John Burn-Murdoch

I think there's two ways of looking at this.

So in terms of the data we have, again, the slightly frustrating thing here is that the data starts in 2014.

And that is already a couple of years into this period where we've had ubiquitous internet in our pockets.

But one thing would be that timing.

It's that when studies have been done over the decades and decades and decades, we haven't seen this data.

Now we have a period where we know that we've had this technological change, which has enormous impacts on social relationships, and we start to see these changes.

So the timings, while we don't have enough data to say they're absolutely perfect, the timings do seem to line up relatively well with that.

The other, again, I think is just thinking on a very basic level about what conscientiousness is and what distraction is.

And if conscientiousness is doing what we intended to do and distraction is being pulled away from that, then they are essentially opposites or they feed off each other.

And we know whether we're looking at data on the number of push notifications people get, the number of times people pick up their device, actual screen time itself.

We know that there is more distraction or there are more individual distractions than there were a generation ago.

That

all else being equal would mean less conscientiousness.

So it's that combination of the timing and the mechanism that I think lines up really well.

A couple of other things I've been thinking about are just some of these concepts that have only really come into existence in the online era.

So things like people being ghosted, or one that always springs to mind for me is the people sending messages that end with, no worries if not.

And the idea that you would always be giving people an out, like, no worries if you don't want to do this, in a message.

Sure, on the one hand, it is polite.

But in a society where everything is face-to-face, you weren't constantly saying to people, like, don't worry if you want to flake or bail at the last minute.

And now that seems to become a thing as people have realized that flaking and bailing seems to be more of a thing.