The Screen Time feature was recently introduced, in September 2018. According to Apple, its purpose is to “reduce interruptions and manage Screen Time.” In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this feature, I have conducted a survey in my school and held some interviews to gauge people’s thoughts on this new feature. [74 people in Year 12 (aged 16-17) participated in this survey.]
After having carried out a survey about Screen Time, the consensus is that Social Media is the most frequently used type of app. 53.4% of the students included in the survey said that this is ‘the type of app they use the most.’ This is followed by Entertainment, which 20.5% of students use the most frequently. Therefore, the majority of people in Year 12 spend most of their ‘Screen Time’ on Social Media and Entertainment apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Youtube and Netflix, which may not be that surprising.
Moreover, according to this survey, over half of these students spend between 20 minutes and 1 hour on Instagram alone every day. This is perhaps indicative of the large amount of time students spend on Social Media nowadays. While this is true, 23% of these students do not have Instagram and a mere 2.7% spend more than three hours a day on the app.
The Screen Time feature might seem very useful as it enables you to monitor the amount of time you spend using your phone and could perhaps encourage you to use it for more productive purposes [considering that the majority of teens primarily use their phones for Social Networking]. However, less than half of the survey’s participants deemed this feature ‘useful’. This could be due to the fact that only 8.1% of the students check their online activity daily, whilst 27% never check it. Consequently, they might not be utilising this feature to its maximum potential. Alternatively, in an interview, some students said that it does not affect the amount of time they spend on their phone, and it does not deter them from using the sites and apps that they usually would.
Although the intention of this new feature is to increase people’s awareness of their usage of technology, it seems to not have affected that many of the students as many of them either do not check it frequently or simply do not have the feature at all.
