Sas, Corina

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             KEYWORDS Digital wellbeing; unplugging; digital connectivity; millennials.                                                                               Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CHI’19 Extended Abstracts, May 4-9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.  Millennials: Digitally Connected never Unplugged? Corina Sas Lancaster University Lancaster, UK c.sas@lancaster.ac.uk  1INTRODUCTION Increased ubiquity of personal technologies brings forward both significant benefits and challenges. Such technologies allow for increased connectivity [4] and immediate access to information [9], while at the same time, they lead to a disconnection from face to face social communication [16], information overload and reduced productivity [9]. Growing medical research has highlighted the risks of social media and personal devices overuse for wellbeing and mental health [8] as reflected in reduced cognitive [17], emotional and social skills [28], as well as physical fitness and increased obesity [4]. HCI community has shown a growing interest in emotional wellbeing and affective health over the last decade [3][7][11][13][18][23][29]. With my collaborators, we explored a range of digital wellbeing topics such as autobiographical [14][15] and emotional memories [22][25][26], particularly in old [20] and end of life care [24], affective representations through smart materials [31], support for mindfulness [2][21], or through virtual reality interventions [5J[19]. HCI interest in digital unplugging which we define as the disconnection from digital devices and applications has only recently started to be explored, with findings highlighting both benefits [11] and challenges of constant connectivity [10][30]. In this paper, digital wellbeing is defined as the mindful balance between digital connectivity and digital unplugging, and we report preliminary findings of an online survey completed by 69 students (53 Male; 16 Female), (age range 17-27, Mean age = 20). © 2019 Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5971-9/19/05. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.XXXXXXX                                            Findings Millennials involved in this study own numerous devices: all of them have smartphones and laptops, and more than half have game consoles, desktop PCs, and tablets. With regard to the length of daily use, the most used devices are smartphones and laptops, with 41 participants using them between 2 and 7 hours, followed by desktop PCs, used by 21 participants between 2 and 7 hours, tablets used by 24 participants between 0 and 4 hours daily, and games consoles used by 23 participants between 0 and 4 hours daily. In addition, we also explored the frequency of checking for notifications on each of these devices. The most frequently used ones are smartphones, with 50 participants checking them at least once per hour, and 42 every 30 minutes. Laptops are used to check notifications by 17 participants at least once per hour, while 9 participants check their desktop PCs at least once per hour. Interestingly, although only 9 participants reported the use of smartphones for checking notifications, they all mentioned checking them every 10 minutes. Apart from these range of devices, participants also reported use of different applications, with most common ones being used up to 4 hours daily such as Email (60 participants), Facebook (51), Messenger (41), Snapchat (31), Netflix (29). Four other applications: Skype (22), YouTube (20), Twitter (20), and Instagram (20) are used for up to 1 hour daily. The most important benefits of digital connectivity include immediate access to needed information (62 participants), increased sense of connectivity (50), frequent contact with family and friends (50), decrease boredom (47), and increased ability to work remotely (41). With respect to perceived challenges of digital connectivity, interestingly, at least half of participants perceived information overload, frequent interruptions, or disconnection with nearby people as less important, and 32 participants also  perceived as less of a challenge the reduced control over how time is spent, or the violation of privacy. The only two identified challenges consist of decreased work productivity due to procrastination (40), and the dependency of being connected (32 participants). Unplugging from devices target mostly smartphones (25 participants), 18 of whom unplug 1to 4 times per day, laptops (25), 15 of whom unplug 1 to 4 times per day, game consoles (19), 13 of whom unplug 1 to 4 times per day, and desktop PCs (18), 7 of whom unplug 1 to 4 times per day. In terms of length of unplugging, about 25 participangs unplug from smartphones and laptops, and more than half of them disconnect for no more than 4 hours. With respect to unplugging from applications, about half of participants unplug from Facebook: a quarter of them more than 8 times, but about a third, never or merely once; 24 participants unplug from YouTube and Messenger; more than half of them never or merely once. Finally, 20 participants unplug from email; almost three quarters of them less than 4 times a day.  