Abstract
In recent years, kids have been spending more and more time on their phones, with less and less time being allocated to going outside and meeting other people their age in the real world. This has led to an increase in isolation, loneliness, and depression among those young children (Tang, 2024; O'Reilly et al., 2018). As well as these mental struggles, kids are going outside less and less. They are spending less time exercising and more time using the internet. This leads to physical health problems along with the mental health challenges. There have been many suggestions for handling these problems, such as placing the onus on parents to make sure that their children have a healthy relationship with technology or making social media apps have features that remind their users to take breaks. For both my STS research and my technical capstone, I attempted to tackle this problem of youth health, in particular the relationships young people have with their phone and the consequences of that.
For my Technical project, my capstone team and I created an app called AquaHealth. The idea is that utilizing the similar gamification and habit-forming tactics that these social media platforms rely on, we could create an app that encourages the users to build healthy habits, rather than unhealthy ones. To accomplish this we decided to focus on two metrics, daily steps and nightly sleep. We tracked both of these stats using the Google Fit API. Once those metrics are tracked, if a user gets a certain amount of sleep, they will get an egg. With a certain number of steps, they can hatch that egg and put a cute little animal in their aquarium. The goal of the ‘game’ is to collect as many animals as possible, and create an aquarium that the user is proud of. To target the youth demographic, we used cutesy sprites and a bright and bubbly user interface to clearly communicate that the main goal is ease of use and fun.
For my STS research, I pursued an idea in a similar vein. With children spending all this time on social media, and all the harms that come with that, I wanted to look into what governments were doing in an attempt to mitigate the harm and risks. To do this, I looked at recent internet restriction policies from two different countries: the United Kingdom and Australia. What I found was that even between just two countries there is a wide array of policies that are being attempted. Australia has completely banned any user under the age of 16 from using social media, while the UK has opted to restrict the content on those social media platforms to hopefully make them less dangerous for children. I found that they both place the responsibility in the hands of the tech companies, meaning if any laws are being broken they are the ones held accountable. Interestingly, they also both left the implementation of these restrictions up to the tech companies. They simply gave them guidelines that had to be met, and let them meet them however they pleased. This resulted in a mix of results, with some companies in Australia requiring government ID and some simply approximating the age of a user and banning them if they think they seem too young. I conclude that there is a tradeoff between feasibility and ideal effect, because while a system like the United Kingdoms sounds more ideal and less like censorship, it is orders of magnitude more granular and difficult to implement, which is why there is room for something like the Australian approach. If the United States were to adopt a policy to this effect, I think a mix of the two would be ideal.
