“Summertime, and the livin’ is easy” – or so they say. During the long holidays many parents will be spending more time with their teens and looking to police their screen time in the hope of getting them outdoors. They’ll be on the lookout for one type of behaviour in particular: doomscrolling.
Designing endless, mind-numbing scrolling on one’s smartphone, doomscrolling has grown in particular since the Covid-19 crisis, posing important health challenges. By processing too much information, those who engage in this activity risk anxiety and cognitive overload.
My research, however, gives us cause for optimism. Surveying 252 teenagers aged between 11 and 19, I found teenagers have more than one trick up their sleeve to stave off online temptation.
A socially shared phenomenon
Before we turn to them, we need to caveat these findings with a reminder that doomscrolling is by no means a generational phenomenon. As Internet users, we are all confronted with and subject to the strategies put in place by platforms to encourage us to stay connected for as long as possible.
The attention-grabbing industry concerns us all, whatever our age or status, from the moment we start using connected objects. Indeed, many teenagers point to the less than exemplary adult use of smartphones, such as Nicolas, aged 14:
“‘My stepfather spends an incredible amount of time on Facebook and then he tells me ‘Hey oh, take it easy with Snapchat, Nico’”.
16-year old Lucy knows only too well that the connected society we live in turn smartphones into essential everyday objects across the professional, academic or personal realms. She calls on adults to exert greater self-awareness:
It’s not just me, or young people, who have to stop with this, parents are no better and they can’t manage things any better than we can”.
Between guilt and coping strategies
Smartphones feature heavily in teenagers’ digital lives. The object meets social needs that offer critical structure at this stage of life, as well as many informational needs, in connection with news or issues related to their interests or school activities.
When I listen to teenagers talk about their relationship with their smartphones, I’m struck by the guilt emanating from their conversations. For example, 17-year old Ambre confides:
“Sometimes you feel bad about yourself, because it’s wrecking your sleep, your family time, time that should be spent doing homework or things outdoors”
However, Melvin points out:
“The time you spend [on your phone], it makes you real anxious, but it’s also tricky because you can’t cut yourself off from the world either! You need a balance, you know?”
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Teenagers are looking for that balance, deploying a variety of strategies to try and keep tabs on their time, their hobbies and their self-esteem, too: “When I waste time like that, I feel rubbish,” says Romane, 17.
The most common of these strategies is to activate the “Plane” or “Do not disturb” modes on the telephone, in the hope of improving concentration on a task. Some people take more radical decisions, consisting of not installing an application they have identified as potentially problematic for them. This is the case of Geoffrey, 17, who has “chosen not to download TikTok precisely because it takes too much time”.
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Another often-reported strategy is to temporarily uninstall an app “just long enough for the tension to subside” in the face of the flood of notifications, notes Juliette, aged 17. This strategy is adopted mainly by secondary school students, either during intense revision periods or when they suffer from information overload:
At times, I can feel it, I feel oppressed by it and I can’t manage it any more, so I uninstall the app. I’ll then immediately feel better and like the pressure has lifted, and then when I feel I’ve calmed down a bit, so to speak, then I reinstall the app […] I can’t not use it at all, it’s not possible, I need it, I like it, I learn things with it, I follow the news with it too” (Apolline, aged 16).
Education, doomscrolling’s best enemy
These interviews raise the question of how adults can support teenagers in their efforts to avoid information overload.
Certainly, the idea of imposing strict control is illusory, and even counter-productive, as it would only generate frustration. What’s more, such a measure fails to empower and instil a sense of responsibility within teenagers. Tackling this problem head-on requires an educational response on several levels.
First of all, it seems essential to consider this issue for what it is: a socially shared issue that has everyone searching for tips to avoid getting lost in the flow. To encourage focus, we could do worse than deactivating as many notifications as possible from the most time-consuming apps. What’s more, too much of everything ends up cancelling any pleasure one can derive from apps or platforms individually: the more you control the time you spend online, the more you’ll enjoy it.
That said, to understand what drives us to doomscrolling, we need to learn about the dynamics of the attention economy, and gain a detailed understanding of the processes that run through us when we are confronted with the strategies implemented by the digital industries (dark pattern, emotional design, in particular.
Governments ought to step in, too. For instance, the EU’s Digital Market Act DMA, is a good step in the right direction to protect Internet users and provide a counterweight to the platforms’ economic and industrial power.
Given its almost existential importance in the truest sense of the word, we ought to arm our youths with media literacy skills, including strategies on how to deal with information overload. All the teenagers talk about their difficulties in coping with this information fatigue and the processes involved in capturing it, but they also, and above all, talk about their desire to share quality time with others, including their families.
Teenagers have told me of their wish to be informed and be empowered to act on the world around them. So we can only recommend that they and we subscribe to these “positive media”, whose mission is to inform us with happy news. Not only can we feed the algorithms in a different way by imposing on them another desired world, our own, but we can also share information that feels good and enriches social interaction.
Finally, slowing down in the face of acceleration is a major political issue. Because slowing down means taking the time to reflect and mature our thoughts. A civic quality. And that could even mean scrolling together.
