Rethinking the Digital Detox: How Platforms Can Help Us Achieve Media Balance
I first learned about the concept of digital detox from a YouTube video in which a young tech executive documents his experience with “dopamine fasting”. I came across this concept again in a book I read earlier this year titled The Information Diet, which outlines steps people can take to orient their consumption of media in a healthier direction. While the associations with the terms “detox” or even “diet” are problematic, both properly shed light on this idea that to be healthy media consumers we need to regulate the kinds and amounts of content we consume each day.
The term “digital balance” is much improved because it presents this idea of portion-control and variety in media consumption without the connotation that it ought to be drastic, short-lived, and unsustainable. In a paper out of the Atlantic Marketing Journal, researchers discuss the challenge of navigating our modern media landscape as a “balancing act”, which requires us to understand the nature of different media and their implicit motivations. In the broadest sense, this balance involves three main categories: entertainment-based media, educational media, and screen-free media, each of which offers a distinct form of value to consumers. And even as the lines between entertainment and education continue to blur, with the so-called rise of infotainment, these categories can help us—and our kids especially—to become more mindful media consumers, aware of the importance of variety and apportionment of digital content.
As communications scholar Neil Postman suggests, as the availability of digital media increases, and as this media becomes increasingly entertainment-driven, it becomes increasingly important to moderate the kinds of content that kids can access. For excesses in screen-based entertainment, he argues, can hinder people’s ability to contextualize information and develop the skills to follow complex linear narratives. Similarly, as a paper out of the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction suggests, spending too much time on television and video games, without supplemental education-based or typographic content, can result in slowed learning. Moreover, the fact that these impacts of entertainment-dominated media are critically understudied means that we should be particularly cautious of such drastic increases in our uptake of digital entertainment.
Still, balance also means that entertainment-based media can be okay when consumed in healthy proportion to education-based media and off-screen media like reading. In fact, and as reflected in the Surgeon General’s recent advisory on social media and mental health, entertainment-based social media can help contribute to important feelings of connection with others. Media balance is therefore not about labeling individual pieces of content as good or bad, but about figuring out how to moderate the amount of entertainment-based media we consume while ensuring enough time for educational content and screen-free activities.
Yet media companies aren’t always making it easy for us to do this. The supremacy of entertainment-based media over other media forms, especially paper-based typographic media, narrows the media landscape to a dangerous degree. It’s almost as if today’s media consumers are now shopping exclusively at supermarkets that sell only pasta. Sure, it’s great for one-stop shopping before noodle night, but not exactly ideal for those who want to hit all the food groups. Which is why to help people find media balance, especially porous populations like kids, media companies can play an important role by balancing the media supply in this same way. Just as you can find fruits and proteins and dairy at the supermarket, media companies can help ensure that we have the variety of content that makes media balance possible in the first place.
Entertainment can evidently be found in nearly all media, and there is even research to suggest that it can play an important role in helping kids to process information. But when content offers nothing else besides entertainment, it’s hard to obtain the full scope of cognitive value that media can help us develop. To be clear, I’m not talking about infotainment or other entertainment-as-education conglomerates. I’m talking about the kind of content that offers nothing in the way of learning, morality, or representation; the stuff that is designed solely to divert attention towards the screen. Having media balance can be attained only when content makers and content consumers recognize the importance of keeping this supply of pure entertainment in proportion with educational content and everything else in between. The entertainment industry in particular can do this in four primary ways:
Bolstering its collection of educational content
Clearly denoting when content is designed to be educational
Enabling users to search specifically for more educational content
Implementing features that promote greater portion control
When we reconceptualize the concept of digital detox as a more long-term pursuit of balance, we recognize that what’s most important is the collection of our media experiences and not individual pieces of content in isolation. Kids especially can benefit from this notion of balance that complements what they already know about nutrition. Given that our current media landscape tends to skew this balance in favor of entertainment, which carries non-trivial cognitive risks, media platforms should feel empowered to make it easier for people, especially kids, to achieve media balance. And they can do this by maintaining a greater supply of educational content and making it easier for us to portion out how much content we want to consume at any given time. Similarly, we should continue to show kids the importance of screen-free media like reading, which promotes different forms of cognitive development and properly complements other forms of digital media, which are ultimately here to stay.
With proper media balance, we can feel good knowing that we are getting many different kinds of value out of the digital content we consume. And technology platforms are the perfect partners to help us reach these new ideals about balance in the digital age. After all, it’s hard to make it in the world on just pasta.