← Thriving with Addiction with Dr. Jonathan Avery
Thriving with Addiction with Dr. Jonathan Avery
When Screen Time Becomes Addiction with Katilyn Regehr
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A
Welcome to the Thriving With Addiction podcast, where we explore how recovery is not just about surviving, but about truly living. Each week, we'll dive into the science stories and strategies that help people and families heal from addiction and build healthier, more resilient lives. I'm your host, Dr. John Avery.
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B
Let's get started,
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C
John.
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B
I'm John Avery. And welcome back to Thriving with Addiction. Today I'm joined by Dr. Caitlin Reguer. Caitlin is an Associate professor of Digital humanities at University College London, where her research is focused on digital and AI literacy. She has informed legislation on online safety, most recently feeding into the Online Safety Act. And she has provided consultation in the House of Lords and to Members of Parliament, the Metropolitan Police, the Children's Commissioner, the Scottish Government, and Prevent. She's been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey for the Oprah podcasts and has appeared across a spectrum of US media, including CNN and USA Today. More locally, she is a regular contributor on ITV's this Morning, BBC News, the Today program, and as an op ed writer for the Guardian. Dr. Aguer is also the author of the international bestseller Smartphone Nation, which I have here. Building digital boundaries when offline isn't an option. Caitlin, welcome.
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C
Thank you for having me.
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B
You are everywhere these days, and rightfully so. This is so important and timely. Your work in this is really outstanding.
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C
Thanks. Thanks. That's very kind. I mean, I think people are just ready to talk about this now. I think there's a huge, huge kind of cultural shift that's moving around the way that we kind of understand our relationship to tech. So, you know, it's really nice as an academic that people outside of the academy want to hear what you have to say and that it can kind of help people outside of the academy.
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B
That's right. And I sense your motivation is more than academic from the first pages of your book. It's your daughters. Your book is dedicated to your daughters. Your. The introduction starts with you talking about one of your daughters. How did you get into this? And tell me a little bit about your path to writing Smartphone Nation and being the expert that you are on this.
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C
Well, I mean, Smartphone Nation is very much a book for everyone. It is a book for all people to be able to consume and to develop their own healthy boundaries when it comes to technology. And I really wrote the book that I, as a parent, wanted to read. I mean, I think that it can almost be overwhelming, the amount of information about online safety and digital safety. And although it felt like this was an issue that seems to be in the media all the Time, I actually struggled as a parent to find really tangible advice that was really practical and useful to me as a parent. And so in the first instance, I kind of. I wrote this book for me, and I wrote this book for my kids to help me navigate this terrain. And the fact that it's been helpful for other people, too, is wonderful because I think that, you know, this book in some ways is about personal responsibility and how we can, as people, make healthier choices about our relationship to technology in our own lives. But then there's something broader here about, you know, pushing forward a cultural shift and changing cultural norms. You know, I. That, that's my big dream, that's my big vision for this, that, you know, my kids generation will look back on our generation as we looked at a generation, looked back at a generation previous, smoking in hospital delivery rooms. They will look back at us as wildly unhealthy and outdated. And I think we're starting to see a cultural shift. You know, there is a change where people, you know, are starting to be uncomfortable with the hold that screens have on our lives and on our children's lives, and people are beginning to. To question these norms. And that's. I think that's really exciting. And when you have culture change, when you have people's norms change, you see laws change too.
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B
I love that you're leading the charge for this. And just so we understand what we're dealing with, help me understand. Why are these phones so. So addictive? What. What is it about this technology that has captured us so.
