‘When the culture changes …’

You’ve opened an app on your phone—Instagram, X—and realized it’s the fifth time in the last hour. As Gloria Mark has explored here in The Signal, being constantly surrounded by screens has changed everything. Twenty years ago, people had an average attention span of about two and a half minutes; today, it’s 48 seconds. Plenty of research, Mark says, now shows that “reliance on digital searches for information is correlated with reduced activity in brain regions involved in memory processes.”

So plenty of people want to spend less time on screens, smartphones, and social media. But it’s not always easy to leave the phone at home. If you’re traveling, your ticket might be on it. If you’re meeting someone, you might need to share your location. In some countries, your boss expects to reach you at any hour—or you’re out of a job.

Sara Robin is the director and producer of the new documentary Your Attention Please. Smartphones with social media—now pervasive across almost every population in the world—are truly addictive, and, Robin says, reducing your use of them isn’t easy. But it’s easier than you might think—and the rewards might surprise you, too. After a few weeks of cutting back, the compulsion to check your phone constantly is gone; your attention comes back; and what your brain started telling you was boredom starts to become room to think and feel. At the individual level, it’s all manageable. Most people can cut back.

But not everyone will be in a position to. Addictive technology is a social problem, so addressing it requires social responses—and conspicuously, there are more of them all the time: Parents and teachers have come together to ban smartphones from schools; some countries restrict social media for children; and a range of businesses—cafes, concert venues, comedy clubs—have started going offline. On its own, any one of these initiatives is debatable; but altogether, Robin says, they’re the start of a cultural revolution …

Gustav Jönsson: How would you describe these technologies as “addictive”?

Sara Robin: The word “addiction” does conjure imagery of substance abuse, which might seem inaccurate for what’s going on. You can fairly argue over whether it’s really a physical addiction or more of a behavioral one. But either way, people experience it as addictive.