You and Your Screen

Think of a market where everything is free to look at, but the shopkeepers are paid for every minute you stand at their stall. They would make their stalls bright, noisy and hard to leave. Many apps work like that.

Most social media and video apps cost nothing to download. They earn their money from ads: companies pay the app to show their ads to you. The longer you stay, the more ads you see, and the more the app earns. So your time and attention are what the app sells. People call this the attention economy: businesses competing for the hours of your day.

Designers have found many ways to keep people in an app. Designing an app so that people spend as much time on it as possible is called attention design (some people call it persuasive design). Here are the main tricks. You will recognize every one of them.

1. No end. A newspaper has a last page; a feed doesn’t. Each time you reach the bottom, more posts load. This is infinite scroll. Autoplay (Unit 6) works the same way: the next video starts by itself, so carrying on is what happens when you do nothing, and stopping takes a decision.
2. Rewards you can’t predict. When you pull the screen down to see what’s new, sometimes there is something exciting and sometimes nothing. It is like checking a fishing line: because you never know when there will be a fish, you keep checking. A reward that comes at unpredictable times is called a variable reward, and it is the hardest kind to stop chasing. Short videos are a variable reward too: the next one might be the funniest thing you have seen all week.
3. Counting you. Likes, views, followers and comments turn how much people approve of you into a number that changes while you watch. It is natural to care what friends think, so you come back to see if the number has grown, and compare it with theirs.
4. Calling you back. Notifications, the messages and sounds that pop up when the app wants you, and the red dots with numbers on an app’s icon, pull you back even when you weren’t thinking about the app. Many of them are not from people at all, but from the app itself.
5. Fear of losing something. A streak counts the days in a row you have used an app or sent a friend something; miss one day and it goes back to zero. Stories that disappear after 24 hours make you check in case you miss them.

None of these is a secret, and none is against the law. Each makes the app a little harder to put down, and together they work very well.

On a short-video app, nobody chooses the next video for you by hand. There are far too many: people upload millions every day. Instead, a program picks, for every person, every few seconds. A program that chooses what to show each person, from what it has learned about them, is called a recommendation system. It is the AI you met in Grade 6 Unit 9, a model that learns from examples. Here the examples are what you, and millions of others, did before.

It works in a loop:

What the app records is not mostly what you say you like. It is what you do: which videos you watched to the end, which you watched twice, which you skipped after one second, what you liked, shared, commented on or searched for, and who you follow. It also records data about each action: the time, the place (if location is allowed), your phone and its language. Data that describes other data, such as when you watched, where and on what, rather than the video itself, is called metadata.

Then the model guesses. For each of thousands of possible videos, it works out how likely you are to watch it, like it or share it, from what you did before and from what people who behaved like you did next. The video with the best guess plays next.

Here is the important part: the designers choose what the model is trying to get. If the goal is “keep this person watching”, the model will find whatever holds you, whether or not it is good for you, and whether or not you would have chosen it.

The feed that narrows

Because a recommendation system gives you more of whatever held you, your feed can slowly narrow: more and more of one kind of video, and less of everything else. If a person spends time on angry videos, they may be shown more anger; if someone lingers on videos about a diet, their feed may fill with diets. When a person sees mostly things that match what they already watch or believe, and little else, people call it a filter bubble.

You can push back:

• Tell the app. Use Not interested on videos you don’t want more of. Look for a setting to refresh or reset what the feed shows.
• Search on purpose. Search for things you actually want to learn about, and follow people who teach you something. That gives the model better examples.
• Notice the drift. Every few days, ask: what is my feed showing me now? Did I choose this?
• Leave the feed. A search, a subscription list, a book or a website you choose yourself puts you in charge of what comes next.

One design, different people

The people who design an app make hundreds of decisions: autoplay on or off, high-quality video or low, which languages the app understands, what the feed is trying to get. Each decision helps some people more than others. A decision that suits a teenager in a big city on fast home Wi-Fi can cost a student in a hill village on a small data pack a great deal.