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C
Right. So these phones, you know, and. And when we talk about phones, where we tend to be in these addictive processes, we're mostly talking about social media here. Right. And it's, I think, important to contextualize that we do not have the same consumer protections in the digital space as we do with other products. You know, we don't have the same consumer protections as the. In the digital space as we do for medication, as we do for food, as we do for cars or toys even. We don't. And that is in large part because we are not actually the consumers of tech. We are the product. You probably heard others say that, or rather our time and attention is the product which is being sold to advertisers. And so the business model is to keep us on our screens as long as possible so that we can be shown more adverts. That's the business model. Many whistleblowers, probably most notably Tristan Harris, who was a former Google employee, have come out to say that there have been addictive processes built into these systems in order to keep us engaged longer. There have been analogies made to gambling addiction, you know, by using that same pull down function that constantly renews that same kind of process. Gambling, of course, is not legal for children. This is. But it goes beyond just this addictive process, this, this kind of dopamine hit when you refresh. It's also about the type of content that is prioritized in this attention grabbing economy. And what my work has looked at is how through this attention economy, this need to hold our attention, oftentimes hate, harm and disinformation is algorithmically prioritized because it's more attention grabbing. Because unfortunately, disinformation is often more attention grabbing than truth or harm or things that hook into our most vulnerable points often holds us there a little bit longer. And it's that extra time, that extra attention that advertisers are paying for. So that's the context. It then gets a little bit worse. And that is around this issue that whistleblower, the Meta whistleblower, Sarawin Williams has pointed out. It's this issue of emotional targeting. And that is if you can target people based on their emotions, you can sell them more stuff. Now that's not new to advertising. Advertisers have often pointed out our lacks and offered us products to fill those lacks. But social media does this incredibly well and in an incredibly personalized fashion. And Sarah uses the example of a teenage girl who pulls a picture of herself down off Instagram. She then says, Meadow would know that that was a great time to sell her weight loss products. And even bigger than that, you can sell her more weight loss products if you grow that vulnerability. So if you continue to feed her more and more body dysmorphic content, you will grow that vulnerability and in turn probably be able to sell her more weight loss products. And this idea of emotional targeting, according to Sarawin Williams, was actually promoted to advertisers through by Meta. They said, look what we can do. Not only can we pinpoint someone's vulnerability, but we can expand upon it. And this is what we should all be deeply concerned about. Yes, that these processes are addictive. Yes, we should be worried about things like the infinite scroll and the amount of time that we spend on these systems, but also the way in which content which can contribute to poor mental health is algorithmically prioritized through this economic structure. Wow, that's a downer, right?
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A
That's rough.
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B
And, and it's true. And, and, and it hijacks our kids. It hijacks us. I mean it's, I was listening to an interviewer, you were saying, you know, parents instead of sitting time with their kid, they're going through Instagram about other people's kids. It's like that emotional content pulls, pulls at us too, everybody.
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C
That's right. And then you have, you know, issues that emerge as a result of that. There's new research around a concept known as phubbing, that is phone snubbing. That is when you look at your phone instead of engaging with someone in real time in a social situation. And there is now research that suggests that parents who excessively fub in front of their young children that that can have an impact on the, on young children's socialization and their development of social skills and that for older children this can impact their sense of self and their confidence. So there, you know, it is, it is a web of social impacts that we see as a result of, of this attention economy structure.
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B
And what's your sense? I mean we talked about a little about who may be most vulnerable to these algorithms and social media. Certainly kids. It sounds like people with mental health issues. Anyone with a phone, which is everybody I guess at the end. But are there certain things that you've noticed or researched about that? Who gets stuck more?
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C
So people with pre existing vulnerabilities and notably teenagers with pre existing vulnerabilities are more likely to see harm and they are more likely to internalize that harm or believe that to be true. So if you have pre existing body dysmorphia, of course you are more likely to see body dysmorphic content. If you already struggle with anxiety and depression, you may are more likely to be felt fed self harm content. And so you know, social media is an amplifier. So if you have pre existing vulnerabilities, they are more like. It is more likely to amplify that vulnerability. And I think it's. We should note that social media of course is not all bad. And you know, before the launch of the iPhone in 2007 we the, our ability to collectivize and find community online was less. Right. Our ability to share our voice or have platforms to speak from was less. Of course. And there are, you know, when we speak about mental health, social media has enabled people, particularly those who sit outside of the norm, people who are neurodiverse, people who are gender non conforming. You know, it has allowed people to find community. What I think is really that we really need to note though is that this is not the social media of 2010. This is not the same social media of the, you know, the early days where as Elon Musk famously said that it was a digital town square. The digital town square only works if everyone has an equal place on that square and then everyone can access that information. That's not really how social media works anymore because of the way in which these algorithmic feeds become so hyper, hyper personalized. It's not as if we are out there searching for information. We're not. We're scrolling, we're scrolling through an infinite feeder, what we call the infinite scroll. And we consume everything that is put in front of us instead of making informed choices about what we want to look at and what we want to read. And that is a problem. And that means that it is different from the early days of the Internet where we had this techno utopic idea about connection and connectivity and kind of shared information. This is a different system and again it is because it is now governed by a corporate structure that is incredibly sophisticated.
