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Online Technology and Play
We spend more and more of our time attached to glowing screens. This started with television and has accelerated with the Internet, video games, and smartphones. In this section, we will look at how technology has affected how we play and how we spend leisure time—and at how this may be detracting from our health.
Silent Streets, Soaring Screen Time
Alex grew up in a quiet middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore. The streets were lined with tall trees, and the roads were wide and safe for children on bicycles and scooters. Alex spent much of his childhood outside playing with neighborhood friends. Despite the proximity only two miles away of an exceptionally dangerous neighborhood, Alex’s parents did not worry about his playing outside on his own or moving about the neighborhood. He was allowed to ride his bike to friends’ homes and to the swimming pool, and to walk a mile to his elementary school unsupervised. And most of his friends lived the same way. These were very normal childhoods for the time.
Decades later, Alex lives in a middle-class neighborhood in California. The streets are lined with trees, and several streams crisscross the woods and run alongside the wide roads and narrow lanes. The hills that overlook the neighborhood are laced with an extensive network of bike lanes and fire roads that make the neighborhood a magnet for recreational cyclists. In fact, prominent magazines have many times named the Bay Area town where Alex lives one of the best places for outdoor living in the country.
The neighborhood abounds with young families. School enrollment has risen more than 30 percent over the past decade. But in the afternoons and on weekends, the streets and playgrounds are mostly empty. Children still play in the local little league and the local soccer club, they go to the swimming pool, and they spend time outside. But they seem to spend a lot less of their time than children used to playing outdoors, and a lot more playing with technology. Study after study supports this observation.
Most studies find that kids are playing outside about 50 percent less than their parents did, despite their parents’ understanding of the importance of outdoor unstructured play. In a large study in the United Kingdom, “Almost all (96 percent) of the 1,001 parents with children aged between four and 14 quizzed for the National Trust thought it was important their children had a connection with nature and thought playing outdoors was important for their development. The research found, on average, children were playing outside for just over four hours a week, compared to 8.2 hours a week when the adults questioned were children.”1
A similar survey of 1,200 parents in the United States conducted by Gallup (for the toy company Melissa & Doug) found that kids played outside for ten hours per week but played with screens 18.6 hours per week. What’s more, the parents of children who spent more than three hours per day on screens were 38 percent more likely to worry about their children’s academic performance, 67 percent more likely than other parents to worry about their children’s stress levels, and 70 percent more likely to worry about their children’s ability to get along with others.2 Other studies have identified considerable parental concern over how much use their children make of screen devices—and vice versa—and in a 2016 study, 56 percent of parents admitted to checking their mobile devices while driving with their children in the car.3
In teenagers and tweens (eight-to twelve-year-olds), the high amount of screen time appears to preclude outdoor activities. A 2015 media-use census of more than two thousand kids by Common Sense Media found that teens spend nine hours per day using some form of electronic media (including music) and that tweens spend six hours per day.4 Lots of teens and tweens still spend less than two hours a day with screens, but the average times are high. It is likely that teens and tweens are playing a lot less pickup basketball or soccer and a lot more Xbox, iPhone, and Hulu.
A large percentage of young children, teens, and tweens have their own smartphones, tablets, or televisions in their bedrooms. Numerous studies have associated the presence of devices or screens in children’s bedrooms with an increase in sedentary activity, a reduction in hours of sleep, and a decline in academic performance. More bedroom screen time also tends to mean more exposure to media violence.5
Naturally, some former techies have founded a company that charges money to teach children how to play outside again. A start-up called Tinkergarten uses web-based training and curricula to train teachers in how to lead outdoor play.6
The evidence is becoming clear. Technology has fundamentally changed how our children play and how they relate to the natural world around them and to each other. This is not a minor shift. For millennia, humans have gone outside to relax, walk, talk, and connect with one another and nature. Research associates outdoor time, in adults and in children, with low stress levels, good heart health, exercise and activity, and generally positive views of the world.7 Hospital gardens promote healing, for example, and people who walk in forests have lower blood pressure and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood than others do.8,9 We are letting technology cut our connection to nature.
Because these technologies are so new, no one has yet been able to study their long-term effects on our lives. That said, some scientists and researchers hypothesize that increasing levels of anxiety and depression may be related to spending more time with screens and spending less time walking in the woods, riding bikes, and pursuing outdoor activities in general.
By changing our play lives, technology may also be cutting into our sleep. People who spend time outdoors or in direct sunlight tend to fall asleep earlier and enjoy higher-quality sleep.10 In adults, the rise of sedentary screen-mediated behaviors is probably a larger factor in the rapid rise in obesity than our bad diets are.11 This is likely to apply to children as well.
No Vacation from Tech
As you’ll recall from the introduction, Vivek’s lack of e-mail access while on vacation caused him considerable stress. For the CEO of a start-up, that would be normal; CEOs of U.S. start-ups generally don’t take disconnected vacations. The rise of the smartphone and ubiquitous broadband have made it easier than ever to connect to the office to keep up with e-mails, chat messages, and other tasks. As more and more people use their personal devices—in particular, smartphones—for work, the boundary between work and time off blurs. According to McKinsey & Company, 80 percent of employees used their own smartphones for work in 2012.12 The percentage in what McKinsey terms high-performing companies is even higher.13
Of course, this loss of boundaries is in many ways a self-inflicted wound. The iPhone ushered in the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon, which most of us have actively embraced. BYOD does give us more control over our devices and obviates the painfully inefficient splitting of our time between two phones. But it also exacerbates the pull of intermittent variable rewards while on vacation, when we now need the mental fortitude to shrug off not only personal social media and e-mail but also the siren song of FOMO and all the connections of work that now live on our smartphones.
