The Download
Tech vacations update, recent reading/listening/watching, and my Psyche essay
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5 min read
This week we’ve got our first edition of The Download: a grab bag of the things I’ve been thinking about, reading, listening to, and writing. Let’s dive in!
Some lingering thoughts on Tech Vacations
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Tech Vacations. The basic idea: choose a tech behavior you want to change, make a plan, and try it out for a limited period of time. I decided, for two weeks, to limit checking email from my phone, to skip Instagram and other social media altogether, and to limit Twitter to once per day.
In prior years, I’ve been surprised by how easy Tech Vacations were. Filling my days with lively family conversation, baking holiday cookies, traveling on planes and trains, exploring new locations—the phone usually becomes an afterthought.
This time, I found myself limping through the finish line. And feeling a little guilty about it.
Perhaps it was the pandemic. Perhaps it was being, for the first time during a Tech Vacation, a parent. Perhaps it was just how I was feeling this time around. But there were many moments when I found myself, sitting cross-legged on a spongey play mat, croaking out another verse of the Wheels on the Bus, wishing I could check Instagram to pass the time. Or staring dead-eyed at an interactive book shrieking, yet again, singing is fun! and feeling a strong urge to—just for a second—glance at my email.
Yet there’s nothing like publicly promising an update to a large group of people—even if most of them don’t even remember that promise—to motivate you to stick with a goal. I followed through on my plan.
There were aspects of it, certainly, that I liked. The limits I set on checking email freed up mind space in a way I hadn’t expected. I spent time thinking. I spent time writing Techno Sapiens. I spent time FaceTiming my mom—a woman who raised six children as a full-time, stay-at-home parent—to complain about how hard it was watching one baby all day.
Would I do it again? Yes. But it wasn’t everything I’d hoped.
I heard from some of you on your Tech Vacations, and the results were similarly mixed.
Some of you loved it:
I was surprised by how much time it opened up for new things, and those new things tended to be things that I love doing and wanted to do more of but which sometimes fell by the wayside: reading, learning about things that don’t involve work, thinking.
Felt lighter, happier, more present, more optimistic.
I loved it - I think it allowed me to do more with my days, relax into my book or needlepoint, and generally be more present.
Some of you, not so much:
What should I do if I totally failed to live up to my tech vacation?
Didn’t really do it. [guilty face emoji]
I didn’t do one. I think because I was working….but also because I wanted to be able to use Instagram!
The mixed reviews, and my own mixed reactions, are a good reminder about what we know to be true about tech. We shouldn’t be surprised by a variety in possible experiences—across adults, kids, and even within ourselves. The effects of technology use, or lack thereof, are wholly dependent on what scientists call “context.” In other words, the ways that our phones affect us depend on who we are, what is happening in our lives, and how we’re using them.
We’re left searching for what works for us, personally. When is our phone serving us—providing a needed distraction from pandemic tedium, or a source of connection to our (recently recognized) superhero moms? And when is it getting in the way of things we love—reading, thinking, needlepointing, newsletter-writing?
Whether we tech vacationed or not, whether we wanted to tech vacation but didn’t, whether we wanted not to tech vacation but did anyway because we’d promised a bunch of people we’d tell them how it went, let’s be kind to ourselves.
There’s always next time.
What I’m reading, listening to, and watching
A few things that fellow techno sapiens might be interested in, too:
(1) Ask Lisa, a parenting podcast by psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour. Some people binge watch Netflix. I binge listen to parenting podcasts. I recognize this is extremely nerdy. I’m going to keep doing it anyway. A few episodes to highlight:
Ep 18: Can Online Socializing Go Too Far?
Ep 31: My Kid Looked at Porn. What Should I Do?
Ep 35: Sexy Social Media. Where Should Parents Draw the Line?
Ep 54: How and When Do I Give My Kid a Phone?
(2) 2021 Research Roundup from Common Sense Media. A brief report by Michael Robb with info on kids and tech from CSM’s research over the last year. Some important findings:
“Social media played a vital role in helping kids support their mental health during the pandemic. More than one in five teens and young adults said social media is "very" important to them for getting support or advice when needed (20%), feeling less alone (21%), getting inspiration from others (23%), and expressing themselves creatively (25%).”
“Young people from targeted groups experience more harmful treatment on social media than typical kids. Three in 10 young women are "often" exposed to sexist comments, more than a third of young Black people are "often" exposed to racist comments, and more than four in 10 LGBTQ+ youth "often" encounter homophobic posts online. The frequency of encountering hate speech on social media has increased significantly since 2018.”
(3) Jeopardy. Not the typical media we discuss here on Techno Sapiens, but important nonetheless. In the past few weeks, my husband and I have become deeply invested.
For the uninitiated, contestant Amy Schneider is on an historic run. As of today, she’s won 38 consecutive games and accrued $1.3 million. She’s currently tied for second place in all-time consecutive wins, behind only Ken Jennings (74 games).
Each night, we tune in to watch Amy absolutely annihilate the competition, crushing the sad, hopeful souls of those who think they have a chance against her. It is delightful.
On Thursday, she brought home $71,400 with a Final Jeopardy response of “What is a frontier?” Her next-closest competitor won $5,000.
Her secret? As she recently disclosed, she sings Eminem’s Lose Yourself in her head before every competition to remind herself that she’s only got one shot at winning Jeopardy.
We’ll certainly be watching this week. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime.
An essay I published this week
One of the topics that I research is how social media impacts people with serious mental health concerns, like suicidal thoughts or behaviors. This week, I published an essay in Psyche Magazine called Suicide risk and social media: is it a landmine or a lifeline?, summarizing my research on this topic. Here’s a snippet. You can find the full essay here.
In a scene from the film The Social Dilemma (2020), a fictional teen sits on his bed, shrouded in darkness, unblinking eyes glued to his phone screen. He’s become increasingly addicted to the device, neglecting school and extracurricular activities. Now the light from his phone illuminates a blank facial expression as he browses increasingly extremist, harmful content. It’s a stark portrait of a technology wreaking havoc on society, destroying the mental health of its young people.
But is it true? Has the proliferation of social media caused a decline in mental health? Some researchers have argued as much, citing associations between digital media use and mental health outcomes such as depression. Yet others have challenged this view, arguing that these associations are inconsistent and too small to be practically meaningful. A controversial debate has unfolded among researchers and the general public. Is social media use good or bad for our mental health?
This debate takes on further significance as we consider potential effects of social media use on suicide risk. Between 1999 and 2018, the suicide rate in the United States increased 35 per cent. Among females, girls aged 10-14 have the lowest suicide risk – but this period saw a fourfold increase in their suicide rate. At the same time, social media use has risen exponentially. Today, 84 per cent of US adults aged 18-29 use social media, and nearly half of teenagers say they are online ‘almost constantly’.
Are these increases in suicide risk and social media use related? Despite the prevailing negative public sentiment about social media, the truth is that we don’t know. There are many challenges to studying a subject such as this one. Suicide is an incredibly complex phenomenon, and it is almost never the case that a single factor is the sole cause. Randomised controlled trials, the scientific gold standard, cannot settle the question. We cannot time-travel to an ancient era (ie, 2003, before Facebook) and randomly assign some people to use social media and some people not to.
Perhaps most importantly, when we try to answer this question, we are often stuck relying on averages: averages across people, experiences, platforms and time.
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