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B
Mm. It's sort of social media on drugs in a way. It's become, you know, so addictive that it's. Yeah, it's lost some of that value. And people obviously still create a lot of value on social media, but there's more risk than ever, which I think you're highlighting and then right alongside social media. And you talk a little bit about some of this other stuff in your book, like gaming. Talk about some of these other things that exist on our phone. Gaming. You mentioned gambling earlier. Certainly pornography and some of the sexual content. I mean, what role does some of that other addictive content play in all this?
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C
So gaming. I think it is worth saying that there are lots of good things about games. Games are not all bad. Games are great for developing dexterity and problem solving skills, but games have to be used safely and in age appropriate ways. So the one of the biggest things that we worry about gaming is the way in which they introduce young people to adult themes before they are ready. And those adult themes can be presented in a variety of ways. As a parent, it's worth knowing that if your child is gaming with a headset on and talking to other players, those people can be adults. And often when young people are introduced to adult themes through gaming, it is not even necessarily the game itself, but rather the players around the game who are either interacting with your child or that your child goes to a forum like Reddit to learn how to pass the next level of the game and is introduced to adult themes, which may be misogynistic in nature, which may be racist in nature or may be hypersexualized. And so that's worth acknowledging. And if you have any more questions about that as a parent, you can go to sites like askaboutgames.com which give you age appropriate levels of games and help you think through these ideas. And just like anything that your child does, it's worth age informing yourself about it before your child is on those platforms right now.
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B
Those are great points and resources. And then as things have become hyper personalized and addictive, we then had AI come on board a couple years ago or in more dramatic ways more recently. What role does AI play in all this as well?
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C
So AI further complicates this and exaggerates a lot of these problems. My hope is that we will learn from social media as a case study. We will actually learn from it as a case study of failure. Like these are the things we did wrong. We tested these products on kids and dealt with consequences later. And because we have it as such a close comparison, maybe we shouldn't do that again. Maybe before we put these systems into schools, we should test them. Maybe we should think a bit more about transparency. You know, if AI systems are going into schools, should we be concerned about where the data is going and who owns that data before we datafy kids from a very young age, probably private companies. And so I hope that, and this is my big push at the moment, that we will learn from our mistakes at social media. My big concern around AI is something I actually, I don't think we're discussing enough in the public space, which is around a deskilling of kids. Social, emotional, cognitive, de skilling. You know, I was in a school a little while ago and a 15 year old told me that she now uses ChatGPT to text her friends because she thinks it does a better job of it than she can. And so what that 15 year old was suggesting is that she was losing confidence in her ability to communicate with her friend. She was outsourcing that those formative experiences that are really important for social development. She was outsourcing that discomfort which is actually learning. Discomfort is learning to friends. Oh, sorry. To, to, to, to, to technology. And that's something that we should be very concerned about and we should be questioning, like what happens if you don't learn to write the email? What happens if you don't have to call a landline only to suffer the torture of speaking to someone's mother first? Right there was learning in those things what happens if you don't do them. And so there's a big push now to put AI tools into schools. I think we should pause, I think we should test these systems before they go into schools. And I think we should really be questioning if these tools are actually better for young people's development than the traditional methods.
