The Defenestration of Amy Orben
For scholars, fighting a moral panic can come at personal and professional cost.
During debates about media and technology, I sometimes hear accusations that skeptics of harmful media effects are “profiting” from taking those skeptical positions, even if they are not directly funded by technology companies. In reality, the opposite is true: going against a highly popular moral panic is likely to come at professional and personal cost, not benefit.
This was put on display this week with an article by the UK paper The Times that I believe can fairly be characterized as a hit piece. The article focuses on UK researcher Amy Orben. Dr. Orben has been appointed to lead a review on the impacts of smartphone use for the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). However, as Dr. Orben has sometimes taken a “there’s no one-size-fits-all” approach to smartphone issues (i.e., implying an all out ban on social media/smartphones for youth would not work) this has led to outraged claims of bias by MPs and advocacy groups pushing for such bans. These appear, in part, to have been promoted by a recent scholarly article by Dr. Orben stating her “no one size fits all” conclusion.
The Times article is, more or less, just a litany of outrage quotes by those groups and individuals. For instance:
· Jess Assato, a Labour MP, without a hint of irony said of the DSIT review that she “hoped that it would have been undertaken in a dispassionate way by a researcher who hadn’t made their mind up about where the evidence was leading them”.
· Ben Kingsley, a lawyer at the campaign group UsForThem, was quoted to say: “The review is hopelessly compromised by this article and Orben’s appointment will now have to be re-tendered if parents, teachers and children are to have any confidence in its conclusions. The appointment of a prominent advocate for children’s continued use of smartphones had already created a perception of pre-determination. The publication of this pre-emptive article while the review is only just kicking off has only reinforced that perception.”
· Molly Kingsley, who is co-founder of the SafeScreens pressure/advocacy group, said: “Millions of parents are experiencing first hand the corrosive effects of excessive social media and smartphone use on their kids’ lives. Many feel deeply cynical about the need for a two to three-year longitudinal study to confirm or dispute the harms their families are living with daily. But if the Department of Science Innovation and Technology believes a study is necessary it is vital that it’s designed and led by experts with no hint of conflict or bias.”
The odd thing here is that, speaking as a skeptic that smartphones or social media have the kind of impacts pearl-clutching adults worry about, I don’t really see Dr. Orben as a fellow skeptic…more a middle-of-the-road scholar open to the idea smartphones have some “harms” but not to the point of comparing that to smoking and lung cancer. Indeed, even in the article that sparked off the fuss, she appears to write in such a way as to presume some harms of social media/smartphones are possible saying, for instance, “Comparative efforts in product safety and education are needed to supplement debates about smartphone and social media bans and to balance the positive and indispensable role of digital technologies against their potential harms.”
What’s missing from the Times article is any hint of wrongdoing. There’s no accusation that Dr. Orben has committed an ethical violation, or has a financial conflict of interest, or even has made a statistical mistake. I suppose the worst thing you could say is that, perhaps, it was unwise to telegraph the likely conclusions of the DSIT report in a separate paper. The likelihood, though, is this paper was already in the works by the time she was named to the DSIT position. And, in that paper, she’s just reporting on what the empirical evidence appears to already be showing us…smartphone bans do not work. That’s obviously not the message some people want to hear, and maybe further evidence will challenge the current data, but that’s where things are at. Further, I don’t think this new paper is terribly different from positions she’d taken before and which the DSIT would have known about before appointing her.
The other irony is the fairly obvious projection in the quotes. The individuals giving quotes make accusations of bias despite, to my mind, being pretty clearly biased themselves (arguably including both political and, in the case of advocacy groups, financial conflicts of interest). I believe this speaks to a general concern with governments naming review boards: too often they try to massage the outcome by appointing only those individuals who they know will come to a predetermined answer.
Articles like The Times serve a fairly obvious purpose: to punish the scholar critical of the moral panic, and to deter other scholars from taking similar positions. Why would you want to try to follow the actual data, if the cost of that is a hit piece in a major newspaper?
In the case of Dr. Orben, I believe the UK government has gotten someone about as neutral as they could get. To put it in perspective, I’ve criticized some of her work myself1 and I don’t doubt she’s got criticisms of mine in turn. I don’t see her as an outright skeptic such as myself but she’s also clearly not a “smartphones are just like heroin” moral panicker either. Let’s give her some time to do her work.
But…do any of us believe she would have come under such scrutiny by The Times, had she telegraphed her belief in the value of smartphone bans?
I tend to find her naïve in the reporting of bivariate correlations, a statistical topic I’ve hit on a few times on this newsletter. However, that’s a common issue in the social sciences, not specific to Dr. Orben.