Are screens really as harmful to our children and young people as we fear? When we look into this question in more detail, we discover a reality that is much more complex and worrying than we initially imagined. We are experiencing psychological climate change caused by the digital world we have created. And we are only at the tip of a very huge iceberg.

The big screen time debate: fears and facts

For years, experts have been hotly debating the effects of screens on young people. The latest bestseller by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Restructuring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, has intensified this debate. Haidt and other psychologists such as Jean Twenge argue that the increasing mental health problems among adolescents are largely due to the widespread use of smartphones and social media.

These concerns are shared by experts and parents around the world. Even the US Secretary of Health is advocating for warning labels on social media. Our gut feeling, supported by personal observations and experiences, tells us that excessive screen time cannot be healthy.

Still, Our fears do not tell the whole story. Our negativity bias causes alarming news to dominate, while studies showing minimal screen damage rarely make the headlines. This distorts our perception of research. As it turns out, Reality is more complex than the headlines.

On the other hand, researchers such as Chris Ferguson, Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orben argue that these worries are exaggerated and suggest that our fears are another “moral panic”, like our earlier fears of comic books or Dungeons & Dragons.

Technoforming Earth: Our rapidly evolving digital world

Why are well-meaning experts so divided? The answer reveals a profound truth about our rapidly evolving world—a truth that explains why, despite extraordinary progress, we still have problems.

“The real problem of humanity is this: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” EO Wilson, Harvard biologist

The truth is, We are tackling a complex problem that goes far beyond screen time. In our relentless pursuit of progress, we have essentially “technoformed” the Earth into the alien world we now inhabit. What should worry us even more is that our digital world is changing at a rapid pace. nonlinear rate while technological evolution leaves biological evolution far behind.

Doesn’t it feel like the “treadmill of life” is already moving too fast and overwhelming us? Now the civilization-changing power of AI will accelerate the pace of change beyond anything humanity has ever experienced. Because AI will permeate everything, it will change everything. Perhaps we will soon remember, with joy and sadness, our worries about smartphones and social media.

One truth we fear is this: The pace of change ultimately exceeds our ability to adapt.

“The greatest deficiency of humanity is our inability to understand the exponential function.” – Albert A. Bartlett, an American physicist

Think about it for a moment. We live in a world that is evolving faster than we can understand it, let alone adapt to it. As successful YouTuber Hank Green noted on his podcast: Hard fork:

“The lesson of TikTok is that culture can emerge very quickly. The speed of culture is, in many ways, the speed of connections between people…“

Psychological climate change

Our rapidly changing world reveals a profound realization: smartphones and social media are intertwined parts of a complex digital ecosystem, not isolated causes of harm. We cannot separate an individual’s screen usage from the digital world we have created with him.

As Brian Klaas so eloquently describes in Coincidence: Chance, chaos and why everything we do matters:

“If you look at reality for longer than a moment, you will see that we are inextricably connected across time and space. In an interconnected world like ours, everything We do something because our waves can create – or calm – storms in the lives of others.”

Source: metamorworks/iStock

Within the complex system of our digital world, interconnected components interact in unpredictable ways. Small changes ripple through this network and can have outsized impacts through social contagion, feedback loops, and butterfly and cascade effects. This makes it virtually impossible to isolate the impact of “screen time” on well-being.

The impasse in the screen time debate has inadvertently brought to light the paradigm shifts we face: psychological climate change. We’re not just dealing with devices – we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in our collective psyche. Just as global warming is changing the systems of our planet, this digital transformation is changing the way we think in ways we can’t yet fully comprehend.

“We are caught in an inescapable web of reciprocity, bound in a single garment of fate. What affects one directly affects all indirectly.” – Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights activist

The digital tsunami: Why science can’t keep up

Our complex digital world has overtaken traditional research approaches. Both sides of the screen time debate are right and wrong at the same time because they study individual aspects of a complex, interconnected system. Isolating the effects of window screens is like trying to determine how much climate change contributes to a particular tornado. It’s a futile exercise.

Remember: every time we pick up our smartphone, we join an ecosystem designed to capture our attention, influence our behavior, and shape our reality. Algorithms of attention disengagement increasingly determine our experiences in personalized digital worlds.

Our traditional tools of understanding are overwhelmed digital tsunamiThe pace of change that we as Treadmill of exponential acceleration (TEA) is so fast that We can no longer rely on science to show us the wayBy the time we collect data on these rapidly evolving technologies, especially AI, the evidence is already out of date. This rapid pace of change partly explains the replication crisis in the social sciences.

Here is a sobering reality: we have had smartphones and social media for over a decade, but we are still debating their impact on young people. If we cannot reach consensus here, How can we keep up with the exponential changes brought about by AI?

The social sciences simply cannot keep up with their need for longitudinal studies, meta-analyses, and replications. Nevertheless, the deep and far-reaching connection between our digital world and our well-being cannot be denied. We are entering unknown territory and facing unprecedented challenges without science to light our way like a candle in the darkness. The impact of these massive changes on our future is staggering.

The paradox of evolutionary progress

While our technological advances have connected us more than ever, they can also drive us apart and affect our wellbeing in unexpected ways. We have unprecedented access to information, entertainment, social connections, psychiatric medications, therapy and wellbeing tools – from happiness science to mindfulness apps. Yet despite these advances, progress in improving happiness in wealthy countries remains elusive. In fact, loneliness, anxiety and depression are on the rise in many groups. Despite the amazing benefits of screens, They do not make us significantly happier overall.

The Paradox of evolutionary progress presents a critical dilemma. Our digital world, with all its wonders and pitfalls, is fundamentally changing the fabric of our society and the psyche of individuals. Just as climate change is radically altering weather patterns, we are changing our thinking in ways we cannot fully comprehend or predict. We are not just using technology – it is shaping us profoundly.

The Commandment of Unity: A Call to Collective Action

In an interconnected world, we cannot solve collective problems with separate approachesThe challenges of this modern world and the science fiction future we are creating require a much greater degree of unity than humanity currently demonstrates. The commandment of unity calls on us to overcome our differences and embrace our common humanity because our global challenges demand it. As we race into an AI-driven future, unity is not only the most adept path forward. It could be the only Way forward.

To dive deeper into The Unity Imperative and learn how we can use AI for the benefit of humanity, read the full article here. If these truths resonate with you—if you sense that our interconnected world calls for more unity—then share this message. Together, we can create the world John Lennon could only have imagined.