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B
Right. And I'll tell you the results, they're not better. I mean, my real worry is that between, yeah, the social media being addictive in that slot machine type way, plus getting relieved of all this emotional and cognitive burden from AI, your brain's just not going to develop and learn is my real worry. I mean, you become who you are from all this friction that develops when you interact with other people and are out in the world and talking to people's parents.
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C
That's right. That friction is how you develop. And there's also significant evidence to suggest that we just retain information better with a pen and paper or from reading off of paper than we do on a screen. We retain it better. So I think these are things we should be, you know, really, really concerned about. Part of it is the way in which we measure education, we measure learning. So I was in a school the other day where a whole, a whole group of teenagers told me they now use ChatGPT to do their homework and their marks have improved. And the school told me, isn't it great? Their marks have improved. But an improvement in mark if you're using AI does not mean that they have learned. And so I think that's a, you know, the way that we're measuring success in education right now I think is problematic. And I have a real worry that we are sending out a generation of people into the world who know less
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and they can't focus, they can't attend, and they, and they, they haven't developed all these skills.
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C
Yeah, I mean, the attention span, the issues with attention spans is real. And that has a, you know, and that's not just for teenagers. That is, that is starting from the early years. I mean, I think one of the saddest things is so much time and energy went into really good children's programming. You know, so much time. When you think of the advocacy that went into the development of PBS children's programming, and a lot of that work has, which. That was really good quality children's programming. It is, a lot of that work has effectively been thrown out the window because most kids aren't on those platforms anymore. 81% of kids, a new Pew Research study says that 81% of kids from the age of three are on YouTube and that is short form, fragmented, unregulated, algorithmically driven content. So we are, we are building these addictive pathways in the brain. We are building this, this, you know, this, this addiction to short form, low quality entertainment from a really early age. And that's, that's not a good thing.
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B
No. Well, Caitlin, you and I have sufficiently scared every listener out there. But what I like, what I like about your, your book, and I even like the, the tag I saw on Amazon. It's sort of what to read after you've read the Anxious Generation. And, and so, you know, after we've made everyone worried. Your book talks a lot about some things we can do. Talks about some of the issues with why screen time doesn't matter anymore about digital nutrition. Can you, can you walk us through how we can improve things?
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C
Yeah, so just, you know, let's talk, let's take screen time first. You brought up screen time.
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Yeah.
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C
Screen time is the, the concept that we should limit the dosage of the amount of screen consumption, particularly as it relates to kids. That guidance was primarily based on research from about 15 years ago on childhood obesity. And what that guidance was about was if children are on screens, they are more likely to be less physically healthy than if they're running around outside. That is, of course, true. That makes a lot of sense. And so the guidance was about the quantity of consumption, but not the quality of consumption. That guidance is about physical health well being, but not actually mental health well being. And so by that old guidance, you could have two kids in the same household. They could be twins, and one could be sitting with a parent watching a David Attenborough documentary, having an engaged discussion, what we call co viewing, which is now the recommendation of the American Pediatrics Association. Collective viewing, interactive viewing. That's when you use the content as a jumping off point to have a discussion. Like if you're watching a Julie Andrews film, you might use it as a jumping off point to talk about World War II history. That is a very different two hours of screen time than if the same kid in that same household is alone in their bedroom scrolling through an algorithmic feed in an unregulated space. Those are two very different uses of that screen time. But by the old guidance, they would be equal. But of course, we know they're not equal. And so my team and I started to think about how we might address that issue and how we might offer some more nuanced guidance about quality consumption. And so we developed a food style pyramid, just like the Food Guide. And we started to think about just like food which you consume, some of which is pretty good for you, healthy even, and some of it is not good for you. We should be thinking about screen time in the same way we should be thinking about what is good quality screen time versus bad quality screen time. And a lot of that comes down to regulated spaces, long form content, quality content, and collective viewing. And so I tend to say bigger is better. Big screens in collective spaces generally better than little screens in isolation on an algorithmic feed. We want to be thinking about screens as household appliances rather than personalized devices. And if we think of them as household appliances, we tend to treat them differently. They tend to be much more collective. They're not so individualistic. And we also tend to talk about what we see, and that is so important that we start seeding the idea from a really early age that what we see on screens is something we can talk about. Whenever you talk to parents who have tragically lost a child to social media addiction or to social media content, so often they will say, I wish we knew what was going on, I wish we talked about it. And so we want to. And that is a lot of that is because none of us talk about what we see on screens. Really. It feels super private and personal now. If you ask an adult to share their feed, you know, to scroll through their feed, it feels almost like an invasion of privacy. And I really suggest that we open up these information silos and we share a lot more, particularly around, around teenage consumption, so that we are actually talking about these issues, talking about what they're seeing. It's really important.
