Electronics are fun: people message their friends through cellular devices, watch movies on their TVs or phones, indulge in social media, and even engage in video gaming. People spend significant amounts of time on their electronic devices; specifically, the rise of phones has contributed greatly to this trend, as people find themselves increasingly attached to them. It has become a universal factor in life and a prevalent, almost necessary, tool in society. This has sparked concern, as excessive screen time is linked to sleep problems, eye strain, and attention deficits, according to the National Institute of Health (NIH). Along with a sedentary demeanor, these effects are harmful for young children and teenagers. Cognitive development is crucial for learning, and the negative consequences of excessive screen time are rapidly becoming apparent through scientific data and anecdotal evidence.
Primarily, the widespread use of social media by teenagers has grown. According to the NIH, over 90% of the population online and around 95% of youths (13-17) use social media. However, the emerging issue is the extreme time spent on social media apps, such as TikTok, Instagram, and even Snapchat. As MIT Social Studies of Science and Technology Professor Sherry Turkle says, “because of our phones, we will be forever elsewhere.” Likewise, social psychologist, NYU professor, and author Jonathan Haidt is a firm believer that phones are the prime reason for unhealthy behavior and cognitive decline. His book The Anxious Generation dives into the phone addiction for boys and girls over the recent few years. Haidt highlights video games, social media, and porn addiction all happening through the phone, for boys, because of their desire for dopamine hits.
A sample of Malvern Preparatory Upper School students responded to a survey. 50% of the 60 students had more than 4 hours of screen time per day, some even up to 9 hours a day. Plus, 72.1% of the students used their phones right before falling asleep. 44.3% of students had between 51 and 100 daily phone pickups, with another 13.1% reaching over 100.
Sean McLaughlin ’27 shared his experiences affected by his electronic devices. Currently, McLaughlin reports his daily screen time is around 4 hours, which is significantly below the national average, according to Haidt’s research, 7 to 9 hours. McLaughlin charges his phone across the room five minutes before falling asleep, and has a new mechanism to help him stay on task and fight the urge to use his phone.
“I started this new [practice] when I’m doing schoolwork, like at a desk, I’ll put my phone in a different room. I’m trying to train myself to not think, ‘oh, let me go on my phone.’ So, sometimes when I have my phone in the other room, and I’m doing work, I just hit some weird spot where I find myself looking for my phone to pick it up. [But], I don’t have it, and I just keep working,” McLaughlin said.
There is a substantial desire to pick up the phone, regardless of what we are doing, whether at work, school, or with friends, because people are so reliant on phones that they naturally crave them, leading to more screen time. McLaughlin delves into the details of his phone usage, specifically, his surprise at how much time he spends on his phone.
“I do think I use my phone too much, but I don’t find myself noticing [it] while I’m on it. In the moment, I [don’t realize]. I’m like, damn, I’m spending a long time on here, actually. I see other people on their phones too much. It’s like an easy escape to go on your phone, especially when you’re out in public; it’s too easy to pick up your phone. I would hope when you’re with your friends, you don’t do that. But in public, you can curl up on your phone and [use] social media,” McLaughlin said.
The current Malvern Prep junior also elaborated on how social media has severely impacted him, noting effects on his behavior and on the people around him. This is a crucial point because scrolling on TikTok or Instagram Reels for extended periods of time is unproductive and addictive. TikTok and Reels get you deeply interested in their core; it gets you critically attached.
“100% of people get hooked, like doom-scrolling. When you’re doom-scrolling, you just lose the concept of time; you’re so locked in. I found myself where I’m just scrolling, and then I’m like damn. You kind of get lost in how many reels you’re actually scrolling . . . It really does shorten your attention span. I’ve noticed that a little bit myself. It’s once something doesn’t interest you, you immediately stop whatever it is. So, if the reel isn’t interesting, you just scroll past it,” McLaughlin said.
Indeed, if something is not interesting, you avoid it or do not engage with it. The dopamine rush hits the brain with desire; people crave more since they are programmed for more, which McLaughlin articulates.
A Malvern student, who wished to remain anonymous, reported that, when asked for this article, his daily average screen time is 11 hours, including a recent day when he reached 18 hours.
