[barbs]

That quote frustrated me too. "Smartphone use" is such a vague term here.

They seem to reference this again later in the article, but it doesn't seem to clear things up much.

"All that distraction adds up to a loss of raw brain power. Workers at a British company who multitasked on electronic media – a decent proxy for frequent smartphone use – were found in a 2014 study to lose about the same quantity of IQ as people who had smoked cannabis or lost a night's sleep."

[djsumdog]

That's some serious spin. What the fuck is "multitasked on electronic media"? Where they employed at a firm where they switched from data entry to looking up stuff? I worked at a firm where people did that and yea it would look like their brain power reduced, because it was a terrible shit job (debt collection). They'd have to go from data entry, to calls to skip tracking lookups.

Depending on the type of work, that's not at all "a decent proxy." That's the kind of bullshit you read in meta-analysis papers. (Tip: if the introduction says its a meta-analysis, chuck that paper in the bin .. and set the bin on fire. Most meta-analysis papers are just lazy. You cannot control in vastly different experiments).

I agree a lot of this is FUD. Media has always been used to manipulate people. Emotional manipulation grew massively during the Edward Bernays era (the father of smoking advertisements and creating political and/or emotional draw to products). It may have changed form from Print to Radio to TV to phones, but it's still just more of the same manipulation.