Niels Weber is a psychologist and psychotherapist in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a systemic family therapist. He specialises in issues of hyperconnectivity and is a member of 3-6-9-12+. He regularly reviews video game releases in the newsletter.
Niels Weber has published with Magenta “Les écrans, je gère !” (“Screens: I’ve got this!”), a wonderful little book aimed at teenagers… and their parents.
And as he likes to say, he is more interested in what happens around screens, on the relational level, than in the screens themselves.
Niels Weber, why did you want to write this book, and who is it for?
The teenagers I meet are either patients, or pupils in the schools where I work, but also the children of my friends, with whom I like to talk about their screen habits. When there is something I don’t know, because things move too fast in the digital field, I like to ask them questions. They are often surprised that I am interested in their screen habits. They have absorbed the idea that screens are “not good”, and that you must never talk about screens with adults, because obviously they will be told it is a waste of time, that it makes you hooked, that it makes you violent, etc.
During a hiking weekend with my 12-year-old godson, we were walking in the mountains, and he talked to me about Minecraft from the beginning to the end of the walk. And when we arrived, he said to me: “It’s amazing how good it feels when someone understands what I’m saying!” So I thought there was something to be done to address young people other than by giving them orders. This book is for them, but I also wanted it to build bridges within the family. The target audience is teenagers, but the aim is for parents to read it too and for there to be connections.
In your book, there is a lot of humour, drawings, anecdotes, testimonies from teenagers (which is unusual), interviews, little challenges, invitations to interactivity. You avoid the pitfall of the adult, and an expert at that, who would be the one who knows and gives advice. It is rather an invitation to shared reflection.
I drew a lot on the teenagers I see in family therapy, where you have to hear the parents’ worry and at the same time form an alliance with the young person. I didn’t want to come in with a specialist’s heavy-handedness, but rather to try to be close to their everyday lives, as if we were chatting. I thought it was important to leave them room to be the experts on their own habits. For my part, I wanted to give some pieces of knowledge that seem fundamental to me: how do algorithms work? Why do they create a situation where it becomes hard to detach from digital tools? Understanding the mechanisms at work makes it easier to realise that you are being hooked, to understand why, and so to find the means to act again.
You clearly distinguish between addiction and the capture of attention…
When we talk about addiction, we are talking about a pathology. For a pathology to be recognised, medical criteria are needed. Today, there is no diagnosis of screen addiction; it doesn’t exist. There is, however, addictive behaviour, a difficulty in detaching from the medium. What I observe in my therapy work is that children arrive with the idea that they have a psychological problem, because that is what they hear. Whereas in most situations they are simply developing children who need to be supported, given a framework and have limits set for them. To view these phenomena from the angle of addiction is, for me, an old model, as if we couldn’t understand what is really going on and fell back on a known model for lack of being able to offer a more suitable one. We are blinded like insects in front of a light. Screen addiction is an expression used everywhere. Yet parents find it harder to set limits when they think of things in terms of pathology. And yet taking a screen away from a child will not harm them! The absence of addiction doesn’t mean there is no problem, but we need to be able to approach the problems differently.
One cross-cutting theme stands out in your book: developing critical thinking.
Yes, giving information should allow teenagers to step back, notably from marketing. To make them aware that they are consumers with purchasing power, but also with the power to choose. To make them aware of the massive phenomenon of data capture and resale, made possible by what is called the attention economy, that is, prolonging the player’s or internet user’s connection by multiple means.
Indeed, what is very pleasing in your book is that you don’t treat teenagers as idiots! You explain the “how” of things: how are video games built? How do social networks work? How is their attention constantly held, and by what mechanisms?
And then there is a chapter titled: The real problems. So, Niels Weber, what are the real problems?
We are focused on the question of addiction, and that stops us thinking about what is really going on. It’s the tree that hides the forest. It feels as if the debate on screens hasn’t moved on in years: it’s always the same arguments, the same fears. The real problems are not understanding what is happening. For example, if a young person uses TikTok without questioning it any further, the only message addressed to them is: you’re hooked! But nobody explains to them the attention economy phenomenon behind TikTok, why it’s free, what the political and economic stakes are… While we look at addiction, we don’t see the rest. And meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) is developing very fast. My fear would be that we end up in a two-speed society, with a minority of people who master AI and draw major benefits from it, and a majority of the population floundering without any knowledge. We can lead young people to take a position and act. But if we don’t give them the chance to talk to us about their habits, we won’t have the opportunity either to put to them ways of understanding beyond those habits. The real problem is ultimately the lack of communication.
You have worked on hyperconnectivity for over 15 years. Have you seen parents’ attitudes change over time?
When I started taking an interest in video games, I was convinced that a few years later we would no longer need to talk about them. But what I notice is that a generational movement keeps recurring around content and techniques: parents who are 30-40 today will say that they had to fight with their own parents, when they were teenagers, to get across that Super Mario was not a stupid game, but that Super Mario had nothing to do with Fortnite or other current games, which, they say, pose so many more problems! So it’s as if we kept coming back to the starting point.
Tell us a little secret, Niels: are you a big video game fan?
I’ve been found out! I started playing around the age of 6 or 7. My father was a great computing enthusiast. He installed video games without really knowing them, and he would sit my brother and me on his lap to try them out. But we had fairly strict limits: playing times were set, and we weren’t allowed to buy a new game until we had finished the previous one. Our parents looked at what we were playing. They criticised everything, but they took an interest, they asked questions. I have very fond memories of this family approach, even if at the time I wasn’t always happy about it!
I still play today. I’m an enthusiast, but it’s hard to keep up: so many games come out that staying informed becomes a real challenge. I use video games in therapy, because they generate very strong emotions and reactions.
This knowledge of video games is a huge asset for working with teenagers, isn’t it?
For building the alliance, it is indeed a wonderful driver. After that, we can talk about anything!
