The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics

What it is

Amy Orben, an experimental psychologist, set out the cycle in a 2020 paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science. The abstract opens with a plain observation. Worries about new technologies, from novels to radios to smartphones, recur throughout history, and past panics are often viewed with amusement. Yet current worries still trigger large research investments and policy debate, and studies of past panics suggest those efforts are often inefficient and ineffective.

The cycle itself has a fixed sequence. Worry about a new technology rises among the public and policymakers, who want reassurance. Psychologists are asked to study the technology and its effects on children and young people, in order to calm the public. The research that follows is less useful than it could be because of what the abstract calls a lacking theoretical baseline. Researchers cannot build on what was learned from earlier technologies, so each new technology effectively restarts the academic study. That slows the policy responses needed to make sure a technology benefits society.

A theoretical baseline, in plain terms, is a shared framework that survives from one round of research to the next: agreed ideas about what a medium might do to a young person, and why. Without one, the field behaves as though each new device were the first. The comparison in the name is to Sisyphus, who pushes the same stone up the same hill and watches it roll back. The point of the image is that the effort is real and the progress is not.

The paper is notable for where it puts the problem. The usual argument about technology panics is about the public, or the press, or the politicians. Orben's argument is about the research itself, and about how the field is commissioned. Her abstract says she examines the political, population and academic factors that drive the cycle and asks why research keeps failing to address these panics. It then calls for better research and policy approaches.

The cycle fits with the older sociology of moral panic. Stanley Cohen's framework and the five tests of Goode and Ben-Yehuda explain how a society produces a reaction and what marks it as a panic. The disproportionality test needs an agreed measure of the actual harm. Orben's account supplies a reason why such a measure is so hard to get for technology: if the research that would build it is rebuilt from scratch each time, under time pressure, it never gets finished. That reading connects the two literatures and is this publication's, not a claim made in the paper's abstract.

In effect

Two panics, one response

Alice Marwick's 2008 paper in First Monday compared the 1996 panic over online pornography with the later panic over predators on MySpace. She found the same parts in both: media coverage, harm to children as a justification for restricting content, and legislation, including the proposed Deleting Online Predators Act, which she argued was misguided. The cycle adds a prediction about what happens beside the legislation. Each panic is also a request to psychologists to find out whether the new medium is harming the young, and on Orben's account each request is answered as a new question.

A method built for one question

In 2019 Orben and Andrew Przybylski published a specification curve analysis in Nature Human Behaviour across three large datasets covering 355,358 people. They found that digital technology use explained at most 0.4 per cent of the variation in adolescent wellbeing. The value of the paper lies in its method: it runs every defensible way of defining technology use and wellbeing and reports the whole distribution, so that a dataset cannot yield an alarming headline or a reassuring one by quiet choice. It is an example of the kind of work that could form a baseline, because a method of this sort can be applied to the next medium as readily as to this one. That judgement is ours, not Orben's.

The same worry, a generation apart

Nir Eyal's list of historical alarms in Indistractable includes Gramophone in 1936, worrying that children were dividing their attention between homework and the compelling excitement of the radio loudspeaker. A parent today can ask the same question with a phone on the desk. The cycle's general complaint is that questions of this kind are asked again with each new medium as though they were new, because the field carries no baseline from one round to the next. The 1936 concern and the present one share a question. Whether the research behind them shares any method or theory is exactly what the cycle says it usually does not.

What it does not say

The cycle is not a claim that technologies are harmless. It describes the way research is commissioned and carried out, not whether any particular medium harms the young. A cycle of poor research is compatible with real harm that goes unmeasured as well as with no harm at all.

It is also not a finding with an effect size. It is a published argument about research practice, which this site marks as primary-cited because the paper is a real, peer-reviewed source. Only the abstract has been read in full; the article itself is behind a membership login, so the historical cases and the details of the political, population and academic factors it discusses are not reported here. Anyone using the cycle beyond the abstract's content should read the paper.

Nor does the cycle say that every study of a new technology is worthless. Its claim is about accumulation: that the work fails to compound across technologies. Single studies, such as the 2019 specification curve analysis, can be careful and useful. What the cycle says is missing is the baseline that would let their lessons carry forward.

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