I find that very frustrating because it's almost like
00:36:12
Speaker
we've forgotten that the replication crisis happened in psychology. Because what's happening there is that you're saying one thing based on the data, and then that's getting criticized, and then you're moving what it is that you're talking about. And it's almost like this weird form of p-hacking, right? You keep changing the thing that your definition of what it is that you're looking at until you get to a point where there's a link between two things that you're arguing is so incontrovertible, you can't disagree with it anymore.
00:36:43
Speaker
And it's a very emotionally reactive debate, and everybody's got very strong opinions about this at the minute. But I think we're going in the wrong direction. Because again, if we go back to what we were talking about before in terms of thinking about what screen time actually is and how complicated it is and how nuanced even that hour that we talked about,
00:37:05
Speaker
One of the things that I say in the book that you realize very quickly that actually asking questions like, what's the effect of social media or mental health? What's the effect of screen time or mental health? It's just the wrong question to ask, right? You just can't get the data that you need to answer that. And there are more appropriate questions to ask that get to what people are actually worried about, which is what things are worrisome and why. Yeah, so I think that's,
00:37:32
Speaker
So I think that's the question. That's the question we want to get on to. Yes. But I want to go back just to quickly. Because you mentioned two things that need definition, and one is the replication crisis and the other the hacking. Yes. Okie dokie. Yeah, that's a good point. So I'm really lacking tonight. That's all right. It's late. So the replication crisis basically sort of happens around about 2011.
00:38:00
Speaker
in psychology, and one of the big things that happens then is that a paper's published that seems, at face value, shows the existence of psychic ability. So I'll try and explain it as quickly as possible. There are lots of different experiments in this study, but just to give you like a simple example, a very basic experiment that you can do in memory research is you give people 10 words to remember.
00:38:29
Speaker
And you give them a bit of time to do that. And then you have a break for like, say, 20 minutes. And then you give them 20 words and 10 of them they saw before and 10 they didn't. And you ask them, you know, this word, did you see it before? Yes or no?
00:38:44
Speaker
So that's the most boring bog standard memory experiment you can do. You put more manipulations in there, right? Maybe you do something like have one condition where you really stress people out in that 20 minute break and another one where you don't to see what the impact of stress is on people's ability to recall words that they saw before and not inadvertently recall. Sometimes you'll say, what is a new word? You'll say, actually, I saw that before. And what we call a false positive.
00:39:16
Speaker
In this paper, they flipped that around. So what happens first is you get a list of 20 words, and you say, do you think you're going to be shown this later on? Yes or no. And then there's a break. And then the computer randomly selects 10 words to show the participant at the end of it.
00:39:38
Speaker
And what they found in that study was that people were more likely to recall or recall, quote unquote, say that they were going to be shown words that they were later shown evidence of precognition. Yeah. So psychic psychic abilities exist then. Yeah, that was the take. What what set this paper apart from most other research on, you know,
00:40:09
Speaker
Parapsychology was generally there's a lot of research in that area. It's generally pretty poor. But this was it was published in a very esteemed journal, a very prestigious journal. It was published by researchers who had a really good pedigree in doing research. It used these techniques that we knew were standardized techniques in memory research. So what happened was that we were left with this.
00:40:37
Speaker
we sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. So either this study is right, and literally everything that we know about everything goes out the window because psychic abilities change everything, right? Or there is something so fundamentally broken with the way that we conduct science, publish it, get it out there, that something like this can happen.
00:41:06
Speaker
What happens in the aftermath is that some other scientists come along and try to replicate the study, which is to say that they try and recreate the conditions of the original experiment to see if they get the same result. And they do that and they don't get the same result. So they find that actually people aren't any better at recalling
00:41:27
Speaker
words that they're going to be shown in the in 10 minutes into the future, no evidence of precognition. One of the things that kick started what we call the replication crisis is that those studies, it was very difficult for them to get published. So they went to the original journal that published the psychic abilities, a real paper. And that journal said, we're not interested in this study. It doesn't tell us anything new. You found it what we call a null result or a negative results not interested.
00:41:55
Speaker
Now, that's a problem, right? Because if we're only publishing things that show a statistically significant, what we call the quote unquote, positive finding, and we're rejecting negative findings, then the published scientific literature is not representative of the reality of the science that we're doing.
