Students throw down ‘disconnect’ gauntlet
Six teenagers who abstained from technology for a week challenging others to do so
Less than a day into a weeklong social media fast, 14-year-old Adam Tibi was going out of his mind with boredom.
“I had nothing to do and I was like, ‘This is going to be terrible,’ ” Tibi said. “I found it to be like a disaster, pretty much.”
Within a few days, however, Tibi found himself playing basketball more and finishing his homework earlier. Rather than scrolling aimlessly through his phone before class, he started striking up conversations in the hallway.
Tibi was one of six high school students from Kingston, Ont., who abstained from technology for a week earlier this year as part of the “Dis- connection Challenge,” a social media experiment done through Queen’s University and the University of Ottawa.
With a week until students in Toronto head back to class, the group is challenging others to replicate the experiment for themselves.
Adults are endlessly cautioning teens about the dangers of social media, said Valerie Michaelson of Queen’s School of Religion and Department of Public Health Sciences. She worked on the project alongside Valerie Steeves from the University of Ottawa’s Department of Criminology.
“Black and white blanket statements aren’t really helpful to kids,” Michaelson said. “(The students) were curious about what’s actually going on with their social media use . . . Things are rarely just good or bad.”
The six students involved in the project are part of a group launched to give youth a voice in research, said Michaelson. Last year, they did a similar project exploring the effects of helicopter parenting.
The panel devised the experiment themselves, deciding to track their own technology use for two weeks and then stop using it for the week after. Though they allowed themselves to use their phones for essential tasks like texting parents or doing homework, the students spent most of the time in a complete social media blackout.
“The hardest thing was not doing it subconsciously,” said Catia Farquharson,16. “A lot of times when I’m not thinking about it, I’ll just go on my phone or whatever.”
In the end, Farquharson said she was happy to stop wasting time on Snapchat and other social media apps. What was “frustrating,” however, was trying to convince others to get off their phones and socialize.
“It wasn’t a big epiphany,” Farquharson said. “I think the biggest realization that I had was that it didn’t matter that much to me . . . I didn’t really care that I hadn’t seen people’s random Instagram posts for a week.”
Though the group concluded that social media is useful and they have no plans to stop using it, they agreed that being more mindful of how much they use it helped them stop wasting time.