2024-07-10 13:27:00
Par Anne Cordier, University of Lorraine
Vacation time is here. The joy of this prospect is nevertheless accompanied by a certain fear for many adults: the vision of the teenage boy or girl in the family glued to his or her phone, indulging in an activity now known as scrolling.
This term, which refers to scrolling through content on your computer, tablet or phone screen, is often accompanied by another: doomscrolling. This addition qualifies a phenomenon, amplified since the Covid-19 crisis, consisting of endless scrolling, which raisesimportant health issues. A phenomenon of weariness in the face of an excess of information, which is also anxiety-provoking, which generates a well-known cognitive process: surcharge cognitive.
Faced with this phenomenon, adolescents seek – and sometimes find – parades to keep control of their web browsingand more broadly of their temporality. Exploration and advice for spending a (more) peaceful holiday together…
A socially shared phenomenon
First of all, it is important to take stock of the phenomenon of doomscrollingand to recognize its social impact. Indeed, if the focus is often placed on adolescents to evoke the not insignificant fears that this practice poses for their mental and social health, the doomscrolling is absolutely not generational. As Internet users, we are all confronted and subjected to the strategies put in place by the platforms to encourage us to stay connected as long as possible, and in the same place.
This attention capture concerns us all, regardless of our age or status, from the moment we use connected objects. There are many, moreover, teenagers who point out adult uses of smartphones that are not very exemplarylike Nicolas, 14, who enjoys the paradox: “My stepfather goes on Facebook a lot, he spends a crazy amount of time there and then he says to me ‘Hey oh, easy on Snapchat, Nico!'”.
This observation of a “society of today” which makes the telephone indispensable in everyday life for alland for all types of activities, whether professional, academic, or personal, leads Lucy, 16, to call on adults to introspection:
“I see my parents, they are sometimes more on screens than me, and it’s a general problem in fact, it doesn’t only concern me, or young people, we have to stop with that, parents are no better and they don’t manage things any better than us, in fact.”
Between guilt and coping strategies
The digital uses and practices of adolescents actually give a major place to the smartphone. This objet total responds to needs for sociability which are extremely structuring and necessary at this age of lifebut also to information needs numerous, satisfied daily, in connection with current events or issues related to their interests or even to school activities.
When we listen to teenagers on this relationship with smartphones, it is striking to note the guilt that emanates from their comments. Thus, Ambre, 17, confides: “Sometimes we even blame ourselves, because we waste sleep, we waste time with family, we waste time to do our homework or do things outside!”, while Melvin emphasizes: “This time that you spend like that, it’s frankly distressing, and at the same time it’s complicated because you can’t cut yourself off from the world either! You need a balance, you know.”
Adolescents seek this balance, deploying multiple strategies to try to maintain control of their time, their activities, and their self-esteem too: “when I waste time like that, I feel worthless!” notes Romane, 17. A qualitative survey conducted among 252 adolescents aged 11 to 19 years old allowed these strategies to be further documented.
Among these strategies, the most common is activating the “Airplane” or “Do Not Disturb” mode on the phone, in the hope of encouraging concentration on a task. Some take more radical decisions, consisting of not installing an application that they have identified as potentially problematic for them. This is the case of Geoffrey, 17, who “chose not to download TikTok precisely because it takes too much time.”
Another strategy often reported is to temporarily uninstall an application, “to give the tension to subside” in the face of the influx of notifications; notes Juliette, 17. This strategy is adopted mainly by high school students either during periods of intense revision or when saturation sets in:
“Sometimes, I feel it, I feel oppressed by it and I can’t handle it anymore, so I uninstall the app. Right away, I feel like it’s better, I feel less pressured, and then when I feel like I’ve calmed down, a little calmer, let’s say, then I reinstall the app. […] I can’t stop using 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, 16 years old).
Education, the best enemy of doomscrolling
How can we support adolescents in these efforts to resist the capture of attention and the information fatigue that follows?
Certainly, the idea of imposing strict control is illusory, and even counterproductive, it would only generate frustrations and tensions. Moreover, such a measure does not offer solutions to the teenager to exercise real power to act. Tackling this problem requires an educational response on several levels.
It seems essential to first consider this question for what it is: a socially shared question, which engages us all in meanderings and searches for tactics to avoid getting lost in the flow. To promote concentration and control, we can thus advise (ourselves) to deactivate as much as possible the notifications of the most time-consuming applications. In addition, excess in everything is a fault, and degrades the pleasure felt in the activity: the more we control the time spent online, the more we also savor it with dignity. This is an argument that can hit the mark.
That said, to understand what drives (us) to this “morbid scrolling” (Quebec name for doomscrolling), you have to learn the springs of the attention economyto grasp in detail what processes we go through when we are confronted with the strategies implemented by digital industries (dark pattern, emotional designnotably).
Social networks, are we all addicted? (Décod’actu – Lumni, 2018).
However, this essential explanation should not place the responsibility for control solely on users: the legal arsenal deployed, through the regulation on digital markets (Digital Market Act – DMA) in addition to the Digital Services Regulation (Digital Service Act – DSA), is specifically intended to protect Internet users and attempt to counterbalance the economic and industrial power of the platforms.
Given its almost existential importance in the literal sense of the word, a education in media and daily information must integrate this problem, which is both social and political. All the adolescents talk about their difficulties in dealing with this information fatigue and the capture processes, but also and above all, they talk jointly about their aspiration to share quality time with others, including family.
These teenagers express the wish to be informed in a peaceful way, and to be depositories of a capacity to act on the world around them. We can only recommend them and ourselves to subscribe to these “positive media” who have made it their mission to inform us with joyful news. Enough not only to feed the algorithms differently by imposing on them another desired world, ours, but also to share information that does good and enriches sociability.
Finally, the slowdown versus acceleration is a major political issue. Because slowing down, stopping the flow, means taking the time to reflect and mature your thoughts. A civic quality. And this can even involve scrolling… Together.
Anne CordierUniversity Professor of Information and Communication Sciences, University of Lorraine
This article is republished from The Conversation sous licence Creative Commons. Lire l’article original.
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