“And this happens because you are always with that phone in your hand!”: There is a trend on TikTok, in which Generation Z makes fun of parents or other relatives, guilty of giving responsibility for any unpleasant situation when using the smartphone. And indeed, the perception that our inseparable mobile device can hurt is extremely present in common sense.
However, the data in scientific research are conflicting: it is difficult, in other words, to establish a correlation between smartphone use and some kind of discomfort.
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How much do we have to use the smartphone every day?
What you can try to do is answer another type of question, which concerns the amount of time in a day in which it would be right to use the smartphone. A German research has tried to give an indication pretty useful in principle: using the phone one hour less a day would have a positive correlation with people’s well-being.
The experiment involved 619 participants, which were randomly assigned into 3 different groups: the first had to completely abandon the smartphone for a week; the second reduced its use by one hour a day; the third has kept the usual habits.
After the experiment, the researchers interviewed the participants immediately after the week of testing, one month later and 4 months later: “We found out – he said Julia Brailovskaia, who led the team of scientists, in Science Daily – that both abstinence and the reduction in the use of smartphones had positive effects on the lifestyle and well-being of the people who took part in the experiment “. In particular, greater satisfaction and substantial growth in time spent were recorded in the two groups a doing physical activity. At the same time, symptoms of depression and anxiety and nicotine consumption declined.
What is interesting is that the most stable results have been for those who have lonely decreased the use of the smartphone by one hour a day. In particular, that experience seems to have changed the habits of the people involved who, even 4 months later, decreased the use of the smartphone by about 45 minutes on average every day.
The experiment was told in an article titled Finding the “sweet spot” of smartphone use: Reduction or abstinence to increase well-being and healthy lifestylepubblicato sul Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
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The smartphone is the battle for our attention
The focus on the times of use of digital devices is not just a rearguard battle, of fear of innovations. It is also a challenge that affects our attention, the things we decide to focus on on a daily basis. The current consultant to the Biden administration talked about it, Tim Wu, who in the book The Attention Merchants (published by Atlantic Books and not yet translated into Italian) tells the story of this battle and the level it has reached in recent years: “Since the beginning the attention industry, in many forms, has asked for and obtained more and more of our moments of it keeps watch, in exchange for new benefits and entertainment, creating a market that has transformed our lives – reads – In recent years, as a society and as individuals, we have accepted a life experience that in all its dimensions is mediated as never before “.
What does it mean? It means that newspapers, TV, magazines, billboards have always waged a battle to get our attention. That interest has an economic value, because it means the ability to sell advertising space. The smartphone has changed the coordinates of this battlein particular the geographical ones: wherever we are, at any time, our attention can be attracted by the mobile device.
In an other very important book on the subject (Avoid the lightpublished by Effequ), James Williams, a former Google strategist, talks about an era of distraction in which we are called to pay attention to so many stimuli that we cannot focus on anything. This, according to Williams, would have important consequences on what we are able to do on a daily basis but also, in the long term, on the ability to choose what is best for us. Finding a balance between the stimuli we are subjected to every day and our well-being is an important challenge. It’s not about putting your smartphone away and abandoning technology. it deals with, as written by Jenny Odell in How to do nothing, to be able to actively choose how to exercise one’s attention. Maybe starting from an hour less than a smartphone a day.