Post Author
Michael Cooper
Senior Director of Advocacy
At NC Child we know that young people are growing up in a world very different to the one that adults inherited—and this presents both opportunities and challenges. Today’s youth can use ChatGPT for their homework and they can communicate with anyone around the world almost instantly through new technologies. We know that it has benefits for learning, creativity, and for finding a community. But it’s also true that we’re still adapting to new technologies and that’s why it’s important to set boundaries for ourselves and for our children.
On that subject, we recently spoke with Keegan Lee. Today she is the James R. Copland & Lillian G. Copland Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying English and Psychology. Before that she was a high school student whose teenage years were shaped by the pandemic and by access to social media.
While a sophomore in high school Lee decided to take a break from social media which meant she had to find other ways to spend her time. And that had a profound impact on her life. Along with Dr. Bilal Ghandour, an associate professor of psychology at Elon University, she wrote a book about that experience called 60 Days of Disconnect, and her journey was featured on News Nation and in People Magazine.
The lessons she learned have fueled a passion for tech ethics and mental health advocacy and she even created a digital wellness program for parents and educators. So, we thought, who better to speak to about what having a healthy relationship with the digital world and what today’s youth should consider when balancing life with technology? Our discussion has been condensed for brevity. But you can find more information from Keegan in the book and on her website.
NC Child: Where did you grow up? What was your childhood like?
Keegan Lee: I was born in Charlotte and then we moved to Burlington. My parents have always been very supportive in terms of creating a childhood where we were consistently learning but doing ourselves. And so, we learned a lot about resilience in that aspect. I always loved school and was very involved.
When I was in middle school I remember this shift. It was the day I got a phone.
I remember it vividly; my father and sister and I walked into the Verizon store. We bought the phone that day. My parents had thought about it for the intention of it being a tool and a communicative device and we walked out with our phones.
NC Child: How old were you when you got a phone?
Keegan Lee: I was 12. I remember it wasn’t exactly the phone that excited me it was the fact that I could download social media.
I remember downloading social media without any sort of knowledge of what it entailed or the challenges of it. My parents and I didn’t really talk about it. It was just something that I knew everybody had.
NC Child: What apps did you download?
Keegan Lee: I remember Instagram and Snapchat because everybody was part of it in middle school. It was part of the culture, and every kid was talking about it. It was its own sort of universe.
I got to high school, and it became more of a factor in my life in regards to expression but also a tool that would validate my worth … the notifications, the numbers, the likes, and all of that.
Social media was a very big part of my life. I was doing everything that everybody else was doing. And during COVID I came about this realization.
NC Child: You were in high school during the pandemic?
Keegan Lee: It was the end of my first year of high school [when] COVID started to ramp up and it was my sophomore year, and we were about to go into 2021.
NC Child: Those first days and weeks of isolation, what was that like?
Keegan Lee: I remember track season being canceled and everything was starting to shut down and I remember realizing oh wow this is really serious.
And eventually we were online for school and the phone was something I turned to for a lot of my socialization, a lot of that connection, and understanding of what was going on in the world, which was not necessarily a bad thing. But it got to the point where it was not great for my mental health because it became obsessive.
I didn’t know how to regulate it.
The things I was doing weren’t always very productive. I was mindlessly scrolling, using it very passively, so I didn’t know how to have a good relationship with it in the sense that when I would use it, it would be connective and facilitate offline engagement with others.
NC Child: So, you decided you wanted a break from social media and started out with a seven-day detox?
Keegan Lee: I deleted it for a week. That was just kind of a little experiment to see what it was like and to see what would happen. And I remember feeling good.
NC Child: What was different?
Keegan Lee: I had to find other ways to spend my time. I had to find other ways to get the dopamine that I had lost particularly in those moments where I was bored.
I had to watch the world go by. I had to observe what was around me.
NC Child: How did you do it? I have tried removing apps from the home screen of the phone but then I’ll still find ways to access them.
Keegan Lee: That was a challenge. Especially because everybody was always on it around me. I was very disciplined and would not even access it on my computer. I deleted all the apps.
