Adolescents Conducted Empathy Research on Boredom and Related Screen Time. Here’s What They Found
“First thing that pops into my mind when I get bored is a phone or TV”, expressed a 12 year old.
The pandemic locked us down to limited physical spaces but also to not-so-limited digital spaces (five-inch screens). It gave us a lot of time on our hands (literally). We’ve been spending a lot of our time and energy on screens — mostly laptops, phones and maybe television. I recently discovered this term ‘attention economy’ which looks at human attention as a finite resource and the way we spend it. Enters boredom, one of the main characters of the story. Boredom and screen time seem to have a Tom and Jerry relationship within the attention economy.
At Tinker Labs, we gave this as a research project (of course digitally) to participants of our remote Design Thinking workshop — school students from GIIS. So basically students had to understand boredom by observing or interviewing their family members and themselves, attempting to find out its root causes. Following are some things that students found in their research.
Activity
A grade 10 girl realised that she feels bored when she has absolutely nothing to do, or has a lot of things to do. Another student reflected and realised that she starts looking into the screen passively after school, scrolling down for hours. “This is the time when my brain is exhausted and does not want to put any mental effort”, she shared. “My family got bored in the evenings when we had done all that we could possibly do and ran out of ideas. After that, even watching TV was not so interesting”, shared a boy.
Repetition
Doing one activity repetitively or for a long time results in boredom, figured one child after interviewing his homemaker mother. “Same routine leads to boredom”, is what his mother told him. Many children resonated this finding, saying how they found doing their share of household chores boring during this period.
Attention
“Boredom is also linked to problems with paying attention”, shared a student sounding convinced. “If you are able to focus you may not be so bored.” Disinterest leads to boredom, added a grade 7 boy. A girl expressed how a two hour movie feels just like five minutes whereas one boring class of 40 mins feels like forever. Boredom is also linked with unhappiness and lack of motivation, observed one student — “when you are sad or demotivated you feel bored to do anything.”
Associated Emotions
A student with working parents shared that he gets bored when there is no one to talk to him or give him attention. He also feels lonely then. “Boredom translated into frustration and irritation in the initial days of the lockdown when there was nothing much to do” shared a child talking about his family. “Usually people find means to run away from their emotions or problems, by getting lost in the digital world”, expressed one student.