Electronic Screen Syndrome - Concerns from an Educational Technologist

Electronic Screen Syndrome - Concerns from an Educational Technologist

With each generation, according to a 2017 CBC Marketplace episode, the daily use of mobile devices increases. With Canadian adults ranging from two or three hours a day and rising, their childrens' screen-time is significantly more. When school is in, their use is in the three to four hour range, but when its a day off or a summer break, this number can reach into the double digits. A shocking calculation coming out of this study was that the youngest in the family, who was elementary-school aged, was projected to spend 15 years of his life locked in to his screen,

After the numbers hit me, I couldn't help wonder why this was happening, and what the future consequences might look be. As an Education Technologist, the thought of this was worrying to me. Was my push to design, instruct, and manage Ed-tech only adding to this overuse of screens? If screentime is a problem, is the flipped classroom we're sending our students home to only compounding it. One recurring image I get when I'm on this train of thought is the chain smoking toddler that went viral on Youtube. Are we essentially doing the same thing to our students/children by supporting this culture of device use during almost every waking hour of their lives?

Anecdotally there we can all name a lot of health problems our students are getting from their phones. In Boyd's It's Complicated, everything from gaming addiction, to breaches of privacy, to bullying are just a few of the issues. Many of these are obvious issues and common throughout the literature. As I searched on, I found came across yet another worrying health complication - Electronic Screen Syndrome. 

According to Psychology Today Electronic Screen Syndrome (ESS) is a disorder of dysregulation - an inability to modulate one’s mood, attention, or level of arousal in a manner appropriate to one’s environment. In other words, when the kids get hooked on the screens, they are overstimulated. This changes how they would normally act in their environment. Then, when the screens are taken away, feelings of anxiety, stress, anti-social behavior, and a host of other issues ensues, 

NAADAC, The Association for Addiction Professionals, a group of experts and academics dedicated to helping those with addictions have certainly assert that this is a significant issue for everyone, but especially those with developing brains. A simple analogy they use is that of the ice cream cone. What happens when you give a child an ice cream cone, then, mid-cone, take it away? I think we all know the answer. So, basically, if we look back to earlier in the blog, some kids (and us too!) are eating ice cream cones 12 hours a day. Without going into too many lists or wellness guides, the takeaway this group suggests is to keep the kids and teens (and yes, yourself) busy with other non-screen activities. And yes, you know this one, be a role model. If you are staring at your screen in bed and half-listening to your kids when they talk to you, what do you think they'll be doing when you go to tuck them in?

So back to my original question and a worry I have as 2019 rolls on: What, as an Educational Technologist, can be done to avert such negative health effects that these devices trap us with? Surely, we can't just get rid of the screens. Or can we? Can our technology go full circle? Are we merely going through a phase? Will we evolve to limit our ice creams to one scoop per day?