Dynamic Learning: The Media City Phone Detox

Research shows that, particularly for young people, spending too much time on our phone can be detrimental to our physical and mental health. This partly explains recent attempts by governments in Australia and the UK to limit young people’s access to both the Internet and things like social media.

But what happens when students themselves volunteer for a digital detox where they give up their smartphones for a short period – a week in the case of students at the University Technical College in Media City, Salford?

Using verbatim interviews with some of the students – 10 originally volunteered for the detox with one quitting after a day because they couldn’t live without their phone – the film discusses some of the physical and mental issues, both the good and the bad, around constant smartphone use as experienced by the students involved.

In particular, those who persisted with the detox found they quickly experienced a better, more stable, quality of sleep – the importance of which to memory and learning we’ve highlighted in a previous film in the Study Skills series – and saw significant changes in the quality of their relationships with family and friends. Also interesting was the way the students revisited the activities – from football to art – they had neglected in favour of their phones.

While a complete digital detox is probably a little extreme for most people, the experience does raise important and interesting questions about our relationship to technology: more specifically, whether we are the controllers or allows ourselves to be the controlled.

A with all our films, the Media City Phone Detox is available to buy (and keep forever) or on a 7-day rental.

It is also one of the “nearly 100 films” available in the Social Science Film Club collection.