Primary and Secondary Phone Harms

Most people talk about primary, but we should be more worried about secondary.

What could he be missing? (public domain)

It is both delightful and infuriating when another writer comes up with a succinct term to describe something I’ve thought about many times before. Inevitably, it makes me wish that I’d had the foresight to create the term that now seems so glaringly obvious, but I remind myself that I should just be grateful it now exists, because it helps to clarify my own thinking.

One such example is Cal Newport’s distinction between the primary and secondary harms of smartphones. Primary harms refer to the direct negative effects of excessive screen time on mental health, chronic distraction from constant notifications, the increase in sedentariness, fragmented attention, the inability to focus, impaired sleep, and exposure to disturbing content. He says it could also include the algorithmically curated content that can outrage and even radicalize people, as well as the brain rot that comes with binging on highly distracting content like TikTok reels.

Secondary harms are everything that people miss out on when they are on their phones, such as interactions with others and engaging in meaningful activities. It is the sense of losing control of our time and of neglecting things that are important. The secondary harms kick in even if the things you’re doing on your phone are not bad. Your online activities could even be useful or productive, but may still be getting in the way of you using time in other ways that have value, too.

Another term for secondary harms is “opportunity cost,” which I’ve used before, but I don’t think it does as good a job at differentiating between the specific issues caused by the proliferation of handheld devices and what it’s costing us in a more general sense.

As Newport explains in a recent episode of his Deep Dive podcast, most people focus on the primary harms, but this approach shifts responsibility for the problems we face away from consumers onto tech companies. Sure, there are things tech companies could do to make their devices and platforms less addictive, but it wouldn’t fix the bigger problem of how these apps continue to rob us of contact with reality, relationships, and direct experiences with the world, thus giving us a diminished version of our lives.

When we put all of our attention on primary harms when it comes to phones, this helps us avoid confronting some of the real danger that they pose for our lives. It allows us to say, look, if we could just fix these tools, we’d be OK. If we could just get the right people to be in charge of these companies or the right features or the right moderation, we could return to this sort of phone, social media app utopia that we were promised in the early 2010s. The problem is someone came in and broke these things, but if we could just fix them, then everything will be OK.

But that’s not the case. No matter how extensively these apps get redesigned for the better, they are not designed to be compatible with the human experience. We must resist getting caught up in nostalgic thinking, assuming something great somehow got corrupted along the way. As Newport says, there is no way to “redeem the technology.”

Arguably, the secondary harms do more harm to us than the primary ones. They impoverish our lives the most:

We're left with a little bit of a shallowness, a little bit of an anxiety, a little bit of a loneliness and emptiness, and all we have to soothe ourselves is that phone itself. And then we get this cycle where we become basically enmeshed into this digital algorithmically curated world, and that's really no way to live.

That’s where Newport’s philosophy of digital minimalism comes in, where we ask ourselves big questions like, “What do I value? How do I want to spend my time? What is this device doing for my life?” It can take time to answer these questions, especially if you are young or haven’t thought much about these things, but it also takes deliberate consideration and persistent thought. Once we start to embrace good things that truly matter, the secondary harms are reduced—and so are the primary ones, because our overall exposure is significantly reduced.

All of this brings to mind a quote from author and physicist Ursula Franklin, who said, “It may be wise, when communities are faced with new technological solutions to existing problems, to ask what these techniques may prevent and not only to check what the techniques promise to do.” Does it even matter all that much what an exciting new technology can do if it curtails our own experience of life? That is an unappealing trade-off.

It doesn’t mean we have to be Luddites, rejecting technology outright and advocating for a return to older ways of operating in the world; I have no interest in doing that, and love my laptop and high-speed Internet connection. But surely, we can strive for some form of coexistence between what these devices offer and what we want—and insist on getting—from our lives, and in so doing, protect ourselves from those insidious secondary harms that Newport outlines.

You Might Also Like:

• A Child’s Question

• ‘The Extinction of Experience’ (book review)

• We Scroll to Escape Ourselves

• Parents Must Care for Themselves

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