One Saturday last month, I had a perfect day. I woke up early, drove to the coast of California, and surfed for a few hours with friends. Then I met a friend nearby, went kayaking, and had lunch. After that—tired from the sun and salty—I drove home, did my laundry, walked the dog, and ate pizza on the couch.
A big part of what made the day so perfect was all the time spent outside—away from work schedules, chores, and screens. Yet despite my best efforts to escape, I was still logging six hours of screen time, more than usual. Two hours and 52 minutes were spent on Google Maps. It came an hour after texting. I also spent 45 minutes on Safari (shopping for a dress for an upcoming wedding), 24 minutes on Spotify (listening to music), and 10 minutes on Venmo (paying some friends for dinner the latest). None of this was abuse of my phone—it wasn’t like I was reading. However, when I saw the total that evening, after checking the iPhone’s Screen Time app, I couldn’t help but feel guilty. Six hours?
Screen Time is a wonderful thing: an Apple feature designed to help people pay attention to using their Apple device. Launched in 2018, Screen Time provides daily and weekly reports of how much time you spend on your iPhone or iPad, broken down by app. After logging into Screen Time, you may encounter what I call the Sunday morning guilt trip, a weekly report that is served as a notification. “Your screen time is up 20 percent in the past week,” it might say, “an average of 4 hours, 15 minutes a day.” Screen Time also allows you to set limits on specific applications – say, restricting the use of TikTok to just 20 minutes a day.
Apple promoted Screen Time as a way for people to “manage” their phone use in this age of screen anxiety – an effort to reassure consumers that Apple is working on their behalf. At no point does Screen Time ever explicitly tell you to think about putting your phone down, but the implication is clear: Ideally, you want your weekly screen time numbers to stand out . downit’s not like that above. People find themselves reaching for their phones every idle moment, they can waste hours watching cat videos on Instagram. Recently, the concern about mobile phone addiction is increasing. A recent best-selling book by NYU sociologist Jonathan Haidt blames phones, in part, for creating an “anxious generation,” and last month, a surgeon general sought that social media applications carry a tobacco warning label.
The problem is that Screen Time—Apple’s tool, and extensive customization—doesn’t seem to help. The bottom line is that it flattens phone usage into a single digit. “We treat screen time as this singular experience,” Nicholas Allen, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and director of its Center for Digital Mental Health, told me. “And of course, it’s a very different experience. It could be anything from getting good information, being bullied, getting news, watching pornography, meeting a friend.”
When it comes to the health effects of cell phones, a lot depends on the situation. How What app a person uses is important, and which app. One person may use Instagram to message friends, while another may aimlessly scroll through their posts, feeling worse about themselves. “If I just say, ‘How much time do you spend on social media?,’ I don’t understand,” David Bickham, director of research at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. Browsing your camera roll is great if you’re looking at vacation photos; maybe not so good if you are focusing on pictures of your ex.
Most concerns about screen time are of one type: social media. Parents in particular are concerned that the recent increase in anxiety and depression among young people is the result of reading too much about Instagram or TikTok and not enough to adapt to the individual. (Famously, leaked internal Facebook research found that Instagram can harm teenage girls’ body image.) But research that focuses specifically on teenagers is highly contested. Another study found that the relationship between the use of digital technology and the mental health of young people is “negative but small” – too small to guide public policy. The effects on adults are also disappointing: One review of more than 200 studies on health and social media use — studies that spanned countries and age groups — found only small associations, which vary according to population, location and type of use.
Instead of fixating on time, the experts I spoke to recommend thinking about how other apps make you feel. “In fact, the best thing is to make people think and realize, Oh my God, I’m slipping here,” said Allen. The one exception Allen and Bickham made was sleep: No matter what you’re doing on your phone, if it’s disrupting your sleep, it’s best to put the device down and snooze.
Screen Time is just a tool, of course. It is up to people themselves to limit their phone usage. But it is an imperfect tool. Screen Time can be used to set a time limit on the app, but it’s very easy to bypass it. When the set time is reached, the app gives a pop-up warning – but offers to extend the time limit, or stop it forever. Returning to the app only takes a few taps (perhaps entering a password). In an email, an Apple spokesperson did not respond to my question about whether Apple has evidence that Screen Time actually helps people reduce phone use.
Apple is in a strange place. The company that makes smartphones and oversees the App Store has no good reason to tell you to stop tapping. Screen Time is one of the most popular tools in the entire anti-smartphone-technology world to fix the problem of using too much technology. Google also has its own screen time reduction tool for Android, called Digital Wellbeing, which is similar in design to Apple’s.
While reporting this story, I tested five other screen time apps: Opal, ClearSpace, OffScreen, ScreenZen, and Freedom. Apart from the apps, there are hands-free phones with only basic functionality, and boxes where you can lock your phone. A company called Brick makes a physical device—a gray square—that, upon testing, blocks unwanted apps. You can hide the device or place it across the room, so you may have to walk to find it again. YouTubers make videos on how to rearrange the iPhone home screen to reduce distraction.
Some of these apps seem to work better than Screen Time. They prevent you from being able to open a distracting app, or force you to wait five seconds or take a deep breath before starting whatever you’ve downloaded. But there are no easy answers here. Many concerns about phones are focused on young people, a perspective that is sometimes lost: “Don’t confuse conversations about phones not being bad for 15-year-olds and phones being bad for adults ,” Katie Notopoulos wrote. Business Insider this year.
Screen Time and the entire environment of devices like it reinforces the vague idea that everyone should use their phone less, even if we don’t know exactly why. The smartphone’s problem is also its greatest success: The device wastes a lot of capacity in the palm of your hand. It is very necessary. Most of it is waste. People do have good reasons to limit the use of the phone. Smartphones can distract us, stress us, ruin our mood, and even ruin our posture and vision. But the tortured relationship people have with their screens doesn’t improve if you just remind people that they have a tortured relationship with their screens. No one should be made to feel guilty for using Google Maps or streaming a YouTube exercise class or sending their parents a picture of their dog.
The truth is, a perfect day can involve using your phone a lot. And that’s okay.
#Worst #Apple