Digital Diet: A 21st century approach to understanding digital technologies and development

Digital technologies are drastically changing the lives of children and young people. For years, the default psychological approach to addressing questions about digital technology’s effects on development was to try and establish evidence-based time use guidelines, i.e. concrete amounts of time that children and adolescents are recommended to spend on digital technologies to avoid negative impacts. The implicit assumption of this research was that there is an informative and simple numerical relationship connecting the time spent using digital technologies and developmental outcomes. In this piece, I argue that this collective search for a unitary numerical value linking screen time with developmental outcomes was futile, primarily because such a value does not exist. To explain and expand on this reasoning, I introduce the digital diet approach: a thought experiment that challenges how we currently research and reason about digital technologies by drawing parallels to our established approach to understanding and reasoning about diet. I cover six conceptual starting-points, each describing a different conceptual angle of the digital diet approach and how it diverges from current practices in the psychological sciences.