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Comment by dkersten | Hacker News Reader

I love how a lot of commenters are redefining “screen time” to suit their opinions or otherwise rationalise their screen time, rather than taking the study as is. I mean, sure, perhaps different types of screen time have different impact and this requires further study, but using anecdotes and opinions isn’t that.

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That's a fair point, but remember that the map is not the territory.

We've come up with the semantic concept of "screen time" that bundles together a lot of disparate activities, because it seems intuitively and linguistically compelling. But imagine an alternate universe where the equivalent term "screen time" also included origami for some reason. The study would reach almost exactly the same conclusions, because such a small fraction of people engage in origami relative to binge TV watching. That doesn't mean that origami is actually as unhealthy as binge TV watching. The map is not the territory.

In my humble opinion passive consumption of media is entirely different from engaging in a creative process. Perhaps it's just projection on my part but surfing the web for hours reading Reddit, Hacker News and YouTube is entirely different than banging out some new chapters for your NaNoWriMo novel, updating a blog or making a github commit.

The researchers attempted to control for this:

"Sedentary screen time Sedentary screen time is calculated in hours per week, adding together the participants’ answers to the questions ‘In a typical DAY, how many hours do you spend watching TV?’ (FC: 1070) and ‘In a typical DAY, how many hours do you spend using a computer? (not including time using a computer at work)’ (FC: 1080)."

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

>and ‘In a typical DAY, how many hours do you spend using a computer? (not including time using a computer at work)’

Sure, that's at least an attempt. However would you characterize spending time on a personal project work? That's why I called out my specific examples of side jobs and hobby projects.

I'm not rejecting the findings In particular, maintaining optimal sleep and lessening screen time (which is often an issue in youth), while having adequate physical activity and good dietary quality, may reduce the symptoms of depression,” of lessening screen time in favor of more constructive activity like exercise. I'm suggesting there's probably room here for a deeper dive into the kind and quality of screen time, because even bucketing it into just work vs everything else is arguably too broad. I believe some kinds of screen time are constructive.

That's interesting, but have you got evidence for your belief? Are you sure the wish is not father to the thought here?

Well clearly not, any more than I have evidence to the contrary. I did my best to qualify my statements that it's just one person's opinion. Sorry if that's not obvious.

The onus is on those making the initial claim that they have properly accounted for error and that their interpretation of the evidence is the most reasonable. Questioning if a potential error has been accounted for or if another interpretation has been considered is important.

That seems like a terrible control. Plenty of people do non-constructive things on computers at work (I'm doing so right now) and lots of people are productive at home.

I don't understand how this controls for GP's concerns. You'd need something much more precise, like "how many hours per week do you spend using the computer in an active creative pursuit such as writing, drawing etc."

> In my humble opinion passive consumption of media is entirely different from engaging in a creative process. Perhaps it's just projection on my part but surfing the web for hours reading Reddit, Hacker News and YouTube is entirely different than banging out some new chapters for your NaNoWriMo novel, updating a blog or making a github commit.

I will second this so hard, as it is my experience as well. Just staring slackjawed, mindlessly scrolling for hours on end, is a noticeable difference from writing code. I wish there were studies on these differences.

I actually agree. My point was just that our opinions are just that: opinions. We did not actually study it in a controlled scientific way.

People are very resistant to the idea that something they enjoy could be bad for them. Instead, they tend to rationalize their own use as good while looking for ways to conclude that others' use is bad.

The same thing happens with social media. It's fascinating to watch people bash social media on their chosen social media platform, under the assumption that social media is some other website that they don't use. That's why Reddit and Twitter full of people bragging they've deleted Facebook, for example. It's also interesting to watch the mental gymnastics people use to claim that the Hacker News comment section is somehow not social media for vague reasons (pseudonymous, moderated, technical niche, not mainstream enough) while ignoring the fact that we're all here posting content and up/downvoting it like the other social media platforms.

Isn’t it pretty obvious not all screen time is the same? If it was then you could do these studies with people staring at simple glowing white rectangles and get identical results.