00:42:16
Speaker
And what's happened in the past 10 years is that there's been a ton of research in psychology that shows that these sorts of things are happening. So, you know, there's a huge, I think it was like 100 different labs in 2015, basically took all the papers from three big psychology journals that were published in one particular year. And across the world, across all these labs tried to replicate them all. And like 60% of them didn't.
00:42:45
Speaker
like huge amount of them just these things that we think of like really solid findings in psychology, it turns out when you start doing them properly, and openly and transparently, they don't replicate. So it led to this real crisis in psychology, you know, real, there was real anger and aggression from from some quarters, because he had a bunch of, you know, a new generation of scientists come along with really strong, really robust methods saying,
00:43:10
Speaker
these things, the ways that we've been doing psychology up to now are not right. They lend itself to the ability for people to do, you know, what we call questionable research practices, which are things like, you know, maybe you run a study and you analyze the data and it doesn't find the thing that you were expecting. So you go, or maybe I've done the analysis wrong.
00:43:33
Speaker
So I run the analysis in a different way. And you still don't find the thing that you're expecting. But you're like, I really thought that this is the finding we get. You keep running different sorts of tweaks of the analysis. Eventually, you find a positive significant result. You go, ah, that was the right way to do the analysis. And look, this thing exists. And then in the paper that gets published, you just report that one analysis that worked.
00:43:59
Speaker
It's kind of what we call p-hacking, right? The more times you do an analysis like that, the more likely you are to get what we call a false positive. So a significant finding when actually non-exists in reality. But you wouldn't know that from reading the paper because there's nothing in that paper to suggest that you ran 20 or 100 or 5,000 analyses before you got the one that you wanted.
00:44:24
Speaker
So the implication of that for the debate around screen time is that old pre-replication crisis papers cannot necessarily be leaned on for evidence of harm.
Evolving Research Standards
00:44:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think we have to take it. It's a tough one, right? Because what we're effectively saying there is that we have a much higher benchmark for good quality research now than we did even 10 years ago, but certainly longer ago.
00:44:50
Speaker
But in some ways, it's unfair to hold older research to those same standards because the tools and the processes that we have nowadays, they just simply weren't there and people weren't thinking about these things. We're not saying that people were going around doing this deliberately or in a fraudulent way, although there were some notable exceptions that were.
00:45:12
Speaker
But yeah, this was just how things were done. And we just have to take those sorts of studies with a pinch of salt. But it feels like there's something similar going on, not in the research, but in the kind of public debates about this. People are convinced that there's something bad going on, right?
00:45:34
Speaker
So what inevitably happens in a lot of the conversations is that somebody goes, well, what about this research showing the effects of X on Y? And you go, well, here's some evidence to suggest that that's not right. And then they go, OK, yeah, but what about the effects of Z on Y? And then you show something and it kind of becomes this list of, you know, eventually we'll find something where there's a significant relationship because we keep looking for it. And it's really hard to push back against that.
00:46:03
Speaker
And what's not happening is nobody's stopping and going, hang on. Why? In the first place, why would we expect these things to be related? Why would we expect social media to have an impact, either generally or specifically for girls or whatever? And, you know, how are we going to define, you know, social media or put in the same category of screen time in the, you know, what social media is, you know, it's WhatsApp, which is text based.
00:46:30
Speaker
local networks. It's Twitter, which is tech space, local and global networks. So by local, I mean friends and family, global, I mean, you can talk to celebrities or whatever. Instagram group for our road, which is basically mainly about when the bins are out. Yeah. This is a thing, right? Instagram, visual club, Harris's audio. These are all social media.
00:46:58
Speaker
texting, is that social media? In some definitions, you could argue yes. Fortnite is basically a glorified social media network for a lot of kids, because they go on there after school, and they use it to reconnect with their mates, right? And also, they're playing a game at the same time, by happenstance, but... Well, you can't just do one thing. So social media is poorly defined. And that's what allows this sort of flexibility in saying, well, we worried about this thing, and its effect on that.
00:47:28
Speaker
The same is also true for mental health. We talk about mental health as though it's this singular thing.
