Is Technology Addiction A Myth?

As a parent of a teenager and a near-teen, I'm on constant alert for studies and news reports about the impact of technology on their (or perhaps our) physical, mental, and emotional health. As we've navigated the gamut from Minecraft to Fortnight, and almost everything in between, there's been no shortage of near-apocalyptic warnings about the potential damage online games might be doing to an entire generation. Experts and pundits have warned that children who were online all the time were being deprived of space for their own imagination; or that online games were hyper-stimulating them. Literally hundreds of articles ran headlines about 'screen addicts' and how gaming was damaging kids' brains. Studies even claimed that there was a proportional link between screen time and suicide rates in teenagers. All in all, scary stuff for any of us.

Except, it turns out, the data on all of this might not be quite so conclusive... In a short essay by psychologist and academic Christopher Ferguson, he reviews the studies and the data behind them, and the press headlines, and finds that there has been much ado over nothing*—mostly a bunch of scary claims and incendiary labels, using weak data and poorly matched correlations to drive what he describes as a contemporary 'moral panic'. For example, when the data was reviewed behind the study that claimed screen use was linked to teenage depression and suicide, another scholar (using the same data) found that 'the effect was no larger than the link between eating potatoes and suicide.'

*Ferguson does note that certain behaviours maligned as 'online addictions' are sometimes symptoms of genuine underlying disorders including depression and anxiety, adding that treating them as 'technology addictions' may leave the real problems unresolved. In this context he argues against using the word 'addiction' to describe technology-related behaviours, and says neither current data nor formal diagnoses support it.