Now I have social media, but I don’t have the apps on my phone. When I want to go on I long in on the computer and make it more tedious for myself.
NC Child: So, you did a seven-day detox and then you set a New Year’s resolution to do it for even longer, for 60 days. But first you did some research and reached out to some academic people. Why did you do that?
Keegan Lee: I reached out to a couple of people at Elon University because that was that was the school nearby. I was reaching out because I wanted to learn. I just wanted to understand technology’s role within human behavior and the mind.
Dr. Ghandour was the really only one that responded. Others responded but said they weren’t in a place to advise on the topic. And Dr. Ghandour had expertise in social media and adolescent mental health. So, we set up a Zoom call. He was very informative and enthusiastic.
NC Child: You go on this 60-day journey. Did you track it? What did you notice?
Keegan Lee: Yes, I tracked it in its entirety. I had a handheld journal. I never really had an experience with journaling before. I had actually found it to be quite the chore. But I was very intentional about it. And I wrote down everything: my emotions, what I saw from other people, any thoughts I had about technology, behavior, media, people, and attention in the digital world.
I was experiencing a shift in my time and how I was consuming information. After a while it got easier. It really did. And you start to see the world in a different way and realize that social media doesn’t have to be the center of our lives and there can be a healthy balance.
NC Child: All your friends are still online. How did you find community?
Keegan Lee: I was having more sort of authentic relationships. Not that I didn’t have that before. But I remember being more present in conversation because I wasn’t worried about what was going on [on social media], my mind was more on the person I was talking to.
I felt limited in my social interaction at times because Snapchat for my age group was a huge source of communication. Everyone would communicate through Snapchat. But I found that people who wanted to communicate would reach out. They would text me and they would call me. They would want to be a part of my life.
NC Child: What else were you doing with your time, with the hours you got back?
Keegan Lee: I was focusing on running a lot. I was also writing letters. I turned more to letter writing. I was very focused on my studies and academics.
I had to find other ways to spend my time, and I wrote about that.
There were times where I really missed social media and I wanted to express what I was doing. If I had an experience I wanted to post it online. But then you realize there is so much beauty in privacy. So, I was really honed in on the moment of what I was doing.
NC Child: When did you decide to write a book about the experience?
Keegan Lee: I decided at the end of the 60 days when I had the physical journal. I remember looking at the journal and flipping through the pages and thinking about how it can be transformed in to something more tangible and into a longer narrative of everything that I had experienced. I wanted to weave Dr. Ghandour’s perspective into it. I wanted it to be dense, and I wanted it to be vulnerable. I’m 20 years old now and it was published when I was 16.
NC Child: What other lessons did you learn from your journey?
Keegan Lee: My tolerance for boredom increased. I was able to hone in on my creative side because I could focus for longer periods of time. And it’s really nice to be at the dinner table and not have the presence of the device anywhere and not have this physical temptation to look at it or to tap it. My experiences were different because of that. My face-to-face conversations were deep and in depth.
When I got back on social media the big part was maintaining everything that I had learned because from the research there were a lot of benefits to social media that I had missed. But it was about finding the middle ground.
NC Child: How do you do that now?
Keegan Lee: I don’t have social media on my phone. I don’t even have email on my phone. And that is hard. But I really try to be intentional about how I’m using the device and designate that time for social media and for email when I’m in my work mode and flow state. So, when I go on Instagram I go on, I log in, and I make it very difficult for myself. When I post something, I have to download the app because it won’t let me post something from my laptop.
NC Child: Have you noticed an impact on your mental health?
Keegan Lee: Yeah, there’s definitely a difference. I deleted Snapchat. I deleted TikTok. I just didn’t find that it was serving me well. When I had Snapchat, that was really all consuming because it gave me so much information. I could see where everyone was. I could see if they had opened something, if they saved something. It had no depth to it, but it was something that I was holding on to if they didn’t snap me back what does that mean for our relationship. And it means nothing.
Now that I’m older and I’ve taken a step back and studied this, I do believe I’m living a more meaningful life.