Attentional Rhythms and the Safer Phones Bill

Attention (and distraction) are of perennial political significance. The extent to which we are capable (or not) of collaboratively creating a liveable future is indexed to what we pay attention to: our attentional rhythms. Today, screen-induced myopia – literal, metaphorical, political – haunts us, impeding what kinds of futures we can even imagine.

In this context, budding pieces of legislation such as the Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill in the UK are potentially vital for galvanising our collective attention on the question of our attention itself. A Private Members Bill introduced by Labour MP Josh MacAlister (calling it the ‘Safer Phones Bill’), its exact content is still unclear, but it is unsurprising that clickbait headlines describe it as simply a ‘school smartphone ban’, and in any case unnecessary given the Department for Education’s existing guidance for schools.

Lawmakers are, undoubtedly, too often too quick to propose the ‘ban’ as a blunt technique to quell perceived social ills. The recent Australian move towards banning those under 16 from using social media perhaps risks being a case in point here, given its quick deliberative process and unanswered questions regarding the potentially exclusionary dimensions of its scope. However, at present, there is obviously more to the Safer Phones Bill than this (for example, the intention to mitigate doomscrolling), and it certainly could become something more interesting than a ‘ban’, and instead form part of a broader context and public conversation, which dismissive and reductive characterisations of a simple ‘smartphone ban’ function to close down.

This conversation has undoubtedly been spurred by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 The Anxious Generation. His diagnosis is that children are being ‘overprotected’ offline (previously developed with Greg Lukianoff in 2018’s The Coddling of the American Mind) and ‘underprotected’ online. Compare a 13-year-old in 2007 (with a flip phone) to one in 2013 (with a smartphone (with social media, a front-facing camera, etc.)) and you will see a ‘great rewiring’ of childhood, says Haidt, underlining what he describes as the synchronised increases in adolescent anxiety and depression in recent years. The key mitigating measures he suggests are no social media before 16, phone-free schools, the delayal of smartphone possession until around 14, and more offline unsupervised play. While this does not appear to be exactly what seems to be proposed by the Safer Phones Bill, it undoubtedly has this Haidtian flavour.

Contrasting this, psychologist Pete Etchells’s recent work positions itself as a corrective to the putative ‘moral panic’ around screens and social media use by children. The description of his Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and how to spend it better) indicates that there is almost no evidence to say that social media is harmful, and that we should instead develop a new narrative around positive screen-use as (apparently) everyone is feeling guilt and shame about their screen-time. Etchells seems particularly concerned about the weak status of the science of screen-use, calling for more definitional precision, methodological rigour and consistency, as well as a slower, more careful approach to evidence-based policy recommendations.

The call for ‘further studies’ is a common refrain. It is not an illegitimate demand: the scientific method itself requires a level of perennial epistemological openness, especially when the move is being made from studies to policies. As a corollary to their strengths (zoomed-in, narrowed focus on the relationship between specific variables), all studies will also have their limits (not considering the milieu more generally, i.e., anything outside of the specific variables).

Our screen-based existence is, however, itself already a completely unprecedented ongoing experiment with our psyches and societies, including adults. If Gabor and Daniel Maté are correct – and I think they are – that ‘by its very nature our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious of ways’ (in The Myth of Normal) then, in my view, this requires new kinds of transdisciplinary approaches. I take the field of rhythmanalysis to be a promising avenue for such approaches. In my book Contemporary Capitalism and Mental Health: Rhythms of Everyday Life, I suggest that we can conceptualise this broader context as a mental environment: rather than reducing mental health to the individual, we can instead think about how individual experiences themselves emerge from its milieu, and that we need milieus with (at minimum) less chronic stressors. Deploying and developing on the ideas of rhythmanalysis in the specific context of what I call the ‘attention-distraction ecology’, we must acknowledge that how our attentional energies are oriented is a site of deep political struggle today, and how this has shifted with the advent of the speed and scale of digital technology. Our interactions with these technologies, which you can phenomenologically verify, involve the sense of being continuously incentivised and seduced not only to pay attention to this or that piece of content, but also to quickly move on to the next piece of content, the next media type, and so on. It is not enough to say that these technologies distract: they incentivise the continuous splitting of attentional durations into tinier fragments: monitoring our attention, modifying our experience, and ultimately monetising our screen-based everyday lives.

The idea that ‘digital hygiene’ practices taught in schools or occasional ‘dopamine detoxes’ will be sufficient to make such an existence liveable and sustainable is a failure to think the political economy of attention today. The Safer Phones Bill, and questions about screen-use, are part of a series of problems which require our collaborative attention if we are to imagine and create a different world. We need more studies, yes, but also more experiments with different ways of living and creating different kinds of milieus, cognisant that adults too (including this one) are also often participants in their own screen-induced myopia.