The most important perceived benefits of unplugging include taking time to focus on task without interruptions (44 participants), better productivity (34), and taking a break from social exchanges (31). In contrast, the most important perceived challenges of unplugging consist of harder to find information (49), missing opportunities to alleviate boredom (32), and fear of missing work related information (38). These also relate to the most common feelings associated with unplugging such as                                         boredom (29 participants), freedom (26), relief (23), satisfaction (19), pride in achievement (14), contentment (14), frustration (12), sadness (11), and stress (8). Participants also found it particularly difficult to unplug from devices, such as smartphones (31), desktop PCs (24), and less difficult from tablets, laptops, game consoles, smart TVs, or MP3 players. The most difficult app unplugging concerns Messenger (24), YouTube (21), Spotify (13), and Facebook (12).   Reflections To conclude, millennials who responded to our survey are digitally connected through a large range of devices and applications used for long periods of time, and for daily often checks. An important finding is that most of them fail to perceive the challenges usually associated with digital connectivity, and that the benefits tend to outweigh the cost. Interestingly, in contrast with most previous work, we have identified perceived challenges and benefits of unplugging, and emotions associated with unplugging. These suggest a more complex and nuanced millennials’ perception and experience of the tension between constant connectivity and unplugging. Following the call for actions from medical sciences [1][4][6][17], we argue for the importance of HCI community to further engage in the exploration and sensitive design for digital unplugging practices. As designers, we bear responsibility that the technologies we design are not harmful [18], ensuring that they support growth and joy rather than dependency and mindless engagement. As suggested by Pierce’s underdesign principle [13], we also argue for the value of uncovering both design principles, and evaluation guidelines for such unplugging technologies.  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has been supported by AffecTech: Personal Technologies for Affective Health, Innovative Training Network funded by the H2020 People Programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie GA No 722022. We are also grateful to Lancaster students who prepared and took part in this survey.  REFERENCES 1. Roger Collier. 2009. Virtual detox: Inpatient therapy for Internet addicts: E193-E194. 2. Claudia Dauden Roquet and Corina Sas. 2018. Evaluating Mindfulness Meditation Apps. In CHI’18 EA.   3. Gavin Doherty, David Coyle, and John Sharry. 2012. Engagement with online mental health interventions. 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Adolescent health implications of new age technology. Pediatric Clinics, 63(1), pp.183-194. 9. Karr-Wisniewski, P., & Lu, Y. (2010). When more is too much: Operationalizing technology overload and exploring its impact on knowledge worker productivity. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(5), 1061-1072. 10. Löchtefeld, M., Böhmer, M., & Ganev, L. (2013). AppDetox: helping users with mobile app addiction. In Proc. International conference on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia (p. 43). ACM. 11. Lindley, S. E. (2015). Making time. In Proc. CSCW’15, 1442-1452. ACM. 12. Marshall, K., Thieme, A., Wallace, J., Vines, J., Wood, G. and Balaam, M., 2014. Making wellbeing: a process of user-centered design. In Proc. DIS’14, 755-764. 13. Pierce, J. (2016). Design Proposal for a Wireless Derouter: Speculatively Engaging Digitally Disconnected Space. In Proc. DIS’ 16, 388-402. 14. Chengcheng Qu and Corina Sas. 2018. Exploring Memory Interventions in Depression through Lifelogging Lens. In Proc. 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Corina Sas. 2018. Exploring self-defining memories in old age and their digital cues. In Proc. DIS ’18, 149–161.   21. Corina Sas and Rohit Chopra. 2015. MeditAid: a wearable adaptive neurofeedback-based system for training mindfulness state. Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. 19, 7, 1169–1182.  22. Corina Sas, Tomasz Fratczak, Matthew Rees, Hans Gellersen, Vaiva Kalnikaite, Alina Coman, and Kristina Höök. 2013. AffectCam: arousal- augmented sensecam for richer recall of episodic memories. In CHI EA’13, 1041 - 1046.   23. Corina Sas, O’Hare G. (2003) Impact of cognitive style upon sense of presence. In: Proc. HCII, 696–700. 24. Corina Sas, Shuang Ren, Alina Coman, Sarah Clinch, and Nigel Davies. 2016. Life Review in End of Life Care: A Practitioner’s Perspective. In CHI EA ’16, 2947–2953. 25. Corina Sas and Steve Whittaker. 2013. Design for forgetting: disposing of digital possessions after a breakup. In Proc. CHI '13. 1823-1832.  26. Corina Sas, Steve Whittaker, John Zimmerman. 2016. 1Design for rituals of letting go: An embodiment perspective on disposal practices informed by grief therapy. TOCHI. 23, 4, 1–37.  27. Schoenebeck, S. Y. (2014). Giving up Twitter for Lent: how and why we take breaks from social media. In Proc. CHI’14,   773-782. 28. Steiner-Adair, C. and Barker, T.H. 2013. The big disconnect: Protecting childhood and family relationships in the digital age. Harper Business. 29. Anna Ståhl, Kristina Höök, Martin Svensson, Alex S. Taylor, and Marco Combetto. 2009. Experiencing the Affective Diary. UbiComp. 13, 5, 365–378.   30. Thomas, V., Azmitia, M., & Whittaker, S. (2016). Unplugged: Exploring the costs and benefits of constant connection. Computers in Human Behavior, 63, 540-548.  31. Muhammad Umair, Muhammad Hamza Latif, and Corina Sas. 2018. Dynamic displays at wrist for real time visualization of affective data. In Proc. DIS ’18, 201–205. 

Millennials : Digitally Connected never Unplugged?

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Millennials:Digitally Connected never Unplugged?

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