Fear of Missing out Real Life: Tensions and Contradictions of Youths’ Screen Time

The youth’s own and non-controlled use of digital technologies has been created a bad narrative, in which what is outside the ‘screen’ is defined as good and desirable – and threatened. This concern around youth and their time use is not new. Young people’s ‘own time’ has been seen as a risk causing anxiety among adults: a dangerous thing with possibilities of becoming disturbed by external inducements. Within the rise of urbanization, leisure increase, entertainment, and consciousness industry (movies, television, internet, phones, and technology in general) have been leading to the continuous atmosphere of dislocation of social control around youth: to a slackening of adults’ hold as an educating element and to a moral panic around the issue.

In Finland, the concept of screen time has risen regularly in the debate on the use of media by young people. In general, it refers to the time spent using a digital display device. In this presentation, we analyze the intertwining of moral concern and moralizing control around youth’s screen time as one expression of adult suspicion about young people’s digitized actions. We also reflect how this concern becomes internalized and self-excused by the young ones themselves. Empirically we focus on concern about the digital media use of young people by examining how they recognize and react to screen time by describing about the adult control they experience and thinking themselves how the time spent on 'screens' means that something more ‘real’ and ‘important’ is missed.

The analysis is based on qualitative interviews and quantitative questionnaire data collected in 2021–2022 in Finland with a target group of young people aged 15 years. The paper is part of "Capturing digital social inequality: Young digi-natives' assymetrical agencies within socio-technical imperatives and imaginaries (DEQUAL) project.