Is Screentime Ruling Your Life?

"Every chronic disease we know of it exacerbated by stress."
"And our phones are absolutely contributing to this."
Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of neuroendocrinology, University of California, San Francisco

"The point is, your thread is yours, mine is mine, and we use it to regulate our emotions, to balance facts with fun, in our own idiosyncratic way."
"It’s very counterintuitive to say at this stage, but the fact is, no one really knows what the heck people are seeing on their screens."
Byron Reeves, paper co-author, Stanford University

"[The researchers contend that] scientists need to look over people's shoulders, digitally speaking, and record everything, on every device, that an individual sees, does and types [to obtain a full idea of a user's experience and the effects on them]."
Benedict Carey, The Times

"A few weeks ago, the world on my phone seemed more compelling than the offline world -- more colourful, faster-moving and with a bigger scope of rewards."
"I still love that world, and probably always will. But now, the physical world excites me too -- the one that has room for boredom, idle hands and space for thinking."
Kevin Roose, technology columnist, The Times

Consumers Research   Pexels

Well, they're everywhere, anywhere you look, people fixated on their iphones, anxious not to miss anything, a kind of pathology of utter dependence, an other-world one inhabits by choice-of-habit, eschewing their presence in a real world in favour of a wired, on-line world that seems far more satisfying than simply observing and taking part in what goes on around them directly, in person. It is, in fact, a kind of casual rejection of life as it is for life as it is portrayed through social media and online contacts.

It now is the rare individual who decides not to have a presence on Facebook. As time-consuming a portal to another kind of remote, reserved life as anyone could wish for, where one looks to be 'friended' and 'liked'. Personal, real-life interaction entirely superfluous as the Facebook-elected consumer becomes completely dependent, satisfied to have an alter-life revolve around an Internet-sourced presence.

It is the grip that the siren-song of that dependency and its impact on people's health, both physical and psychological that led a group of social scientists to begin to study the phenomenon. They conceived of a working method; to download software onto the smartphones and laptops of study volunteers. That software snapped shots every five seconds to record what was happening on screen; shots sent to be analyzed on the server used by the researchers.

They named the process "screenomes", enabling them to get a fairly representative and in fact concise picture of what was happening. What they discovered was that the test subjects switched every 20 seconds from one activity to the next, rarely tarrying over twenty minutes on any one particular activity. What they came away with was a sequence of disjointed screens unique to the individual; a kind of digital DNA.

There exists reliable evidence that smartphones interfere with sleep, with self-esteem, with relationships, memory, attention spans, creativity and problem-solving, as well as decision-making skills. Cortisol levels rise with each ping of a phone, and that hormone is linked to stress; its release triggering alterations in the body similar to spikes in blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar.
A situation that ultimately contributes to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke.

In the United States, the average person spends four hours daily fixated on their phone, picking it up 52 times throughout the course of a day. This is done as a subconscious routine, somewhat like a nervous tic, so habitual it almost reflects instinct, only one that has been ingrained by endless repetition to become a nervous disposition. Leaving the user with social adaptations more suited to a hermit.

Face-to-face, eye-to-eye interactions become rare; they appear extraneous. As a result, interpersonal and intimate relationships suffer. Considering all that is known about this modern-day universal and favoured mode of 'communication', definitely injurious to one's physical health. Throw in the unsettling effect of the psychological impact and it's an insidious diminishing of the value of life.

Abstract:
Digital experiences capture an increasingly large part of life, making them a preferred, if not required, method to describe and theorize about human behavior. Digital media also shape behavior by enabling people to switch between different content easily, and create unique threads of experiences that pass quickly through numerous information categories. Current methods of recording digital experiences provide only partial reconstructions of digital lives that weave – often within seconds – among multiple applications, locations, functions, and media. We describe an end-to-end system for capturing and analyzing the “screenome” of life in media, i.e., the record of individual experiences represented as a sequence of screens that people view and interact with over time. The system includes software that collects screenshots, extracts text and images, and allows searching of a screenshot database. We discuss how the system can be used to elaborate current theories about psychological processing of technology, and suggest new theoretical questions that are enabled by multiple timescale analyses. Capabilities of the system are highlighted with eight research examples that analyze screens from adults who have generated data within the system. We end with a discussion of future uses, limitations, theory, and privacy.
Screenomics: A Framework to Capture and Analyze Personal Life Experiences and the Ways that Technology Shapes Them

Byron Reeves, Nilam Ram, Thomas N. Robinson, James J. Cummings, C. Lee Giles, Jennifer Pan, Agnese Chiatti,  Mj Cho,  Katie Roehrick,  Xiao Yang,  Anupriya Gagneja,  Miriam Brinberg, Daniel Muise,  Yingdan Lu,  Mufan Luo,  Andrew Fitzgerald & Leo Yeykelis

Human Computer Interaction journal