Scientists Are Ready to Move Beyond ‘Screen Time’

All screens are not equal. Stanford’s Human Screenome Project promises to map people’s digital behaviors in far more complex ways.

Photo by Tayler Smith. Prop Styling by Caroline Dorn.

Scientists have spent years, and millions of dollars, correlating screen time with all manner of negative effects on young people: depression, anxiety, obesity, academic achievement, ADHD, and even childhood developmental delays. Several have found significant links, but others have turned up inconsistent or even contradictory results, and literature reviews often struggle to extract clear takeaways from them.

The problem, according to the authors of an op-ed published in the journal Nature last week, is that “screen time” is a deeply flawed metric. To improve upon it, they’ve launched what they’re calling the Human Screenome Project. It’s a research program built on a new tracking platform called Screenomics that logs screenshots of participants’ devices every five seconds throughout the day. The platform, which the study authors developed at Stanford University and plan to make available to other researchers, is meant to provide a finer-grained understanding of not just how much people use screens, but when, why, and how they use them. For now, it works on Android smartphones, Macs, and PCs, though the researchers plan…