“When people get bored, your mind can be pre-programmed to instantly go to something when you’re craving that kind of dopamine. I’ll leave my phone in the other room, and I’m already searching for my phone when I’m bored, or I hit a weird spot in homework; I’m already pre-programmed. I think with the proliferation of algorithms, it certainly hooks people a lot more, and I feel a lot of people are becoming dependent or addicted to it. I think as a whole, using screen time in general is going in the wrong direction,” McLaughlin said.
Stanford University Professor and Medical Director of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Dr. Anna Lembke, described in her book, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, how this craving for our devices sneaks up on us without us even being fully aware that we are addicted.
“Pleasure and pain are co-located. In addition to the discovery of dopamine, neuroscientists have determined that pleasure and pain are processed in overlapping brain regions and work via an opponent processing mechanism. Another way to say this is pleasure and pain work like a balance. Imagine our brains contain a balance, a scale with a fulcrum in the centre. When nothing is on the balance, it’s level with the ground. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released in our reward pathway, and the balance tips to the side of pleasure. The more our balance tips and the faster it tips, the more pleasure we feel. But here’s the important thing about the balance. It wants to remain level! That is, in equilibrium. It does not want to be tipped for very long, to one side or another. Hence, every time the balance tips towards pleasure, powerful self-regulating mechanisms kick into action to bring it level again. These self-regulating mechanisms do not require conscious thought or an act of will; they just happen like a reflex,” Dr. Lembke wrote.
Blake Lee ‘26, who will attend MIT in the Fall, spoke about how he thinks society is becoming increasingly dependent on phones and mindless activity. Lee’s average daily screen time is 3 hours and 18 minutes, which is also below the average. However, Lee emphasizes how he is still greatly affected by his phone.
“I’m definitely reliant. It lowers productivity, maybe not to the extent that it used to, because now I’ve actually installed an app called Screen Zen, so it prevents me from looking at apps like YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, really anything that could provide some source of external distraction in my life. But it’s still a form of distraction at some point, especially when communicating with friends,” Lee said.
It is undoubtedly a major distraction, as teens are heavily hooked on certain social media platforms. This is because of the major appeal of dopamine, like Dr. Lembke stresses, for teens as they seek more content.
“I think [people] become too reliant on [social media and] on the dopamine. I’ve seen myself become too reliant on the dopamine. People want instant gratification. It is an automatic dopamine spike, but it’s not fulfilling endorphins. . . You don’t even notice that you’ve been doom-scrolling the entire time, you fall into this dangerous cycle where at the end of it you feel very unfulfilled, even though throughout the process you may have felt extremely happy,” Lee said.
In her book on the subject, Dr. Lembke also explored how technology has hijacked how we produce dopamine, rewiring our brains. Our receptors crave the dopamine hits like a drug, which has created an addiction.
“Because we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation,” Dr. Lembke wrote.
He remarked about how it is tough to stay away, but the best way to use our phones, and even our computers, for work or school, is to use them in moderation.
“I’d say it’s very difficult to limit screen time these days, especially because society’s become so reliant on our laptops, on our devices, and I think that’s only just gonna get worse as more and more things become digitized. So, I’d say just to find a couple of hours in your day where you just decide to put down your laptop, put down your phone, and just enjoy nature and look outside. I do that because sometimes I stare at my screen, and my eyes get too dry, too tired. I realized I just need to take a quick break,” Lee said.
There is a great impact on society as a whole, which Liam Matlack ‘28 emphasizes. He notices the overall change in human-to-human interaction due to the way we use phones.
“I feel like there’s been a lot of change. I feel we were, before all of us had phones, really close-knit, and there were no phones at all. It was all human interaction, a lot of talking. But I feel like [now], there are phones. In middle school, we just kept playing games all together on the phone, which is interaction, but it’s not face-to-face. Your face is in the phone. There are positives and negatives [to phones]. Positives are that you can interact with people online. There are obviously texting features; you can talk to people, call people, it’s a great tool. However, it’s also negative as more and more people are on it, and there are more dangerous things now,” Matlack said.
Fran Oschell ‘21, an interim theology teacher at Malvern Prep and twelfth-round Major League Baseball pick by the Los Angeles Angels, shared how screen time affects him personally. Oschell says he feels glued to his device, and he has a natural inclination and instinct to check his phone throughout the day.
