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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
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • 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

5 Myths and Truths About Kids' Internet Safety | Common Sense Media - 0 views

www.commonsensemedia.org/...ths-about-kids-internet-safety

digital citizenship cyberbullying cybersafety

shared by Sean McHugh on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Sean McHugh on 06 Jun 14
     
    If you believe everything you hear about kids online, you might think pedophiles and cyberbullies are around every cyber-corner. Yes, there is bad stuff out there. But the truth is, there's a lot of good, and some experts are arguing against a "techno-panic mindset" that worries parents unnecessarily.
Sean McHugh

The Kids (Who Use Tech) Seem to Be All Right - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...-use-tech-seem-to-be-all-right

parents screen time screentime screen time tech

shared by Sean McHugh on 19 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Social media is linked to depression—or not. First-person shooter video games are good for cognition—or they encourage violence. Young people are either more connected—or more isolated than ever. Such are the conflicting messages about the effects of technology on children’s well-being. Negative findings receive far more attention and have fueled panic among parents and educators. This state of affairs reflects a heated debate among scientists. Studies showing statistically significant negative effects are followed by others revealing positive effects or none at all—sometimes using the same data set.
  • at a population level, technology use has a nearly negligible effect on adolescent psychological well-being
  • Technology use tilts the needle less than half a percent away from feeling emotionally sound. For context, eating potatoes is associated with nearly the same degree of effect and wearing glasses has a more negative impact on adolescent mental health.
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  • The size of the association documented across these studies is not sufficient or measurable enough to warrant the current levels of panic and fear around this issue.”
  • Unfortunately, the large number of participants in these designs means that small effects are easily publishable and, if positive, garner outsized press and policy attention,
  • put these extremely miniscule effects of screens on young people in real-world context
  • some positive behaviors such as getting enough sleep and regularly eating breakfast were much more strongly associated with well-being than the average impact of technology use.
  • Strikingly, one of the data sets Przybylski and Orben used was “Monitoring the Future,” an ongoing study run by researchers at the University of Michigan that tracks drug use among young people. The alarming 2017 book and article by psychologist Jean Twenge claiming that smartphones have destroyed a generation of teenagers also relied on the data from “Monitoring the Future.” When the same statistics Twenge used are put into the larger context Przybylski and Orben employ, the effect of phone use on teen mental health turns out to be tiny.
  • “The real threat isn’t smartphones. It’s this campaign of misinformation and the generation of fear among parents and educators.”
  • All of this is not to say there is no danger whatsoever in digital technology use. In a previous paper, Przybylski and colleague Netta Weinstein demonstrated a “Goldilocks” effect showing moderate use of technology—about one to two hours per day on weekdays and slightly more on weekends—was “not intrinsically harmful,” but higher levels of indulgence could be.
Sean McHugh

Video Games Aren't Addictive - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...deo-games-arent-addictive.html

gaming addiction video games

shared by Sean McHugh on 15 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Playing video games is not addictive in any meaningful sense. It is normal behavior that, while perhaps in many cases a waste of time, is not damaging or disruptive of lives in the way drug or alcohol use can be
  • This is true but not illuminating.
  • These areas of the brain — those that produce and respond to the neurotransmitter dopamine — are involved in just about any pleasurable activity: having sex, enjoying a nice conversation, eating good food, reading a book, using methamphetamines.
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  • On its own, the fact that a pleasurable activity involves dopamine release tells us nothing else about it.
  • A large-scale study of internet-based games recently published in the American Journal of Psychiatry bears out our skepticism about this “addiction
  • the diagnosis of addiction doesn’t make much sense to begin with
  • by treating the immoderate playing of video games as an addiction, we are pathologizing relatively normal behavior
  • We don’t deny that new technologies come with some perils. We understand the nostalgia for the halcyon days of, say, the 1950s, when people were not yet bound to their personal technology and were free to enjoy the simpler pleasures of life, like stickball and climbing trees — and getting polio and having to wait in line at the bank to check your account balance.We doubt most people would actually want to return to the good old days. We and our children are “addicted” to new technologies because, for the most part, they improve our lives or are simply pleasurable
  • indulging in panic about technology or nostalgia for a better past that never really existed does us no good
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