00:47:34
Speaker
Well, people try and make it a singular thing, but I think that's right. The definite, the effort to do it. You were going to say something. Oh, I was just going to, it's just a brief point, but specifically within like social medias, then you get like so much variation, especially like after the tick tock tick tick tockification of like every social media. So, you know, Snapchat used to just be messaging. Yeah. And now they've got their own, um, like short form video. Okay. Snapchat spotlight.
00:48:04
Speaker
Instagram's got Instagram reels, Facebook has Instagram reels, you know, YouTube shorts. Yes, it does. I don't hold with it, personally. But yeah, that's just one little thing I wanted to add. You were saying about the mental health thing? Oh, so there's an effort to make mental health a single phenomenon and it just,
Technology Habits and Perceptions
00:48:22
Speaker
it flattens everything out to something that's almost, in the same way that screen time and social media, as a single phenomenon, it flattens out something that's almost meaningless.
00:48:30
Speaker
I want to go on to the third, I'm not to be rigid in my structure, but the third question, I think we should go into it, and then you've slightly touched on it, but I think digging into, well, ask the question and I'll kind of clarify. Okay. Why do people think that exposure to screen time has a negative effect on attention? And I'm thinking about that in terms of why is it that we have this deep-seated need for this to be true?
00:48:59
Speaker
not necessarily how particular well anyway that's the question so i think the answer to this is that because we have all to some extent and for most of us most of us this is a little bit for some people it's a lot which is a problem we've all developed bad habits on
00:49:23
Speaker
our smartphones and screens and things like that. Everybody that I talk to has had lived experience of having a not good time on their phone at some point. And by that, I mean things like we've all had that experience of feeling like we've overdone it.
00:49:44
Speaker
You know, I've had it a fair few times recently where I've, I've been on Instagram kind of scrolling through, uh, videos, because it's one of the ways that I unwind at night is finding funny cat and dog videos and videos relating to like parenting fails and things like that on Instagram. And do you know what, in the past year, the time, all of the times where I have like.
00:50:09
Speaker
been in absolute fits of laughter, you know, tears streaming down my face, can't breathe because I've been laughing so much. There's been from finding a funny video on Instagram. But at the same time, there are some nights where because of the way the algorithm is working,
00:50:25
Speaker
I've been there, I've been really tired and I've needed to go to bed and an hour later I'm still there scrolling through and I've not really had a good time. You know, I mean, you're waiting for that one video that's going to make you laugh the harder you cry, but you know, you don't get it. You just keep going. You're like, well, I don't want to turn it off now. Maybe it's the next video down, you know? Yeah. And I think everybody can relate to that, right? We've all had some experiences along those lines. So when somebody comes along and says,
00:50:50
Speaker
These things have been designed to do that, to addict you to your phone and that this is sort of something that's happening to you and actually it's really bad. This is causing real problems with mental health. It's a lot easier to relate to that than to a sort of slightly more complex reality, which is that
00:51:15
Speaker
Phones aren't addictive by design. Phone addiction is not a thing. It's not a clinical disorder. You're not addicted to your phone. You might have developed some bad habits and some good ones as well.
00:51:29
Speaker
And it's a lot harder to accept that and therefore do something about it because changing habits is really hard and it requires efforts and intention. And it's not just something that you do once and it's fixed. It requires quite a lot of long term. It's kind of like, if you take like a massive ship, you can't just turn it around on a
00:51:52
Speaker
on a on a coin, right? It takes a long time for that thing to turn around if it's going in the wrong direction. Yeah. And I think I think there's an element of that to why we feel like also a couple with the fact that, you know, we're told constantly that they're bad for us. It's literally every week, nearly every day at the minute. There are stories in the news saying screens bad for us, smartphones bad for us. Tess. In this context, I just want to make sure the differentiation is clear. How we
00:52:20
Speaker
making, how are we defining the difference between like a bad habit and like an addiction? Where's the line for that? And what does bad mean? Yeah, well, yeah, it's a good it's a good question. Right. So habits are very much context dependent. So habits in and of themselves are neutral. Right. So the example that I use in the book is literally just checking your phone.
