Mapping the human screenome: Our vast digital lives

Nilam Ram (00:00):

Finally, we have a device that allows us to be able to express the switching our brains were designed to do.

Denise Pope (00:09):

Welcome to School's In your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights in learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:33):

And I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:42):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed.

Dan Schwartz (00:52):

Hi, Denise.

Denise Pope (00:53):

Hi, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:54):

I have a good question for you.

Denise Pope (00:56):

Okay. I need a good question. That's good.

Dan Schwartz (00:58):

So imagine you could look at my cellphone and see everything that's happened, say over the last day. Would you be able to tell anything about me if you looked at it? Like, "Boy, he's just looking at airline tickets."

Denise Pope (01:15):

Yeah, I think I'd be able to tell a lot about you.

Dan Schwartz (01:18):

So what do you think you'd discover? Because I know the answer, I actually know the answer.

Denise Pope (01:24):

Yeah, I know you know the answer 'cause it's your phone, right? No, I think that Dan Schwartz is probably not so much a phone guy because you're on your computer for work for much of the day. So my guess would be that, this is a total guess, during the day Dan Schwartz is not on his phone a lot, maybe answering a quick text like, you know, who's picking up food for dinner or a quick text how much longer are you going to be in your meeting 'cause we have someone else coming in. I think those kinds of things are happening on your phone. But I would not peg you as someone who, the minute there's a break, you pick up your phone and you start scrolling and looking at dog pictures. Am I right or am I wrong?

Dan Schwartz (02:02):

You are, but I can tell you more specifically what you would learn.

Denise Pope (02:05):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (02:06):

You would look at my chats and you would see that almost all my chats are, "I'm really, really sorry, I'm 10 minutes late."

Denise Pope (02:12):

Yes.

Dan Schwartz (02:12):

Just every single one.

Denise Pope (02:13):

That's what I was guessing, yeah.

Dan Schwartz (02:15):

And then you know what kind of person. I'm apologetic, but I don't do anything to fix it.

Denise Pope (02:20):

Let's flip it for just a second. If you looked at mine, I am a news junkie and you would learn that about me. And I text often with my children and my husband. It's a very easy way for us to communicate during the day, just like a quick little thing, but neither you or I are like, "let's go shopping on the internet for the five minutes we have in between meetings." I don't see that happening.

Dan Schwartz (02:45):

You are correct, but I think it is interesting that you could figure something out about people. We have a guest who is really working on this.

Denise Pope (02:54):

Yay.

Dan Schwartz (02:55):

His name is Nilam Ram. He's a professor of communication psychology at Stanford, and he leads something called the Human Screenome Project, a great name.

Denise Pope (03:03):

Oh my God, I love that name.

Dan Schwartz (03:05):

Yeah. No, it's really good. And he's looking at people's use of digital media from moment-to-moment across the lifespan.

(03:12):

So welcome, Nilam. It's good to have you here.

Nilam Ram (03:15):

Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Dan Schwartz (03:17):

So my memory of this, The Screenome Project, was that somehow you convince people to let you take a screenshot of their cellphone every five seconds for like two months, something like that?

Denise Pope (03:31):

Wow.

Dan Schwartz (03:32):

Is this right?

Nilam Ram (03:33):

It's amazing. We install software on study participants' telephones. We take screenshots every five seconds and we've done some people even all the way up to a year now. We see everything that they travel through, all the different aspects of media that they get exposed to, things you guys were talking about with the text messages, cats, dogs, all that's in there.

Dan Schwartz (03:56):

Wow. So before we get to what you found, why did people agree to do this? Lik, is this a new-generation that everything they do is public, they don't care. Like the chances I want you to follow me around and take a picture of me every five seconds is zero.

Denise Pope (04:17):

You're probably not the candidate of choice, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (04:20):

Well, just what is the psychology of someone who says, "Sure, my life's an open book and in fact I want you to see every single page of it?"

Nilam Ram (04:29):

Well, I think that there are some general trends in the way that we are viewing privacy of ourselves and our own behaviors. But there's also a thing about contributing to science and trying to understand both how people behave in the world and also how is it that I behave in the world and can, if you learn more about me, you can help me optimize my life and help me not be late to every meeting, to provide the reminders at the right time. Like we would be able to automatically try to provide that kind of help if we learn what those behaviors are.

Denise Pope (05:02):

It's for the good of science, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (05:06):

Yeah, yeah. So before we get to findings, this is an incredible amount of unstructured data, like a picture every five seconds. There's no chance a human is going through all that, right. You would lose your life for every participant 'cause it would take you five seconds per screen to look at it. So you have a machine to do this somehow?

