To hear Andrew Przybylski tell it, the American 2016 presidential election is what really inflamed the public's anxiety over the seductive power of screens. (A suspicion that big companies with opaque inner workings are influencing your thoughts and actions will do that.) "Psychologists and sociologists have obviously been studying and debating about screens and their effects for years," says Przybylski, who is himself a psychologist at the Oxford Internet Institute with more than a decade's experience studying the impact of technology. But society's present conversation—"chatter," he calls it—can be traced back to three events, beginning with the political race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Then there were the books. Well-publicized. Scary-sounding. Several, really, but two in particular. The first, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, by NYU psychologist Adam Alter, was released March 2, 2017. The second, iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids … Continue reading →