“I think all of us are, for the most part, depending on our phones in one way or another. For some people, it may be scrolling reels, or posting, or watching videos of whatever for a long time . . . I think social media absolutely ties into it. I think it’s so easy now to spend excessive periods of time. When I was in high school, when you went on Instagram, the only posts you saw were the posts that people you follow posted. Now, there’s so much stuff with recommended posts and the ‘For You Pages.’ The way that social media is just non-stop generating content for you to digest is definitely a changing factor that leads to a lot higher screen time,” Oschell said.
Social media has rapidly transformed. Specifically, the content in front of teenagers’ eyes. For the first years of platforms like Instagram, it was, as Oschell said, a platform for friends’ pictures. But now, these apps are mostly short videos, called Reels, mainly created by content creators and influencers and companies selling products, ultimately getting people deeply hooked into the system.
AP Macroeconomics teacher Mr. Paul Edwards ‘10 expands Oschell’s points about the transformation of phone usage, in which this new, advancing technology has warped society because phones have become so addictive. Human brains have not evolved quickly enough to keep pace with the devices that vie for our constant attention.
“I think at this point having a smartphone is essentially assumed to the point where it’s almost a necessity. We never had anything quite like a smartphone before, where you have pretty much anything you want to know, see, listen to, [and] watch at your fingertips. I think phones can be used as a helpful tool. However, I think the way many younger people use it is detrimental to their health and development,” Edwards said.
Edwards describes how phones have altered our lives and how people, especially adolescents, are so reliant on the devices. This results from the algorithm, keeping people engaged with the content.
“[The algorithm] is designed to show you things that you want to see exactly. The apps aren’t necessarily competing for your data, they’re competing for your attention. The algorithms don’t necessarily say, ‘okay, what’s the best thing for Jason to see today? What’s something inspirational or something that he can learn from?’ It’s going to be ‘what is Jason’s normal content like? What’s something that’s going to keep his attention for at least this next minute?’ I think one thing that doesn’t get talked about enough is that the executives at these companies don’t let their own children have the apps that they work on on their phones because they know the game that they’re playing is all about manipulating their attention,” Edwards said.
As Edwards points out, the algorithm is a concern because it draws people closer to the content, increasing the time they spend on these apps. He also mentions that prolonged social media usage has numerous effects, impacting students in many ways.
“I think on a lot of social media sites, there’s no content moderation. They really don’t have age levels or something where certain things would be blocked. I mean, I see sixth graders and seventh graders with smartphones, and the stuff that they can access can be really, really bad for them . . . One thing that I’ve noticed, and I think this also kind of goes along with social media, are attention spans have really reduced. You know TikTok, or fifteen-second clips, or Reels, so I think when it comes to actually reading a full book, [it’s] become more difficult because you guys are so used to those fifteen-second clips and then another dopamine hit and another. I think it’s reduced literary skills and overall communication skills,” Edwards said.
Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic, also notes how social media content has definitely transformed. Content is growing on a divergent path from what it once was, and now there is a completely new side of Reels and TikTok, all engineered to hold our attention, amuse us, and sell us things.
“And as social media has shifted away from connecting users with people they know and toward pushing AI slop and algorithmically targeted short-form videos from who-knows-where, a dissociative sort of mushing has occurred. The posts from my friends and family are still there, but they are absorbed into the flow of brain rot and advertising. Here an ad for washable ballet flats, there a picture of my friend’s baby, then a baby I don’t know performing some meme-worthy antic, followed by a reel about how Millennials are lame for wearing high-waisted jeans, an ad for trendy jeans, sponcon for weight-loss drugs so that you can fit into your jeans from high school that are suddenly trendy again. All of it passively consumed, all of it scrolled on by,” Beck writes.
To put it in perspective, excessive phone usage is the problem; the excessive use of the device drastically affects us. People have been unknowingly using them negatively, which results from the rise of social media and designed algorithms. The system is designed to keep you glued to your phone, and as we all know, it works efficiently since we are all enthralled. From scrolling through AI videos to the bursts of memes on the “For You Page”, the brain rot is taking control. More time spent scrolling through this content affects adolescents, harming teens and kids even younger.
Ultimately, social media has transformed universally, and this major change has increased screen time over the years. Currently, you see people on the streets, in school, anywhere you travel, on their phones, because society has become dependent on and obsessed with phones, disconnecting people, especially teenagers. This has depleted face-to-face interaction among teens and is heavily affecting them. There must be limits and moderation for people. As time passes, our screens will continue to glow brighter, posing ongoing risks and greater harm to our health.
