Cowritten by Heather Widdows and Jessica Sutherland, University of Warwick

How often do you find you’ve lost an hour passively scrolling through social media? You only sat down for a moment, to take a break, and suddenly half the morning has gone. We scroll almost everywhere, on the sofa, lying in bed, on the bus, waiting for a bus, or, when we can get away with it, in boring work meetings or classes. A recent analysis of findings from the Millennium Cohort Study 2019 shows that nearly half of British 17-year-olds (48 percent; n=7022) feel addicted to social media. Girls reported feeling like this (57 percent) far more than boys (37 percent). This is not an accident; to work, social media must eat our attention. Social media is designed to keep us scrolling. Whether it is addictive in the clinical sense is up for debate, but what is clear is that people feel a lack of control over their social media use.

The effects of this out-of-control use are worrying. The Millennium Cohort Study finds that, amongst 14-year-olds, “greater social media use related to online harassment, poor sleep, low self-esteem and poor body image; in turn these related to higher depressive symptom scores.”1 This is a pretty extensive list of harms, especially if you take seriously the harms of body image dissatisfaction. The evidence shows that it’s not just teens who are affected. In a study of the relationship between........

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