Nilam Ram (05:29):

You're absolutely right. It's lots and lots of data we've collected now up to, I think, it's three and a half centuries' worth of people's smartphone usage.

Dan Schwartz (05:35):

Jesus. Wow.

Denise Pope (05:35):

Oh, that is crazy. That's crazy.

Nilam Ram (05:40):

And so in order to be able to look through that material, we are employing computational techniques in order to be able to articulate. So say, give an example, we think that Dan is a dog person rather than a cat person.

Denise Pope (05:51):

You would be correct, Nilam, yes.

Nilam Ram (05:54):

So we go through the images on the screenshots and we look to see okay, how many dogs are you exposed to in the pictures and how many cats and then we can try to do a classification of you as a dog or a cat person.

Denise Pope (06:07):

I just want to point out one thing though 'cause if you looked at my phone, things that you say out loud, so I might not be, I get a lot of exercise videos. I am not an exercise crazy person, but because I work out with a friend and we talk about this, my phone picks it up. And so you might think that I'm a crazy exercise person, when really I'm just once or twice-a-week walking with a friend and we're talking about it. So I worry about that a little bit. Are you picking up actually if Dan's a dog person or if Dan's just in situations that talk about dogs and then the phone algorithm picks that up?

Dan Schwartz (06:42):

Everybody around me is a dog person and I really hate them 'cause I'm a cat guy.

Denise Pope (06:51):

Okay. You know what I'm saying, Nilam, right?

Dan Schwartz (06:51):

Yeah.

Nilam Ram (06:51):

Yeah. So I think it's one of these classic person context debates about how much of the behaviors which we see and express are related to us as people or related to the context that we're moving in and out of. And I think in this project we've sort of literally taken the screen, which is the membrane that connects us to a set of algorithms and digital context, and we're taking pictures of that screen, that membrane.

Dan Schwartz (07:17):

Yeah, that's a great way to describe it. I really like that.

Denise Pope (07:19):

Yeah. So you're learning about the algorithm in Dan's life that goes along with Dan's life-

Nilam Ram (07:24):

As well as about Dan.

Denise Pope (07:24):

Yes, yes, yes. That's important, I think that's important. And also, did everyone understand that why we think The Human Screenome is such a cool name? I just want to make sure that that's clear because there is something called The Human Genome Project, and I'm assuming that's how you came up with Screenome. Yes, Nilam?

Nilam Ram (07:40):

Yes, that's right.

Denise Pope (07:42):

And just so folks know, what does The Human Genome Project do? It maps the genes and so, all the genes, which is a lot and so The Human Screenome is mapping all the screens that you're on basically in a day.

Nilam Ram (07:58):

Yeah. One difference between the two projects is that we do like to think of the genetics and the genome as being static, like it's what you were given when you were born, what's fixed. In contrast, the screenome is constantly changing. Every day we're looking at different types of material, moving in and out of different spaces. So in that sense, it's a much more dynamic ome or ome mixed than genomics.

Denise Pope (08:22):

So cool, I love that. Cool.

Dan Schwartz (08:25):

All right. So give us a taste of one of the things you found.

Denise Pope (08:29):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (08:29):

I've been stalling just to build up the anticipation.

Denise Pope (08:30):

Suspense, yeah.

Nilam Ram (08:33):

One of the interesting things is that these devices allow us to very quickly move from one application or type of content to another application. So I can be looking at the news and also answering a text for my kids, all within just a few seconds of each other. So people are switching back and forth between these different applications on average on their smartphones every 10 or 11 seconds. And that's an average. So there are some that are shorter than that, and also some which are quite a bit longer. But on average, it's switching every 12 seconds, which means we're able to do many, many things within an hour on our smartphones 'cause there's so much material to switch back and forth between.

Dan Schwartz (09:13):

So all this switching, is there some implication? So here, this is a very far analogy, but people ask me what it's like to be dean of the school. And the answer is it is very fast, things keep changing. And the consequence is I don't really get to savor anything. I just get one thing and then I move on to the next. So all this switching world of less sort of appreciating what you have because you move on so quick or should I not care?

Nilam Ram (09:44):

It's an interesting hypothesis. I wouldn't be able to say directly of whether people are doing less savoring or more savoring. I would put it in the context of people have multitasks since humanity began. So take a mother is doing six different things simultaneously with their child and the rest of the house and the rest of the family and work at all at the same time. And so the devices are allowing for greater expression of that, or maybe we can say better measurement of that because so much of those behaviors are now digitally mediated.

