TRY · 10 MIN
Digital Reality Check
TAIU
Assumed screen behaviour and recorded screen behaviour are usually different.
Compares assumed screen behaviour with recorded screen behaviour.
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Everything worth your time on the question: What exists about me, and is it true?
← Back to the sessionREAD · BOOK
Attention Span
Gloria Mark
Read this before you buy another app to fix your concentration. The evidence points at the environment you are working inside, not at your character.
Mark has measured what people actually do at a computer for twenty years, rather than what they report doing. The average uninterrupted stretch on one screen has fallen from around two and a half minutes to under fifty seconds, and roughly half of the interruptions are self generated. Her argument is that attention is shaped by design, rhythm and workload before it is shaped by willpower.
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READ · BOOK
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
Nancy Baym
Read it if your closest friendships live online and you have been quietly discounting them. She will not flatter you, but she will not patronise you either.
Baym has studied mediated relationships since long before it was fashionable, and she dismantles the assumption that anything conducted through a screen is a lesser version of the real thing. Her account of how people build genuine intimacy and community through text is the best correction available to the idea that digital life is inherently thin. It also refuses the opposite exaggeration.
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READ · RESEARCH
A theory of social comparison processes
Leon Festinger
Best for seeing how much of your self-assessment is borrowed from other people.
The original paper, and still the clearest. Festinger's claim is that in the absence of an objective measure we evaluate ourselves against whoever is nearby, and we choose people close enough to us for the comparison to sting. It explains a great deal about why private ambition and public ambition often turn out to be different things, without reducing everything you want to envy.
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READ · RESEARCH
The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use
Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski
Best for getting the actual size of the screen time effect.
They ran the same large datasets through thousands of defensible analytical choices and showed the effect of screen use on wellbeing is tiny, comparable to eating potatoes, and that most headline findings depend on which analysis somebody happened to run. It is the single most useful paper for resisting the idea that hours online tell you anything on their own. What the hours contain is a different question.
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