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B
It's like what we recommend for kids and substances. Like we should start talking as early as possible. I mean, they recommend start talking to kids about substances at age 8 or 9 these days and mental health similarly. We need even earlier conversations though, with our kids about the, you know, the first sort of addictive thing they're interacting with, which is these algorithms. And talking about it goes a long way. That's, that's half the half the battle is creating awareness for our kids.
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C
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
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B
And your digital diapyramid provides a great, I mean, it's, it's, it's a great model for how we should think about it. From passive to participation to creative. Just walk me through some of those steps, if you don't mind.
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C
Yeah, so at the very top of that pyramid is what we would call passive consumption. That's that type of consumption that switches your brain off. So the doom scroll, we might call it the doom scroll where young people would refer to that as brain rot. So that kind of passive behavior we want to do less of. And further down the pyramid, we have much more engaged behavior, like calling a grandparent on screen time. Right. Or engaging with educational content. You know, things that are actually, that are actually encouraging. An active mind. And the biggest rule of thumb is that you want to move away from being a passive product into being an active participant. You want to be making choices and you want to be making intentional choices about the screens that you inhabit, the content that you consume and the type of screens that you're putting your kids in front of. So, you know, I think that, I'm not saying that you can't have screens at all. That's not, is just not realistic. But, you know, real time television, I'm a big, big fan of traditional broadcast. You know, like in the UK they have CBBs on the BBC. I don't, I would much prefer my kids watch that which has been programmed by a children's commissioner to have diversity of content than watch eight episodes of Bluey. Because what we're trying to do is we're trying to have diversity of content. We're trying to, we're looking for quality content. And, and we want, you know, we want our young people to be introduced to ideas that have been programmed and commissioned in regulated spaces by experts in children's programming, not by an algorithm.
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B
Right. Are you saying Bluey's out though?
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C
You can have Bluey. Okay. No, no, you can absolutely have Bluey, but maybe have Bluey alongside, you know, alongside other forms of content. If you're going to turn on PBS and turn on Sesame street, that's great. Sesame street is fantastic programming for kids and was really thoughtfully created by psychologists. That's very different than turning on AI slop on YouTube. My colleague Dana Susskind at University of Chicago talks about it all the time. It's almost toddler disinformation where you have disinformation, you have images of babies eating GR rapes, toddlers running into streets of, you know, and it's, it's, it is, it is toddler disinformation. It's very low quality content which is very, very short, which is bad for their attention spans. So we want to just be careful about the screens in which we are choosing to use around their, our children. So the type of screens, big screens where possible, not little screens and the spaces that they are inhabiting. Regulated spaces where possible, please.
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B
Right. And then what about for the adults in the room? What do we recommend? For us.