Denise Pope (10:16):

So moms are going to finally get the credit for juggling, those pictures of a mom with 18 balls in the air, now you'll actually show this mom actually is doing a million things at once and go mom, yeah?

Dan Schwartz (10:29):

So I don't know what I think about the 10-second sort of average. Help me think about that.

Denise Pope (10:38):

What are you asking, Dan? What do you mean?

Dan Schwartz (10:40):

Well, I sort of want to say 10 seconds. Oh, that's good. That's interesting. But it's like, okay, this is really bad. It's like when I look at the stars in the sky on a clear night and I look at them and I go wow. And that's about as far as I get thinking about it. It's like wow, that's a lot. So help me go beyond wow in the 10 seconds. Give me something to hang on to.

Nilam Ram (11:02):

Well, I think that our brains and minds and bodies are built in order to be able to process lots and lots of information. And that includes looking out for lions that are running across the savanna and that might eat us, as well as for the moments of the stars and appreciating the beauty of the universe that we live in. And all of that is simultaneously happening in the world and it's happening all within this screen, all within 10 seconds of each other. So now we can move between these, what we used to think, were very different kinds of content much more quickly, and that could lead to a greater interconnection between the different parts of our lives. So our work life is not separate from our home life because I'm doing the texting and the e-mailing all simultaneously within each other. So we're getting greater and greater connections, one hypothesis is we're getting greater and greater connections among the different varieties of life experience that we have.

Denise Pope (12:03):

I think that's so true. If you think about even just the newspaper, right, because I used to get an actual newspaper and I would read it in the morning and then I would go to work and I wouldn't be turning on news or getting bings or dings on my phone. I'm saying this as a news junkie. And then if I wanted more news, I'd have to wait till the 5 o'clock version or 6 o'clock when I got home. And now, you get notified like urgent, alert, so-and-so did this in the Senate or whatever and it's constantly throughout the day

Dan Schwartz (12:31):

And that's good?

Denise Pope (12:32):

No, I don't know. Well, that's what I'm saying. I think there's some good happening with connections. It's great that I can just answer a quick question from a colleague who just needs something super quick and they don't have to wait till the end of the day and I'm not disrupting their workflow. And yet, there's a lot of other stuff that's disrupting workflow-

Dan Schwartz (12:52):

I have to ask the question.

Denise Pope (12:52):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (12:54):

So there's a lot of concern that the big social media companies have algorithms that make you sort of want to stay on. And so this behavior where I'm switching to some extent is rewarded. And so it's driving me to switch more than I used to. Can you track someone and say, "Oh, this person didn't switch very much, but over time I noticed because they started using XYZ, they're switching more and more?" And by the end, Denise is checking her cellphone all the time to see what's happening in Washington, DC which she doesn't really care about anyway.

Nilam Ram (13:33):

Well, so we see evidence of the switching. We don't see evidence that the switching is happening differently than it is in other domains or in physical world compared to the digital world, that this is a log normally distributed thing, which means that there's a lot of short switching and there's some long segments as well. And that's exactly the same distribution of switching across different tasks that we see in the physical world as well, same distribution. So we're not seeing that it's different, it's just that the technology is facilitating the expression of neural processes that allow us to do switching at a rate at which their brains can do. So in that sense, it's finally we have a device that allows us to be able to express the switching our brains were designed to do, is another way to look at the question.

Dan Schwartz (14:29):

So one of the interesting things about genome is we have lots of genes, but it's the context that determines whether they express themselves.

Denise Pope (14:39):

Oh.

Dan Schwartz (14:39):

And so the environment you're in will activate a gene and then it'll cause some change. And so that sort of feels like the cellphone story, that it's kind of there, but the context is releasing my responses to it to a large extent as opposed to me initiating a tremendous amount.

Denise Pope (14:59):

Everyone, this can't possibly just be me, is just flooded all the time with things. I was talking to my mom about buying a dress and then the next thing I know, all of these dress ads show up. I didn't look for dresses even, right? It was just literally out in the ether.

Dan Schwartz (15:18):

Yeah. So I intentionally do not use my cellphone for certain things 'cause I just don't want the context to intrude.

Denise Pope (15:26):

Like what? Wait, this is so cool. Tell me.

Dan Schwartz (15:28):

Well, I don't shop on my cellphone, for example.

Denise Pope (15:32):

Oh.

Dan Schwartz (15:32):

Because once you do that, you get ads that keep showing up.

