It's time to think more about your 'media diet'

We should be looking at what's on our phones the same way we do what's on our plate

Recently, I’ve noticed I take my phone with me wherever I go. I don’t mean when I leave the house or pop to the shops, I mean when I change rooms. Doing a minor chore or even (for shame) brushing my teeth without it now seems like a missed opportunity, to grab a few minutes of a podcast, refresh Instagram or see something funny on TikTok. 

Having your brain constantly set on ‘receive’ mode in this way is clearly not ideal. But rather than try and raw-dog life by sheer force of will, I’ve started thinking more about a term I heard recently: ‘media diet’. It’s the idea that we should be deliberate not just about how much time we spend online, but what the type of content we’re consuming.

Most people today are mindful about what they eat and the consequences it has on their bodies. We know we are supposed to consume fresh, healthy foods and minimise processed sugars and fats. We also accept that if we ignore this advice, the pleasure we feel in the short term will be paid for by looking out of shape. This wasn’t much of an issue when food was scarce and options were limited, but once we had pretty much everything available all of the time, the need for nutritional literacy and self-discipline grew and grew.

The theory goes that we have now reached the same inflection point with the media we consume and the consequences it has for our inner life. The challenge is figuring out what in our media diets is a plate of salmon and vegetables, and what is a packet of Fangtastics and a big old bag of Doritos. 

It’s fair to say the term ‘media diet’ hasn’t quite caught on with Google yet

One way to measure the nutrition of media is to look at how it makes us feel. High levels of social media use has been linked in several studies with heightened anxiety, particularly among young people. This year Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, which posits social has driven a collapse in teen mental health since the early 2010s, has inspired schools and parent associations around the world to experiment with banning social media use among children, in much the same way campaigners of the past tried to tackle fast food consumption among adolescents. 

Meanwhile, researching my own book I learned that social media is not only designed to make us feel angry, but to stymie the healthy outcomes anger can have in real life – such as deepened empathy, or reaching constructive resolutions with other people. The prioritisation of posts that attract ‘angry face’ emojis in your Facebook feed, for example, is one way social media evokes the itchy-scratchy unpleasantness of anger without its potential for useful catharsis.

Perhaps a better measure of social media’s nutritional value is how useful it is, or how better informed it makes us. There, too, it appears to be junk food. A BBC report from earlier this year found that in America, the amount of adults who say they follow the news closely has fallen, from 51% in 2016 to 38% in 2022 (among people aged 18 to 29, it's just 19%). At the same time, one in five US adults now get their political news mainly from social media (among those aged 18 to 29, it is nearly half), with Facebook being the overwhelming source. 

This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, except we know misinformation spreads more quickly than verified news on Facebook. In fact, a 2020 Pew poll found that US respondents who used social media the most were the least well-informed about news and current affairs. Only 17% of those who primarily got their news from social media had "high political knowledge", versus 45% who got their news from a news website or app.

Social media, then, is the equivalent of Big Macs and Mars Bars. This is where thinking about our media diet like it is our food diet should, at the very least, be cause for reflection. If 80% of what we ate was Big Macs and Mars Bars, we would expect to become sick and overweight. If 80% of what we consume in the media is Facebook and Instagram, we shouldn’t be surprised to feel angry, anxious or unhappy a lot of the time, and become less well informed – specially given we now spend a third of our waking lives on our phones.

Looking at Screen Time on your iPhone settings can start to feel like a sobering diagnosis. Over the past week, for example, I’ve spent 10 hours 33 minutes on social media (TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook) and 7 hours 10 minutes on ‘entertainment’ (YouTube, Spotify and Safari), meaning I’m eating quite a bit more crap than stuff that’s at least potentially good for me (one caveat: WhatsApp is classified as ‘social media’, which I would argue is nutritious in an emotional sense, assuming we’re having positive conversations with loved ones). 

All of which leads to the question: what exactly is the media diet equivalent of a healthy meal? This is where it gets subjective. 

We can argue over which are the most reputable news sources, but I personally think of rotating the BBC, Guardian, New York Times, CNN with a little Times, Telegraph and Fox (to balance out my political bias) like consuming a healthy mix of carbs. It’s information-fuel that keeps me going and engaged with the world – but is also easy to overindulge on and feel bloated.

The really good-for-you stuff – fresh salmon and greens – is, for me at least, using the internet to learn. Reading about a topic that interests me, or listening to an adsorbing podcast, video or audiobook about it, is a way of consuming media that feels satisfying and filling, even if it doesn’t always taste that exciting. 

The metaphor reaches the limits of its usefulness here, because while the acting of eating fruits and vegetables is no more strenuous than stuffing down a cake, engaging with new and complex information takes noticeably more effort than brain-deading your way through thirty videos on TikTok. It’s probably unrealistic to make our media diets the equivalent of what a body builder or marathon runner eats. 

But I’m finding thinking about media as a health challenge – rather than simply a pleasure and entertainment proposition – is already helping me adjust the balance of what I consume, and feel better as a result. I have applied time limits to my social media apps, subscribed to some topical magazines (The Atlantic, New Yorker) to cut down on my pure news consumption, and try to make sure I always have podcast episodes on things I’m interested in (books, sport, history) downloaded and ready to go. Who knows, one day I may even learn to put my phone down altogether. 

Books in this post:
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt