22 terms

Glossary

The vocabulary of attention and digital wellbeing, defined plainly. Where a term is commonly misused — dopamine detox is the worst offender — the entry says so.

Attention economy: An economic model in which human attention is the scarce resource being bought and sold. Free products are free because attention, not money, is the payment — advertisers buy access to it, so platforms compete to capture more of it.
Attention residue: The portion of your attention that remains stuck on a previous task after you switch away from it. It is why checking a message mid-task degrades the work you return to, even if the check itself took seconds.
Brain drain effect: The finding that the mere presence of your own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity, even when you successfully resist checking it. Demonstrated in 2017 experiments led by Adrian Ward at the University of Texas at Austin; the effect held with the phone face down and switched off.
Computer vision syndrome: A recognised cluster of symptoms from prolonged screen use, including eye strain, headaches, blurred vision and dry eyes. Also called digital eye strain. Prevalence estimates vary widely by study, but reported rates among regular computer users commonly fall between roughly 60% and 90%.
Context switching: Moving attention between unrelated tasks. It is costly because the previous task leaves residue in working memory. Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine is the source of the widely quoted figure that returning to a task after an interruption takes about 23 minutes on average.
Deep work: Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. Coined by Cal Newport, and contrasted with shallow work — logistical tasks that can be performed while distracted.
Digital declutter: A structured 30-day process of stepping back from optional technologies, then reintroducing only those that pass a deliberate test of value. Distinguished from a detox by the reintroduction step, which is the point rather than an afterthought.
Digital minimalism: A philosophy of technology use, popularised by Cal Newport, in which you deliberately choose a small number of tools that strongly support things you value, and skip the rest. It is about intentional selection rather than total abstinence.
Doomscrolling: Continuing to scroll through distressing news or social content despite it making you feel worse. The behaviour is sustained by infinite scroll and by the way alarming content outcompetes calm content for attention.
Dopamine detox: A popular term for deliberately abstaining from highly stimulating activities for a period. The name is misleading — you cannot deplete or reset dopamine by abstaining — but the underlying practice of reducing constant novelty has more support than the neuroscience framing suggests.
FOMO: Fear of missing out: anxiety that others are having rewarding experiences you are absent from. It is a primary driver of compulsive checking, and the mechanism most social platforms are designed to amplify.
Friction: Deliberately added difficulty between an impulse and an action — logging out, deleting an app so it must be used in a browser, moving a charger to another room. The most reliable intervention in practice, because it works without requiring willpower in the moment.
Grayscale mode: A device setting that renders the screen in black and white, removing the colour cues apps use to attract attention. In one study of 161 undergraduates, switching to grayscale for eight to ten days reduced daily screen time by roughly 39.7 minutes.
Infinite scroll: An interface pattern that loads new content automatically as you reach the bottom, so a feed never ends. Invented by Aza Raskin in 2006, who has since said publicly that he regrets it. Its significance is the removal of a natural stopping point.
JOMO: Joy of missing out: the deliberate reframing of absence as a benefit rather than a loss. Used as a counterweight to FOMO, and as the organising idea behind several screen time apps.
Notification batching: Holding non-urgent notifications and delivering them at scheduled intervals rather than immediately. Both iOS and Android support this natively; it preserves the information while removing the interruption.
Phubbing: Snubbing someone you are with by attending to your phone instead. Research from Baylor University traced a chain in romantic relationships: being phubbed predicted conflict, which predicted lower relationship satisfaction, which in turn predicted more depressive symptoms.
Pickups: The number of separate times you wake or unlock your phone in a day. Often more revealing than total screen time, because a high pickup count with low screen time indicates habitual checking rather than sustained use.
Screen time: The total time a device reports its screen being active. A blunt measure: it counts a video call with family and an hour of scrolling identically, so it is more useful as a trend to watch than as a target to minimise.
Sleep latency: The time it takes to fall asleep once you intend to. Bedtime screen use is associated with longer latency, and the evidence suggests what you do on the screen matters more than the light it emits — which is why blue light filters alone tend to disappoint.
Surveillance capitalism: A term coined by Shoshana Zuboff for an economic logic that claims human experience as free raw material for behavioural data, which is then used to predict and influence future behaviour. It frames your behaviour, rather than the product you use, as the thing being sold.
Variable reward: A reinforcement schedule where the reward is unpredictable in timing or size. Unpredictability drives far more repeat checking than a reliable reward would, which is why a feed that is sometimes interesting is more compelling than one that always is.