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C
So for adults, we should be aware of our own addiction. I'm a big fan of grayscaling. That is where you strip the color out of your phone. You go into settings and all the phone, all the color will wash out of your phone. That will make your phone less sexy to look at. And you may choose that when you're around your kids, you want to turn it to grayscale. You can even set it up so that when you flick onto your home WI fi, your phone goes to grayscale. And that means it will be less interesting to look at when you're around your kids. I also recommend definitely for teenagers, but adults to get those phones out of the bedroom. We know that having a phone in the bedroom is bad for sleep. Teenagers in particularly in particular need sleep. They need sleep. And if you take phones out of bedrooms, get a clock. We know that sleep improves. So that's one thing. The other thing is what we can do with actually in our social media in and of itself. I'm a big fan of a digital spring clean. That's when you go through your most frequently used applications and you go on unfollowing sprees, Unfollow things that don't serve you, unfollow things that don't make you feel good, clean up that feed. The other thing I would say is game your algorithm. And this is when you actively make a decision, intentionally make a decision about what you want to see, what do you want to see more of, what you want to see less of. And you actively search for the things you want and quickly move past the things you don't. Don't linger on it, don't comment on it, don't give it your attention, because your attention, your time is money. And so guard it as such. And if you do that, you'll see that the algorithm will adjust. Now, I know people who will actually go into their kids TikTok and like search for science videos and the algorithm will shift. I think we should, if your kids are on social media, take them along for the ride there and include them in these discussions. But that works, right? If you make a choice and you become much more intentional about what you want to see, you can change it. That is, if you want to stay on social media at all. And that is, as adults, a personal decision. But you also maybe want to make clear choices about what your family habits are, what your boundaries are, and how much of your time, particularly your family time, do you want to give over to these platforms, right?
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B
And a lot of this sounds like the techniques we use to help people moderate substances and moderate management and set these boundaries. And the other principle of moderation management goes back to something you were saying earlier, which is to be aware of how you're feeling. Like when you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired. If these algorithms are going to prey on that, that's a special time to sort of not doom scroll, but to do something else. I imagine
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C
that is a great point. And I think the more that we speak about these platforms as substances, I mean, it's not a mistake that the analogy between social media and cigarettes gets made often. You know, the more that we kind of start to speak in these terms, the more I think people might be able to step away, see the problems with these platforms, and actually start to decide that they want to take control. I mean, it's not a mistake that what happened in California last week has been, you know, has been described as a big tobacco moment, that, that all of a sudden the research has reached the amount of research and the amount of public awareness about that research has reached a tipping point and the cultural norms are shifting.
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B
Right. I mean, another big part of your work has been impacting policy around this. And can you talk a little bit about the California case and some of the regulations going on in general?
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C
Yeah, I think it's worth noting that up until this point, social media companies have been protected by section 230. Section 230 is a piece of regulation, a piece of legislation from about 30 years ago. And just for context, that predates the iPhone by 10 years. And that has meant that social media companies are not held culpable for the content that is posted on their platforms. Okay? So they are not categorized as a broadcaster or a publisher, and they have been protected as a result of that. Now, what was significant about the social media addiction trial that was going on in California is that the question wasn't about right to publication, but rather right to dissemination. That is to say, it wasn't about whether someone had the right to post their suicide journey, but whether Meta had the right to algorithmically offer that suicide journey to a child. So the question was around these, exactly what we've been discussing, these addictive processes that seek to hold people's attention, that seek to hold people there and feed people personalized content that may not be good for them. Now, the fact that meta and YouTube lost this case is very, very significant because it shows that the public will and public norms and public acceptance around these companies and the tactics that they use is changing. I know, some of the mothers groups that worked that were really pushing and pushed forward this case. And I mean, I think they and all of us parents should take pride and also inspiration from what happened in California. The public mood is shifting here and we will see more cases as a result of it. Absolutely. I mean, I was on the BBC this morning because the prime minister of the UK has come out to say, oh, as a result of what happened in California, perhaps we should be changing our laws here as well. And so the work of the young person who brought forward this case and the parents groups that rallied around her is being heard and is being felt globally. It is sending ripples across the globe and that amounts to real change.
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B
That's awesome. And that's the inspirational note to end on today. Caitlin, thanks for coming. I really appreciate you spending time with us and for all your work in helping curb our smartphone use. I appreciate it.
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C
Thank you for having me.
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A
Thanks for listening to the Thriving with Addiction podcast. If you found today's episode helpful, please follow and subscribe. Wherever you listen to your podcast and share it with someone who might benefit, you can also connect with me on Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube or visit thrivingwithaddiction.com to learn more. Stay tuned for next week's episode. And remember, Thriving is possible.