Denise Pope (15:36):

Yes, this is my problem ,and I could care less about it. So wait a minute-

Dan Schwartz (15:40):

So I'm trying to control the environment that's just on the other side of the membrane of the cellphone so that I can-

Denise Pope (15:45):

Look at you. That's amazing.

Dan Schwartz (15:48):

Who knew? Of course, I have no Facebook, no LinkedIn, nothing.

Denise Pope (15:53):

You're like one of those-

Dan Schwartz (15:54):

Go away world.

Denise Pope (15:57):

That's interesting. I don't think I could do that because it's just so much more convenient to shop on your cellphone-

Dan Schwartz (16:03):

I know, I know.

Denise Pope (16:04):

... or I look at recipes all the time and then all of a sudden, I'm just getting tons and tons of recipes and shopping lists and things like that. So there's certain things that you just don't do on your cellphone. You use your cellphone only for certain types of behaviors?

Dan Schwartz (16:18):

Yeah, yeah.

Denise Pope (16:19):

So you text?

Dan Schwartz (16:22):

I text, I check the airline apps. I like looking at the exercise stuff, how many steps.

Denise Pope (16:28):

Oh, you mean tracking your own steps?

Dan Schwartz (16:31):

The problem is if I'm at the dentist and I'm waiting an hour before I go in and all I've got is my cellphone, it's tough not to start going in and then I'm thinking if I do that, you start getting feeds. I don't want it.

Denise Pope (16:42):

Yes. And the big brother is watching you and all of a sudden...

Dan Schwartz (16:46):

How many times can I check the weather?

Denise Pope (16:47):

So, Nilam, this is so fascinating. Now, am I right to know that you have just adults in this study or have you included some young people?

Nilam Ram (17:00):

No, we've also included young people. We have adolescents that are age 13-plus, and we also have, for a subset of those adolescents, we also had their parents participating. So in some cases we are looking at both the parents and the adolescents.

Dan Schwartz (17:12):

Wow.

Denise Pope (17:13):

That is so cool. That is so cool. Okay. Can you give us any insights into findings of young children or younger 13 through 18 and versus adults and their parents?

Nilam Ram (17:25):

We haven't done yet the analysis to do the contrast between the two. One short answer is everybody's on their smartphones a lot. It's not necessarily the case that the adolescents are on more, often more than the adults, um are.

Denise Pope (17:39):

Interesting.

Nilam Ram (17:40):

And that the behaviors are in part related to each other, but also not related to each other so that the types of content that adolescents are engaging with is slightly different than the types of content that adults are engaging with.

Denise Pope (17:58):

Do you mean like TikTok, some kids spend more time on certain apps than adults do? Is that what you mean?

Nilam Ram (18:06):

Yeah. So there are some app differences, but there are also the types of tasks, which we are engaged with are slightly different. So one of the predominant aspects of adolescents is peer relations and engaging with peers and trying to understand those peer relationships, whereas adults are more engaged with work and family relations compared to the peer relations.

Denise Pope (18:29):

That makes sense.

Nilam Ram (18:31):

And that's true both on the smartphones and off the smartphones.

Dan Schwartz (18:33):

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Denise Pope (18:34):

That totally makes sense.

Dan Schwartz (18:36):

So as a basic question, and this is really fascinating, just sort of how do people allocate their time? Are they good at it? Things like that. Are there practical applications of what you're doing? You've been able to detect early warning signals for kids, for example, that you follow them and you sort of say, "Uh-oh, this kid's heading in a bad direction," or something like that?

Denise Pope (19:00):

Wow.

Nilam Ram (19:01):

Yeah. So that's the long-term dream is to be able to take this relatively continuous data streams of people engaged in their natural daily lives and to be able to learn patterns that exist in there and then to help people optimize those trajectories. So would we eventually be able to, if we learn the patterns, provide time-sensitive and context-sensitive interventions like text messages that would interrupt somebody's flow in order to return them towards the flow which they would like to achieve?

Dan Schwartz (19:34):

Oh, that's nice. That's a nice application. So a lot of people are worried about cellphones and various aspects of mental health. So are you getting something there 'cause being able to send a text to a kid that sort of says, "Stop what you're doing, go this other direction," you're sort of doom-scrolling kind of thing.