Our bosses are part of the problem. Most companies profess that they want their employees to disconnect on vacation. Few have a formal disconnection policy or tech backstops in place to prevent workers from checking e-mails and Slack. Not surprisingly, workers rarely feel they can disconnect completely. According to a survey conducted by Intel of 13,960 workers between the ages of twenty-one and fifty-four and evenly split between men and women, 55 percent of respondents reported that they had intended to unplug on their vacations but had been unable to do so.14
Inability to unplug on vacation is harming our ability to rest, relax, and connect. In the Intel survey and in many others, people who had unplugged said that they had enjoyed their vacations more and were better able to absorb their surroundings. The science of vacations and the impact of tech remains lightly researched, but some studies have found that too much contact with screen technology compromises our ability to recall the vacation. In a 2016 joint study of 713 adults from six countries, vacationers who spent more than two hours per day on their smartphones were 26 percent more likely to struggle to remember their vacations than lighter users of the devices. Working for an hour or more a day on vacation translated into a 43 percent greater chance of inability to remember the trip than in those who worked for less time. Respondents who had used laptops struggled the most to recall their trips.15
And what of those video zealots who insist on snapping selfies and videos of their entire trips? “You’re taking yourself out of the vacation,” says Art Markman, a professor at the University of Texas and the lead author of a study on the topic. “If you’re using your phone that much, you’re not engaged with your surroundings. There is a qualitative difference between seeing something pretty and snapping a picture of it versus walking around staring at a screen.”16 Of course, taking pictures while on vacation actually helps us remember not only the moment but also its context. But those types of interventions, because they are temporary and intermittent, do not detract from the overall experience and memory.
Love of Nature Becomes Love of Electronic Media
In 2006, biologist Oliver Pergams published a report tracking a clear decline, over three decades, in attendance at national parks, and a decline in requests for licenses for fishing and similar activities.17 The researchers subsequently analyzed the data across sixteen long-term trends in nature participation beginning in 1987 in the United States and Japan. They found that public participation in a host of nature-based activities in the national parks, including fishing, hunting, and camping, had declined by between 18 percent and 25 percent in just sixteen to eighteen years. Pergams says, “All major lines of evidence point to a general and fundamental shift away from people’s participation in nature-based recreation.”18
Pergams concludes that this decline, viewed as a massive longitudinal dataset, most likely signifies a broad societal shift away from spending leisure time outside. He attributes it at least partly to the rise of multiple forms of electronic media.
According to Outdoor Foundation annual surveys of outdoor activities, the percentage of Americans participating in outdoor activities has trended only slightly downward over all, from 50 percent in 2007 to 48.8 percent in 2017.19 But a host of studies have found that humans are growing weaker and less physically fit, possibly because of the continuing decline in outdoor activity and leisure-time activity. A meta-analysis in 2013 of fifty studies covering twenty-five million children in twenty-eight countries revealed that children then took ninety seconds longer to complete a one-mile run than had children thirty years earlier.20 The researchers chose the mile measure because it is a good indicator of aerobic and cardiovascular fitness, both of which are closely related to reductions in heart attack and stroke rates. The researchers found that fitness had declined in the younger generations in nearly every country studied.
Not just aerobic fitness but also strength and flexibility are in decline. “The least fit ten-year-old English child from a class of 30 in 1998 would be one of the five fittest children in the same class tested today,” writes Gavin Sandercock, an academic who studies fitness and strength in children.21 His studies have found that general fitness is declining by nearly 1 percent per year, and that the rate of decline is accelerating.22 In an earlier study, Sandercock found that the number of sit-ups ten-year-olds can do declined by 27.1 percent between 1998 and 2008. Arm strength fell by 26 percent and grip strength by 7 percent in that period. In 1998, one in twenty children could not hold his or her own weight when hanging from wall bars. In 2008, one in ten could not do so, and another one in ten refused to even try.23 Researchers have found similar trends in Canadian children.
Sandercock and many other researchers believe that this decline in fitness comes in part from children’s spending less time outside playing or just moving around. A 2011 YMCA study of children and their parents found that 58 percent of children between the ages of five and ten played outside fewer than four days a week.24 A significant percentage of the decline was attributable to the greater convenience to parents of giving children playtime with technology and screen time than of giving them opportunities for outside active play. Not surprisingly, research has shown too that busy tech-using families report lower satisfaction with their leisure time.25
These are just a few of the many ways in which pervasive technology is affecting us through our play. The negative effects appear to be accelerating in the younger generations, and we cannot really foretell their ultimate effects. It seems that many kids will never climb a tree, run through a forest, or build a dam in a stream with rocks, and that many adults will never be able to take a vacation without answering work e-mails. For all of us in society, the idea of truly having time for play may be obliterated in our lifetimes unless we can aggressively roll back tech use and guard against the continuing incursion of technology into the most protected parts of our lives.