It’s time to rethink the conventional moral panic surrounding screen time and academic achievement. The prevailing focus on displacement effects tells only half the story. In our new paper, Gabriel Hales and I demonstrate how adolescents’ casual engagement with social media, video games, and other digital leisure activities cultivates broader digital skills. These skills are positively associated with substantially higher standardized test scores on the SAT in reading and writing, and a smaller, yet significant, boost in math. However, gender-based media preferences—with boys favoring video games and girls tending towards social media—lead to unequal benefits from these digital engagements. While digital skills developed through these activities can narrow the reading and writing achievement gap between boys and girls on the SAT, girls experience fewer benefits in closing the math achievement gap.
There is a real danger that trends prioritizing structured, adult-supervised, overtly educational activities at the expense of unstructured leisure time both on and offline are doing more harm than good. We must shift research, policy, and parenting practices to recognize the profound benefits of casual leisure (both online and offline) for adolescent well-being and development.
Read the full paper for free on the Information, Communication & Society website: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2516542
This paper broadens the scope of research on echo chambers by examining social media use and attitudes within a real-world context that resembles an echo chamber: rural areas characterized by low racial/ethnic diversity and low social tolerance.
Rural environments often lack conditions conducive to higher social tolerance due to limited cross-group interaction and lower formal education. However, the rural-to-university transition, a major life course event, typically leads to expanded social circles and increased tolerance for young adults who leave, while leaving tolerance unchanged in rural communities. This is attributed to the university experience, which fosters social mixing and education, coupled with reduced contact with former ties from the rural community.
We hypothesize that social media alters these traditional trajectories. Using survey data from five cohorts of student-parent pairs, we investigate how shared use of social media platforms relates to network composition and social tolerance. We find that shared social media use constrains network diversity and tolerance among white university students, while conversely expanding ties to people of color and increasing social tolerance for their parents remaining in rural areas.
These results offer new insights into the complex relationship between social media and the composition of personal networks, demonstrating how social media can both disrupt and reinforce echo chambers by linking lives across the life course.
Overall, the constraints on students’ network diversity were relatively minor, while the expansion of parents’ networks and tolerance was more substantial. While this effect could be meaningful over time, its impact likely depends on rates of rural post-secondary attendance (which are in decline).
Free to download from Information, Communication & Society: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2460556
I recently had the opportunity to reflect on the progress that sociology has made, as a disciple, in studying the Internet, social media, and related technologies. I see a general trend, away form multiple disciplinary voices engaged in the study of digital media, towards a dominant ‘communication perspective’ that does not adequately represent sociological perspectives on digital media. This core perspective often serves to constrain the range of phenomena considered worthy of study, the methods, and the research goals of the broader field concerned with digital media. I see the homogeneity of this dominant communication perspective as damaging to the field of communication as it is to sociological perspectives and the health of a (multi)disciplinary field of digital media. Sociology offers a unique perspective on digital media that enriches the field. I attempt to delineate some of the major theoretical and methodological differences. I suggest a path forward that would strengthen a sociology of digital media, make communication more applicable to sociology (and other social sciences beyond psychology), and would help breed a plurality of perspectives in the field. Such change is necessary, if we are to strengthen sociological perspectives and avoid a myopic lens on our understanding of digital media and social life.
Abstract
This paper draws on my experience over two decades as part of an early generation of scholars who graduated with a Ph.D. in sociology into a career as a researcher and teacher in the multidisciplinary field of digital media. I reflect on my experiences to offer an assessment of the state of digital media scholarship within sociology and the field of communication. The study of digital media remains underdeveloped within sociology. In part, this is due to disciplinary failures, an array of relevant, specialized areas within sociology have yet to fully realize the role of digital media. Sociological perspectives are also constrained through a dominant “communication perspective” at the center of the field of communication. Communication is home to most digital media scholarship and uses its institutional dominance to arbitrate what qualifies as scholarship. Whereas communication serves as a plural disciplinary catch-all for the subjects of the social sciences, it often does so without crossing the boundaries of a relatively homogeneous, epistemological framework. That framework does not adequately represent sociological perspectives on digital media. I point to key differences between sociology and communication that tend to marginalize sociological perspectives. These differences have also served to render the field of communication less relevant to sociology (and likely to other disciplines in the social sciences). I stress the importance of building institutions and practices that support (multi)disciplinary representation in the field to strengthen sociology and other perspectives and avoid a myopic lens on our understanding of digital media and social life.
Hampton, Keith N. (2023). Disciplinary Brakes on the Sociology of Digital Media: The Incongruity of Communication and the Sociological Imagination. Information, Communication & Society 26(5), 881-890. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2023.2166365