Nilam Ram (19:53):

Yeah, so the literature generally about the relationship between social media use and mental health has been very mixed. On average, across all of the studies, it's basically, there's zero association between those two. And yet at the same time though, the empirical evidence is showing no relation or intuitive senses say, "Oh, there is a relation between my smartphone use and my own mental health." So why aren't we finding it? And in the studies which we have done, the analyses we've done so far is that we can find those associations, but they're very idiosyncratic. The way in which your smartphone use is related to your mental health is very different from the way that my smartphone use is related to my mental health. I may use my smartphone more when my mental health is low, you may use your smartphone less when your mental health is worse. So the same relation can exist in different directions for different people.

Dan Schwartz (20:52):

So having all the data in the world turns out to be complicated to find a clean hypothesis. Is that sort of the answer?

Denise Pope (21:02):

You were hoping for like yes, mental health goes down when your phone use goes up at a certain point or something. Is that what you were hoping for, Dan?

Dan Schwartz (21:10):

Yeah. If your home screen is orange, lookout, something simple.

Denise Pope (21:14):

It's not that simple, it sounds.

Nilam Ram (21:17):

Yeah, I would say that it's definitely more complicated and much more nuanced and much more idiosyncratic. Even in a four-week period, the relationship between my anxiety and my smartphone use may be different one month than it is from another month. So that complexity is all embedded there. And now that we have the data to be able to dive in and really look at those nuances, we're finding them everywhere. So it's very hard to make a general statement about this type of behavior is related to fluctuations in mental health.

Denise Pope (21:50):

I think there's going to be a bunch of teenagers saying, "Yay," if we have any teenage listeners because I think so much of what you're hearing in the news and from certain cities as you say is like, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad and kids are just really struggling as they see the party play out online that they weren't invited to or they see everybody looking beautiful all the time and all of this. So you're basically saying, "Wait a minute, it's a little bit more complex than that." Yeah. Am I understanding that?

Nilam Ram (22:23):

Yeah, much more complicated. Sure there are moments when I feel as though I have been left out of something that my peers are doing, but there's also right next to them, 15 seconds later, a moment that my friend says something very nice to me-

Denise Pope (22:37):

Online?

Nilam Ram (22:38):

... and I need that support. Online, right. So all of this is happening within these 15-second snippets back to back. So it's not all bad and it's not all good. It's all mixed together and very complicated.

Denise Pope (22:51):

It's so hard as a parent because you are just so worried about your kid and this is so new and you hear so much stuff. I mean just even you saying that makes me think, it goes back to the development of you want to know your kid's friends, you want to know who they're hanging out with, virtually and/or in person, 'cause you want your kid to be able to say, "Hey, no, you're great," right after they're feeling down.

Nilam Ram (23:17):

Yeah. Yeah, and that's hopefully what our eventual goal would be, is to be able to deliver those types of interventions in that moment when they're needed the most.

Denise Pope (23:26):

It's also a little big brother-y, I have to say, right? We're always watching you, but I guess people are always watching anyway. That's how I get my little videos sent to me is the algorithm is listening, right? So maybe it's not that different, I don't know. Sorry, I just had to throw that in there.

Nilam Ram (23:42):

Yeah. I think it is true that the algorithms are now working with us in many ways, and our hope is that we would be able to provide a set of algorithms that have a different purpose than trying to increase engagement or purchasing and would be more interested in how it is that I'm doing as a person and the goals that I would like to achieve.

Denise Pope (24:03):

But I know you're a good guy, Nilam, and so you would be doing things for positive, but I can also see people doing things to mess with people. I don't know. It does scare me, but you're right, it's already out there, so it's not you.

Dan Schwartz (24:16):

Denise. I have a fitness app and it says get up and walk. I've been sitting too long. Does that seem evil to you?

Denise Pope (24:27):

No. That's what I'm saying. We can think of all the good things, right? But I could also, you know, have you both read 1984? You can also be like go out and consider buying a gun, you know, and here's all the cool things about owning a gun, and if you're underage, this is how you get a gun, and now here's how you make a gun and I- I mean, I don't know, I'm watching too many true crime stories clearly on TV, but right for all the good, I am a little bit worried about that power. You must think about this ethically.

Nilam Ram (24:58):

Oh, yeah. So we've spent a lot of time thinking about the potential dual use possibilities here, both for good and for evil and yes, we are trying to promote the good side of the whole piece, but being aware that the evil side is there. And one of the reasons that our participants are engaged with us as a research institution is that we are providing a public good, which is not motivated by profit in order to understand human behavior and how it's working. And so we've reached this conclusion that we sort of have a moral obligation to try to do this research in order to provide a different way of looking at the data than a profit-motivated company might.