00:52:47
Speaker
That is a neutral habit. It's not good for you. It's not bad for you. Whether it becomes good or bad depends on other things. So it depends on not just simply the frequency of how you do it. And we often talk about excessive use in this sort of way. And I'll come back to that to answer the other bit of your question in a minute. But if you engage in a phone checking behavior
00:53:12
Speaker
lots of times during the day, and you do that in a sort of mindless way, in a non-reflective way, eventually you will do it in a bad situation. So the really kind of facile example I give is checking your phone at night when you're feeling a bit lonely and you want to connect with friends, good habit to get into. That's a nice thing to do, and it's probably going to be a good thing for your well-being. Checking your phone when you're driving down the road
00:53:41
Speaker
just to see what somebody's posted on Instagram. Super bad habit to get into. And the thing is, it's not necessarily going to be bad every time. So it's not the case that every time you check your phone while you're driving, you crash your car and somebody gets injured or killed. Actually, most of the time that's not the case, but it increases the risk of it.
00:54:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so so I mean, that's a bit of a kind of facetious example in a way, but basically habits become that tilt between whether it becomes a good or a bad habit for you depends on things like what you're doing, why you're doing it, what your particular aims and goals are, your intended use of your phone or whatever digital technology you're talking about, coupled with things like
00:54:33
Speaker
do you have pre-existing vulnerabilities that might exacerbate this? Do you have support networks around you that you can turn to when it does go wrong? And all those things together
00:54:47
Speaker
will dictate in some way whether that bad habit translates into a bad outcome for you. I mean what I'm really gathering from all this is that we just really can't answer any questions simply can't we? We can't just be like why is my attention span bad? Social media. What is attention? It's just when you focus on stuff you know like I mean obviously we all wish it could be like that but
00:55:12
Speaker
Well, do we? Do we want these simple answers? I mean, how good would it be if you could just go, is there an afterlife? And I could just go, yeah. You know what I mean? Like these big questions, these confusing questions. Well, you know, it would be nice to know. Yeah, I know what you mean. And I think there's something, I mean, I suppose that's part of the drive towards the simplistic narrative of phones bad, social media bad.
00:55:38
Speaker
Because then you've got an answer. Yeah, it's an answer. It's an authority from on high telling you yeah This thing you're doing is bad Yeah, and people need this right? I mean and you know this max because that you came across this few years ago when you were involved in writing screen time guidance, right the What people wanted out of that was somebody to come along and say Two hours a day. Yeah
00:56:04
Speaker
When you get two hours and one minute, bad things happen. And the reason the parents want that is because it's really hard being a
Screen Time Guidelines for Families
00:56:13
Speaker
parent, right? And you're knackered all the time. And everybody's telling you about expectations about what to do with your kids in all sorts of different domains, right? And with the best intentions in the world, it's really hard to be the best in all of those. So it's great if somebody can come along, so you can just have as like a script in your head,
00:56:34
Speaker
you know, the research, the science, you know, all the experts say, you know, two hours, and everybody, everybody kind of agrees on that, and it becomes a social norm, it's easier to manage. And I think that's why we crave these things sometimes, and I kind of get the sense that that's why so many people were angry with those guidelines when they came out, because they were really sensible, evidence-based guidelines that acknowledge this nuance, right, that sheer limits don't work.
00:57:02
Speaker
They don't work in a blanket sense, for sure. And what actually does work is having open and transparent conversations in your family is about good, responsible screen use, creating well-defined boundaries around that, having times in the day where you connect with each other, maybe not over screens, so you can just check and see how people's days have been going.
00:57:26
Speaker
Just waiting people to come for dinner, that sort of thing. Don't look at me when you say that, I'm always there. You are pretty good. Your brothers, your brothers are bad. Do you remember when you tried to set like a two hour screen time limit during like, was it 2021? No, because I had, no, I did not do that because I would not have done that. Because in 2019, I was the author of the screen time guidance for the Royal College, which explicitly did not say two hours. It was the screen time in general at least. It was, you know, it was like one hour a
00:57:56
Speaker
video game time. Well, yeah, there was there was so okay, to be honest, we did we didn't need it slightly, slightly exposing me as a massive hypocrite. So just to explain that just explain that everyone is a hypocrite. Okay, let's let's let's just walk through this because this is actually possibly not uninteresting. So that should be on the tagline of the of the of the podcast, possibly not uninteresting. And
00:58:22
Speaker
In 2019 just to kind of just for the benefit of the listeners so I was I wasn't the author but I was led the production of the Royal College of Pediatrics screen time guidance and as Pete alluded to we rejected the approach which was X amount of screens is fine X plus one minute is not fine because it doesn't make sense.
