With increased automation comes increased concerns over digital behaviors.
Does screen time really impair concentration, lead to anxiety and depression, hinder social conduct, and weaken our ability to tell reality from fiction?
Researchers at Stanford and Penn State universities want to find out by recording and analyzing everything people see and do on their phones.
Their so-called “Human Screenome Project” (a play on the Human Genome Project, aimed at mapping the world’s genes) promises a detailed approach to “observing the complexities of current digital lives.”
Our screen time is mostly invisible to researchers; studies tend to rely on participants to self report usage, which is highly inaccurate.
But even when time spent on one app or website is measured more accurately via software, the numbers don’t necessarily reflect the various types of content in which folks engage.
For instance, one user’s hour on Facebook keeping up with social posts from friends may have very little in common with a neighbor’s hour on Facebook reading political news or a co-worker’s hour on Facebook stalking and bullying strangers.
“No matter what you study, whether it’s politics, addiction, health, relationships, or climate action, if you really want to understand people’s beliefs and behaviors, you really need to look at their ‘screenome,’ because so much of our lives is now filtered through our digital devices,” Stanford medical professor and study co-author Thomas Robinson said in a statement.
To properly diagram society’s digital life, researchers have installed software on personal devices (with the user’s consent), which records, encrypts, and transmits screenshots every five seconds—whether or not the handset is turned on.
Those images are funneled into the project’s shareable database, which can be used to observe moment-by-moment changes across content and screens, or to describe longer-term variations over days, weeks, or even years.
“We now have a way in which we can observe all of that movement and begin quantifying and studying it,” commentary co-author Nilam Ram, professor of human development and psychology at Penn State, said. “Now we’re in a position to be able to launch the Human Screenome Project as a large-scale, interdisciplinary effort that brings all that technology and domain experts together.”
The Stanford Screenomics Labs has so far collected more than 30 million data points from 600-plus participants.
That’s not enough, though.
“We need thousands and tens of thousands of people generating even more screen data,” according to co-author Byron Reeves, a professor in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.
Moving forward, researchers hope the project’s findings can be used to encourage healthier screen use.
“It’s not just giving people information about what they’re doing, but actually building interventions around it,” Robinson said. “If a person is struggling with becoming more physically active, we can identify their digital media use associated with periods of sedentary behavior and steer them, using precisely timed and personally tuned interventions, towards healthier outcomes.”
More on Geek.com:
- Study: Teen Tech Time Not to Blame For Poor Mental Health
- Feeling Tired and Unproductive? Blame Your Smartphone
- Americans Are Checking Their Phones More Than Ever
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