Dan Schwartz (25:42):

Yeah, no, that's important. So if there's a narrative out there that you would like to correct or get people to hedge on, what would it be about cellphone use?

Nilam Ram (25:56):

Yeah, I would think that cellphone use is not bad. We're carrying them around for reasons that they are useful to us in many, many different ways. And they're useful for me in a different way than they are for each of you and for each of their listeners. And to sort of celebrate that heterogeneity in the ways in which they're being used, and to try to leverage them as technological innovations that can help people optimize their lives in ways that are good for them.

Denise Pope (26:24):

Can I ask a silly question? I have a silly question to ask. You don't have to say the person's name obviously, 'cause of privacy, but has there been a person where you're like, "Oh my gosh, this person is literally on their phone all the time." Like, who wins the prize for most on their phone all the time?

Dan Schwartz (26:44):

Bob.

Denise Pope (26:44):

That's what I want to know.

Dan Schwartz (26:45):

Bob.

Denise Pope (26:48):

Don't tell me their name, but are you surprised by just the sheer amount of time people are on their phones or is this like, "No, Denise, everybody's on their phone all the time?"

Dan Schwartz (26:56):

So can I give a story on this?

Denise Pope (27:00):

Yeah, then I want Nilam to answer.

Dan Schwartz (27:01):

I know, we have guests who are experts, whatever.

Denise Pope (27:05):

Yes. Hello, yes.

Dan Schwartz (27:07):

So I had an undergraduate who wanted to work with me in my lab, and so she comes and she asked me a question, and while I start to answer, she gets onto her cellphone and starts doing something. And I stop talking and it takes her about 5 seconds, 10 seconds to realize I've stopped talking. And I said to her, "You realize that you asked me a question. As soon as I started answering it, you stopped paying attention. You went..." And her response to me was, "Get used to it. I'm the new generation."

Denise Pope (27:36):

Yes. So did not hire her.

Dan Schwartz (27:38):

So I appreciate Nilam saying it's good and bad, but there are social norms where I want to say, "Sorry, you lose" like the kids at the dinner table all on their cellphone, I want to say no.

Denise Pope (27:49):

And adults and adults.

Dan Schwartz (27:51):

Yeah. Yeah. No adults-

Denise Pope (27:52):

It's bad. It's bad. Okay. Wait. So Nilam-

Dan Schwartz (27:56):

Sorry. Sorry. I had to get it out.

Denise Pope (27:57):

Okay. That's good, Dan. That's good. I'm glad. Do you feel better? That's good.

Dan Schwartz (28:02):

I do feel better.

Denise Pope (28:02):

So, Nilam, have you been shocked by anything in that sense?

Nilam Ram (28:07):

To this particular point, I would say that the adults are also doing many of these same types of behaviors, surprisingly more than we give ourselves credit for doing those types of both good and bad behaviors on the phone.

Dan Schwartz (28:18):

Sorry, what did you say? I was just checking my e-mail.

Denise Pope (28:21):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, adults are poor role models when it comes to this, a hundred percent. The kids are the first to point that out.

Nilam Ram (28:28):

Yeah, and rightfully so. I think the surprising thing for me is that just the sheer range of media world, the digital world is humongous and there's so many different parts and places of it that are interesting and contain all kinds of great information about so many things, way more than even exist in our current physical universe. And so being able to see that heterogeneity and the very creative ways in which people are engaged with all of that heterogeneity that is relevant to their own personal lives in meaningful ways, that's been what's surprising to me.

Denise Pope (29:10):

That's a nice way to end.

Dan Schwartz (29:12):

Yeah, that's really cool.

Denise Pope (29:12):

That's a really nice way to end. So okay, so Dan, I'm going to put you on the spot as I love to do. What are some takeaways from this episode that you're walking away with?

Dan Schwartz (29:21):

Boy, I think the theme that came through over and over in my head was there's a lot of variability in the way people use these devices. And so it's going to be really hard to say good or bad. So one person may use it style one, another person uses it style one. For the first person, style one was really good. For the second person, it was really bad. And so it's going to be really complicated to find different pathways through the media world we're in to be able to make recommendations.

Denise Pope (29:56):

Yeah. We're looking to you as the future hope and help for all of us folks out there who are struggling with, you know, how can we emphasize the good Nilam.

Dan Schwartz (30:07):

This was great. This was great.

Denise Pope (30:08):

Thank you so much for being here. And thank all of you listeners for joining this episode of Schools In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you tune in.

(30:18):

I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (30:20):

Sorry, I was checking the newsfeed. I'm Dan.