00:58:45
Speaker
Having said which, I have had to struggle with now three teenage kids and the fact that there have been times when the use of screens have disrupted family life. And I'm not saying, so I think it's really important to say because I didn't have that two hours plus one approach, it doesn't mean that I
00:59:09
Speaker
And I don't think either of us are saying this to me. Neither of us are saying that screens cannot be disruptive and cannot be harmful and that limits are not.
00:59:21
Speaker
useful to put in place in particular settings and you're right we didn't just go two hours of screen time because that we quickly concluded that was completely meaningless but we did put a limit on video games and you know playstation and we've tried to limit your youtube use and i've tried you know but then i would just go on youtube and pretend i was doing work which was a whole other thing well that happened
00:59:43
Speaker
So this, this is, I think, the crux of it's really important. And I get a bit of pushback sometimes, because, you know, in all the stuff that we talked about up till now, some people come along and say, Okay, well, so what you're saying then is that there's nothing to worry about. And that's, that's a ludicrous position to take. And you're right, I don't think anybody is saying that in this debate at all. What we're trying to figure out is,
01:00:08
Speaker
how do we kind of more precisely define and interrogate the things that we should be worried about so that we can get workable solutions? And also, you know, how do we navigate these scenarios where, you know, it very much is the case that people have arguments every night around screens and video games and things in the household, and they want help with that. And I think what we've been trying to say is that
01:00:34
Speaker
it feels like the help that we want is for somebody to come along and say, look, no more than two hours a night. And the thing is that that's not going to fix anything. If you come along and say, OK, well, the experts say that no more than two hours a night, so we're going to have to stick with the experts, that is not going to change what's happening at the minute. But the way that we approach these sorts of conversations, I think, is really important as well. So one of the bits of research that I alluded to in the book that kind of taps into some of the things that you were talking about then
01:01:05
Speaker
is this idea of how we navigate these conversations as parents and caregivers and children around screen use. And there's a great paper a few years ago where they presented about 1000 UK teenagers with these different vignettes, which is like a scenario where a parent caregiver is
01:01:25
Speaker
trying to maybe kind of create a screen time rule with a teenager. And there's a few different ways in which they do it. So this is like authoritarian approach. So it might be something like you're not having a games console in your room because I'm the parent and I say so and that's it. End of conversation no more.
01:01:44
Speaker
And then there's a bit more of maybe like a guilt tripping scenario where you go, why do you want a games console in my room? Why do you not want to talk to us? That's really hurting my feelings. Can we just really almost like shaming the kids into adhering to that rule?
01:02:03
Speaker
And then there's a third version, which is much more collegiate and collaborative, which is you use the caregiver come along and say, look, this is why I don't feel comfortable with you having a games console in your room. Why do you want one? What do you want out of this? Talk it through. Basically do what we should be doing, which is treating teenagers as people with thoughts and opinions that are completely valid and trying to explain why
01:02:33
Speaker
you think it's not a good idea to have a games console in the bedroom, but trying to acknowledge their side of it and things. What they found was that you present teenagers with these scenarios, and you ask them things like, how likely are you to stick to this rule? And you ask them, how likely are you to hide your tech use? If you were this teenager, how likely would you be to hide your tech use from that parent?
01:02:59
Speaker
And what you find is that in the authoritarian scenario, kids say that they're likely to rebel. And in the guilt tripping scenario, kids say that they're likely to rebel against the rules. And then in the really kind of collegiate, nice, best-case scenario, kids say that they're likely to rebel.
01:03:21
Speaker
So they're going to break the rules. And actually, that's quite an important part of being a kid, is understanding those boundaries and pushing them. And it's all part of identity formation and things like that. The worrying thing was that it was only in the nice scenario where kids said that they weren't likely to hide their tech keys from their parents. So the authoritarian ones and stuff, they said they're more likely to do it.
01:03:47
Speaker
And that's the worry, right? When we're hiding our tech use, when kids are hiding their tech use from the people in their own homes, it's not about tracking what they're doing and helicopter parenting. It's about being there if they need you, if something goes wrong, creating a support network, a buffer, a cushion.
