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Sean McHugh

New tech 'addictions' are mostly just old moral panic - 0 views

www.engadget.com/...re-mostly-just-old-moral-panic

screen time gaming

shared by Sean McHugh on 08 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Not everybody in the medical community is on board with such an assessment
  • a group of more than two dozen doctors and researchers sent an open letter to the WHO in 2016, arguing that formalizing the disorder lacked scientific merit and could cause real harm to patients.
  • the current operationalization leans too heavily on substance use and gambling criteria, and the lack of consensus on symptomatology and assessment of problematic gaming
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  • Addiction is not a good term to be using with video games, because I would say unlike substance problems there is no substance that we're ingesting that directly affects your brain chemistry," Colder Carras told Engadget. "It makes more sense to talk about problematic video gaming.
  • The study found that the strongest agreement between participants' rankings and IGD characterizations were functional impairment, continued use despite problems, unsuccessful attempts to stop and the loss of interest in other hobbies
  • These games aren't necessarily causing the problems; it might just as well be the other way around. People are not functioning, they suffer from social anxiety, they're lonely, and they flee into the games because it's an excellent coping mechanism.
  • However, the official investigation report points out that the only game he played regularly was Dance Dance Revolution.
  • If anything, the current body of evidence suggests that gaming might actually reduce the rate of violent behavior rather than instigate it.
  • Luckily, moral panics don't last far beyond the lives of those who are outraged by them
  • The group of people who believe in the dangerousness of whatever they put on media eventually dies off," Ferguson remarked. "And then people stop talking about it, and they move on to whatever the next new thing is that older adults don't use and don't like."
  • newly defined diagnoses of Internet Gaming Disorder or Selfitis may be rooted in a modern-day moral panic. "It looks like from the data that some people probably do overdo gaming like they overdo a lot of other things -- like food or exercise or work or religion. There are even papers on dance addiction, of all things," Ferguson said. "But that seems to be more of a symptom of other underlying mental illness rather than a mental illness by itself
Sean McHugh

It's Time For a Serious Talk About the Science of Tech "Addiction" - 0 views

www.wired.com/...-the-science-of-tech-addiction

addiction tech

shared by Sean McHugh on 02 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Anxieties over technology's impact on society are as old as society itself; video games, television, radio, the telegraph, even the written word—they were all, at one time, scapegoats or harbingers of humanity's cognitive, creative, emotional, and cultural dissolution. But the apprehension over smartphones, apps, and seductive algorithms is different. So different, in fact, that our treatment of past technologies fails to be instructive
  • To combat addiction, you have to discard the addicting substance," Turkle wrote in her 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. "But we are not going to 'get rid' of the Internet. We will not go ‘cold turkey’ or forbid cell phones to our children. We are not going to stop the music or go back to the television as the family hearth.
  • it's really hard to do purely observational research into the effects of something like screen time, or social media use," says MIT social scientist Dean Eckles, who studies how interactive technologies impact society's thoughts and behaviors. You can't just divide participants into, say, those with phones and those without.
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  • that 0.36 percent means that 99.64 percent of the group’s depressive symptoms had nothing to do with social media use.
  • In datasets as large as these, it's easy for weak correlational signals to emerge from the noise. And a correlation tells us nothing about whether new-media screen time actually causes sadness or depression
  • research on the link between technology and wellbeing, attention, and addiction finds itself in need of similar initiatives. They need randomized controlled trials, to establish stronger correlations between the architecture of our interfaces and their impacts; and funding for long-term, rigorously performed research
Sean McHugh

expert reaction to study on screen use and white brain matter in children | Science Med... - 0 views

www.sciencemediacentre.org/white-brain-matter-in-children

research screentime screen time

shared by Sean McHugh on 09 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • the study has a number of features that reduce confidence in the robustness of the findings.
  • The review of prior literature is unbalanced to emphasise adverse effects of screen time and ignore conflicting studies
  • too small to give reliable estimates of effects of screen time
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  • the scale does not distinguish between TV and other types of screen use
  • no child had a vocabulary score in the impaired range
  • misleading
  • The study was not pre-registered, making it hard to know how many analyses were conducted but not reported
  • nothing is said about predicted associations between the brain measures and the language measures
    • Sean McHugh
      Sean McHugh on 09 Nov 19
       
      This highlights the difference between neuroscience and cognitive science, specifically indicators about changes in brain tissue mean nothing unless they are accompanied by behavioural indicators that support these observations. In the case of this study the children were found to have language development that was more advanced than would be expected for their age regardless of the brain scans.
  • The study does not provide credible evidence of an adverse effect of screen time on child development, but could serve to stoke anxiety in parents who may worry that they have damaged their child’s brain by allowing access to TV, phones or tablets
  • an association between screen time and brain wiring says nothing about causation: you can speculate that an apparent delay in brain development might be caused by high screen time but it is equally possible that lower brain developmental status increases screen time
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