Yeah, screen time "doomscrolling", screen time "playing online board game with friends", screen time "reading a book" and screen time "watching a movie" are pretty different screen times.

But they're all... screens. And you're spending your time looking at them, regardless of what's on them and how you interact with it.

I do agree that they are different. But they're still screens.

Right, so just because this study doesn’t bother to differentiate between different things people can do with screens, you are saying it’s all the same?

Insufficient information to make a reasonable conclusion, I'm guessing.

It could very be related to what's on the screen, but it might not. Insufficient data. Screens are very new in relation to the development of human physiology, so I don't think we can assume that screens themselves are not a cause.

Screen time at work is not correlated with depression though. The explicitly choose to remove that factor, since many jobs with tons of screen time like software engineer have very happy people.

To me it is not obvious. What causation do you think is at play here? A lot of commenters seem to think it is some kind of emotional mechanism, mentioning things like social media and such. But it might just be a physical mechanism, like being too sedentary, or eye fatigue.

How about something like e-ink? That's a screen, but in terms of optical properties I believe it should resemble paper.

I never tried e-ink for prolonged times, but I always found the contrast to be a bit lacking, which is something that contributes to eye fatigue. Last I used such devices was over 5 years ago though, so maybe technology has improved now.

Reading a book on a screen is basically the same as reading a physical book. There is no reason one would cause depression while the other wouldn't, unless it is due to the physical screen which is a problem that can be fixed. I've never seen a study saying that reading books causes depression, so it shouldn't.

If you somehow managed to convince a group of people to stare at a glowing white rectangle for 10 hours day, I would be pretty surprised if you couldn't notice any mental health effects.

True, but I argue that those mental health effects would be different than other kinds of screen time :)

Probably, but the effects of different types of screen time would likely be more similar to each other than going for a walk in the woods.

After reviewing all the porn on the internet, I am no longer able to sustain an erection.

It certainly seems very likely that what you're doing with said screen matters quite a bit, but this is also an extremely complex thing to try to study. Not only can the net result (i.e. a hypothetical positive or negative result) of a given activity change based on the individual instance of that activity, but it can also change based on the person doing that activity (whose mindset could also change depending on the instance, which could effect the net result of a given instance of a given activity).

The point is, while it might be "pretty obvious that not all screen time is the same," it would also not be that surprising if screen time was still negatively related to the average number of common screen activities over a certain amount of time (which is what you would expect from a study like this).

I'll of course hedge my statement, by saying that the Hacker News community is likely not a representative sample when it comes to common screen activities relative to the general population.

My comment wasn't meant to agree or disagree with these statements, just to comment on how I find it interesting that people are making assumptions or defining screen time to suit their own opinions.

As for whether its obvious: maybe, but there are many cases where something seems obvious (certainly to laypeople in the subject) but that are actually flat out wrong.

So, as someone who hasn't studied these things, I say, yes, it seems obvious, but just because I think its obvious, doesn't necessarily mean its true.

we can only think things when a double blind study of 100 people on average think them. we are all excatly the mean of N>100 other people, and anyone who believes otherwise is mistaken.

The problem is with these studies which (probably due to lack of funding) measure such a gross metric in an age where there is such a variety of activities that take place over a screen.

Screen time was initially a deliberate positive spin in response to the studies demonstrating the negative effects of social media use on mental health, and somehow gained mainstream traction.

Commenters should be able to fine grain their definition of "screen time" because we have previous studies that do clearly indicate what type of "screen time* has the most detrimental effects.

The researchers appear to have tried to look at Sedentary Screen Time, but had to correlate passive TV watching and non-work computer use as those were the questions from the data bank they sampled.

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

It was specifically "sedentary screen time" defined as the total "hours per week, adding together the participants’ answers to the questions:

1. "In a typical DAY, how many hours do you spend watching TV?" and

2. "In a typical DAY, how many hours do you spend using a computer? (not including time using a computer at work)"

Since it is an observational study, any talk of screen time causing/worsening depression (or abstaining from screen time helping it) is going to be speculation anyway.

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