01:04:13
Speaker
so that if something bad does happen, they've got somebody to talk to about it, somebody that they can help deal with it and fix it so that it doesn't become as big a thing as it might otherwise be if they're dealing with that on their own. And I think that's
01:04:29
Speaker
That's not a simple thing to get into a slogan like, no more than two hours a day. It requires quite deep conversations about what are the appropriate. So in the book, I don't talk about rules or limits, but more things like how we establish expectations in the home around what we want out of our screen use and our other things.
01:04:54
Speaker
and just being as open and transparent and talking as much about these things as possible. Trying to understand why you want to be on Instagram at 10 o'clock at night. And I have these conversations with my wife about this, that we sit there, we're both knackered, we both want to go to bed, really. But then we sat there for an hour sometimes, not every night, but sometimes we sat there on Instagram and we talk about this. Why are we doing this?
01:05:25
Speaker
And, you know, sometimes it's things like, you know, we're sort of so tired, we don't want to go through all the rigmarole of getting ready for bed. And it's a silly thing. It's a stupid thing to say that because, you know, you're only making it worse for yourself by going to bed. But, you know, there've been times for me recently where, you know, I've not been very well recently, and that's translated into not getting good sleep. And I've sort of developed bad sleep association. I feel nervous about going to bed because I'm worried that
01:05:54
Speaker
I'm not going to get any sleep that night. And again, I know it's like a bit of a silly thing. But, you know, if you develop those kind of worry worry thoughts about going to bed and then you go to bed and you don't sleep, that impacts you want to go to sleep. So it's almost like you're then using that tech use as as a distraction, almost not necessarily the tech use itself. That's the bad thing. It's not being on Instagram. That's the bad thing. It's it's the context of why.
01:06:22
Speaker
But the important thing is talking about all of that. So you can kind of verbalize and vocalize maybe things that you've not explicitly thought about. But also you're talking about that in a shared environment and trying to understand what the other members of your family and friends, even what they're getting out of their tech use.
01:06:42
Speaker
how we can navigate that better. So I think one thing that I think is really important in all of this is that for our generation, Max, what happened was that
01:06:55
Speaker
smartphones appeared. Yeah. And nobody told nobody told us how to use them. Right. They just I remember getting my first iPhone and going, This is awesome. Yeah, they're incredible. Now what do I do? What do I do with it? And you you wing it, right?
Guiding Young People in Tech Use
01:07:11
Speaker
You figure it out. And it's true. I think it's true for most people. Like if you ask people, why did you? Can you remember when you first joined Instagram or Twitter or whatever social media? Can you remember when you joined it? And can you remember why you joined it?
01:07:23
Speaker
And I think for a lot of people, the answer is that I can't really remember. It's just sort of what everybody else was doing. And I didn't have a reason to join it. I just did. And what happens in those sorts of scenarios is that you try and figure out why you're using it and how you're using it over time. And for some people, it goes really well. And for some people, it goes spectacularly wrong. We didn't have that scaffolding when we were trying to figure this out. And what we need to start doing is providing that scaffolding
01:07:52
Speaker
for kids. So that when they do get their smartphones, iPads, or start using social media, they're not like we were in 2007. They've got more of a toolkit for dealing with that. Yeah, and I think it's fair to say, well,
01:08:10
Speaker
There's lots of people who are sort of adults and people are kind of maybe not quite as old as me because I'm very old. Almost 50. Almost 50, yes. Maybe you'll be 50 by the time this comes out. I will be 50 by the time this comes out. Happy birthday. Everyone tweet happy birthday at my dad. Fine, absolutely. Anyway.
01:08:31
Speaker
So there are lots of people, perhaps not quite as old as me, but who are producing toolkits for young people for negotiating the internet. What do you think Tess? Because my feeling is that young people are just sorting it out themselves largely. What do you think? In terms of our own usage. Yeah, not even like how much you use, but using the internet safely. I think that
01:08:58
Speaker
people are figuring it out for themselves. But I think the issue is that we're figuring it out through trial and error, which is not a healthy way to be figuring things out. I mean, I did some of my own, I mean, it's embarrassing, I take drama level. But I did some of my own research for a drama project we were doing. And we looked at just the people around us, like just the people who were sat across from us on the bus, like their experience joining the internet, what age they joined, like the