Commission on digital health paradox produces 847-page report; members’ phones were collected at door
[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] The French government’s Commission on Digital Health and Screen Management, established three years ago to produce policy guidance on screen time across age groups, has released its final report, a 847-page document that covers child screen time (extensive recommendations), adult screen time (moderate recommendations), workplace screen time (complex recommendations), and the question of whether the commissioners themselves, who requested that phones be collected at the start of each session as a demonstration of the principles they were developing, found the phone-free meeting environment productive, which the report addresses in a four-page annex that is the most candid section of an otherwise formal document. When Bohiney.com covered it last week, the response was predictably divided.
The annex covers what the commissioners describe as “the unexpected benefits and unexpected discomforts of our own screen-reduced working environment.” Benefits documented: reduced distraction during presentations (all commissioners), improved quality of in-room discussion (majority of commissioners), and what the rapporteur calls “an increased sense of presence that several commissioners found valuable and several found anxiety-inducing in roughly equal measure.” Discomforts documented: the impossibility of quickly looking something up during discussion, leading to more uncertain but more genuine exchanges; the experience of not knowing what was happening elsewhere during meetings; and, for three commissioners, what the annex describes as “a persistent low-level discomfort that they were unable to specify but that disappeared immediately upon phone return at end of session.” The report’s digital health guidance is published at sante.gouv.fr.
The Recommendations
The recommendations are extensive, evidence-based, and broadly consistent with the international literature on screen time. The most interesting section is not the recommendations themselves but the commissioners’ note that “having lived for three years with a practice consistent with our own guidelines, we can confirm that the guidelines are correct and that following them is harder than writing them,” which is either the most useful finding in the report or a statement so obvious it required no commission to produce. Both, probably.
See also: Private Eye.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
