Older people are spending more time on screens. Writer says it comes with benefits and pitfalls

LAUREN GILGER: As a parent of little kids, I think a lot about screen time. How much should my kids be watching TV? Looking at a phone? Playing games on a tablet? Learning on screens at school?

It’s a topic that’s been debated and studied and legislated extensively as all of us spend more of our time on screens for a lot of things all the time.

But, while a lot of the worry about screen time is focused on kids, our next guest says it’s older people who are the real screen addicts.

Tom Wainwright is media editor for the Economist. And in a recent article, he explores the ways in which technology is transforming old age — and for the worse and, maybe surprisingly, also for the better. Here is our conversation.

TOM WAINWRIGHT: Well, for a long time, older people have been kind of champion television watchers. You know, for many, many years, they've had some of the highest rates of TV viewing, but they've tended to lag behind when it comes to digital devices. They've been less likely than younger people to have smartphones or tablets or to use the internet.

And this is what has changed in recent years. We've got this new generation of retirees who are retiring, already fully familiar with their smartphones, with tablets, with the internet. And what we're seeing is that they are still watching as much TV as older generations have in the past.

But on top of that, they are stacking extra hours of screen use through their phone, through their tablet, through their desktop — and it adds up to a huge amount of time. We've got pensioners now here in the UK spend probably more than half of all their waking hours using one type or another of screen.

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LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. So, I mean, like, most of the conversation — I have little kids — so most of the conversation I think about, when I think about screen time, is always about kids, right? But, yeah, this is sort of the flip side of that. Tell us, you know, is it a problem? I guess, like, is this something we should be concerned about?

WAINWRIGHT: I think it could be. I mean, I think it's worth saying up front that there are big benefits to this. You know, I think the internet could almost have been designed for older people. It's fantastic that people who might have more limited mobility can now do all this stuff from home. You know, whether that's online shopping or keeping up with family or attending doctor's appointments virtually, you know, huge benefits to all of this stuff.

But there are risks as well. And just as people worry about younger people overdoing it on their screens, I think that some of those risks apply with older people, too. And that could be anything from online scams to misinformation to loneliness, maybe, being caused, if people are spending more time interacting with people virtually and less in person.

So I think some of this conversation about young people's screen use perhaps could be redirected towards looking at older people's screen use, too.

GILGER: I want to get to some of those positives that you mentioned in a moment, because I think they're really interesting. But let's talk for one more minute about some of the issues here. When we talk about vulnerabilities, like, I think scams definitely comes to mind, but also I think of news as a journalist, right? There's so much misleading and misinformation out there. Is that a concern?

WAINWRIGHT: I think it is. I mean, it's a concern for all age groups. But I think there are a couple of things that I would particularly worry about with older people. One is that surveys show that older people who spend time online spend more of that time on news sites and apps than younger people do. So they're automatically already more exposed to this stuff than younger people. ...

The other thing that I think societies need to consider is that older people are much more likely than young people to vote. And so if misinformation starts to take root among older generations, it's kind of everyone's problem if that's a generation that's misinformed.

And so I, yeah, I think this is something to keep an eye on. As older generations start spending less time in front of perhaps Fox News or the BBC or whatever they're watching now, and spending more of that time watching YouTube or TikTok, these risks of misinformation are just gonna get bigger. So I think that that is something that everybody needs to keep an eye on.

And as AI becomes more of a thing, I think these online scams and fake videos and fake news of all kinds is just going to become more convincing and more dangerous for all of us.

GILGER: Right. And people of that age might not have the same kind of, I guess, savvy when it comes to what's real and what's not online. Although with AI, maybe none of us will soon.

WAINWRIGHT: It's difficult for all of us, isn't it? But you would think that perhaps younger people who've grown up with AI from the beginning might be more likely to have that kind of instinct, that maybe what they're seeing isn't true. We'll see. It's a developing thing.

GILGER: Yeah, that's new. So. So let's talk then about some of the benefits, though, because this I found very interesting. I assumed this would be kind of an all-bad thing, but when you started looking into this, it sounds like it's not nearly all bad. In fact, there is some research that digital devices may be helping older people stay mentally fit. Right?

WAINWRIGHT: That's right. I mean, there is some research showing that. There's some debate about what the direction of causation is. I mean, it's true that older people who spend more time with digital devices are mentally sharper than those who don't. It isn't totally clear whether it's the devices that cause that sharpness or whether it's the other way around, and that sharper people spend more time online than people who are less mentally sharp.

So there's some debate about which way it goes, but there are certainly benefits. I mean, I was speaking to a psychotherapist in the U.S., and he was telling me about how he uses YouTube to — as a kind of, he called it a nostalgia machine. You know, it allows people to relive the media of their youth, whether that's TV or music.

He told me he treated one elderly patient who was suffering from anxiety and depression using Google Street View. And he'd allowed her to relive the old walk from her old house to her old school. And, you know, this kind of thing using VR in case, virtual reality, this kind of thing is incredibly valuable.

So I think it's important that we don't lose sight of this stuff. Just as with young people, they get enormous benefits from screen time as well as being exposed to risks. So there are definitely trade-offs here.

GILGER: Yeah, and one of the things that one of the researchers you spoke with on this talked about was that maybe older people don't have the same kind of risks with smartphone, social media in particular, that young people do because they already kind of have social connections. Like they already know how they interact with people and the world.

WAINWRIGHT: I think that's right. I mean, with younger people, sometimes people have this worry about what they call social stunting. You know, if you spend all your teenage years chatting with people online and not in real life, maybe you won't develop those important life skills.

By the time you're 60 or 70, you've probably already formed a lot of the key personal relationships in your life. You've probably already formed something of a kind of world view. So maybe you're a bit less open to manipulation by kind of weird people online.

I think another important thing also is just the, the opportunity cost of wasting a lot of time online is probably higher for young people than older people, because older people have a lot more leisure time than young people do.

And if you're, if you're an 18-year-old with a five-hour-a-day TikTok habit, the cost of that could be failed exams and missed job interviews and so on. If you're retired, then really you have leisure time to spend as you wish. And if you want to spend five hours a day on TikTok, maybe that's a shame, but it might not have quite the same impact on the rest of your life ...

GILGER: Right, Let me end, Tom, by asking you about this idea of what the next frontier might look like here. You mentioned kind of virtual reality and that doctor that you spoke with who had a patient with depression kind of walk through her old haunts from childhood, which could be really interesting. Is this something that tech companies are looking at?

WAINWRIGHT: They are. And I mean, you can already see that older people are important customers for companies like Apple. Apple's wristwatches, for example, have echo electrocardiograms built in now. The AirPods have hearing aids built in. You know, there are lots of features now clearly aimed at older people. And I think we're just going to see more and more of this.

There was one interesting piece of research I saw when researching this article showing that people in their 50s, now something like 20% now own a video game console. Which astonished me.

But I think that we're seeing, you know, generations of people now who grew up with this technology, and as they enter retirement are now going to be familiar with it. So I wonder if we may have more people spending their retirement playing Call of Duty rather than golf.