A recommendation system is one algorithm, a list of exact steps (Grade 6), that decides something for you. It isn’t the only one. Before you reach school, others have already decided things for you: which emails you see, which way the bus driver’s map says to go, which word appears when you type, what a ride costs. Each was built to help, and most of the time it does. But the same algorithm can also do harm, and it can treat some people unfairly: worse than others, through no fault of their own.

Whether an algorithm does more good than harm is not something to guess. You need evidence: what actually happened, to whom, and how often. Here are four algorithms you meet nearly every day, with evidence on both sides.

A spam filter

Your email app moves junk, scams and fake “You have won!” messages out of your inbox into a folder called Spam, using a model trained on a huge number of emails that people marked as spam or not.

• Helps: it keeps out almost all junk and scam emails, so the ones you see are mostly real, and fewer people are tricked by phishing (Unit 8).
• Can harm: sometimes it moves a real email into Spam: a reply about a scholarship, a notice from your school. Few people look in Spam, so it is never read.
• May be unfair to: people and offices whose emails it hasn’t seen much of, such as a small school with a new email address, whose real messages are more likely to be taken for spam than a big company’s.

A map’s route

A map app works out the quickest way from where you are to where you are going. It knows where traffic has stopped from the speed of other phones on the road.

• Helps: it finds a way you didn’t know, and a way round a jam, which saves time and fuel. Ambulances, delivery riders and visitors to a new city all use it.
• Can harm: its map can be out of date. On a foggy night in November 2024, in Bareilly district in India, three men were following a map app when it took their car onto a bridge over the Ramganga river that a flood had broken earlier that year. The road simply ended, the car fell from the bridge, and all three died. The map hadn’t been updated, and there was no barrier or sign on the road to warn them.
• May be unfair to: places whose roads are mapped badly or late, often villages and new roads, where its routes are worse; and the people who live on quiet lanes that it sends traffic down as a shortcut.

Prices that change

Some ride apps, airlines and online shops let an algorithm set the price, and change it minute by minute: when many people want a ride at once and few drivers are free, the price goes up. This is called surge pricing.

• Helps: a higher price is meant to bring more drivers out, so people who need a ride can get one. (Ride companies say their data shows it works; some researchers who studied it found that many drivers drove away from the busy area instead. The evidence is argued over.)
• Can harm: the price shoots up just when people need a ride most. In December 2014, when a gunman held people hostage in a café in the center of Sydney, Australia, Uber’s prices there rose automatically, to as much as four times the usual, as people tried to get away. After an outcry, Uber gave free rides out of the area and paid the extra back.
• May be unfair to: people with less money, who are priced out at the very moments when others can still pay.

Autocorrect

The phone or computer checks each word you type against its list of words, and changes or underlines any it doesn’t know.

• Helps: it fixes “becuase” to “because”, so you type faster with fewer mistakes.
• Can harm: it changes words it doesn’t know into ones it does, including people’s names, sometimes into something rude, and you send it before you notice.
• May be unfair to: anyone whose name or language isn’t in its list. A campaign in Britain called I Am Not A Typo found that a popular spell checker marked many babies’ names as mistakes, many of them African, Asian, Irish and Welsh, while a much rarer old English name, Nigel, passed (the box below). Many Nepali names typed in English letters aren’t in such lists either.

Weighing it up

To judge an algorithm, ask:

1. Who does it help, and who does it harm? Name real people, not “everyone”.
2. How big is each effect, and how often? A scholarship email lost in Spam once is not the same as a car sent off a broken bridge, but neither is nothing.
3. What is the evidence? Something that happened, a study, or only a feeling? And who says so: a company praising its own product is weaker evidence than a study by people with nothing to sell.
4. Is it unfair to some people? Who does it work worse for, and why: missing data (Unit 10 shows how), or the goal the designers chose?
5. Can a person check it, complain, or switch it off? You can look in your Spam folder and turn autocorrect off; the students in England, at first, had no one to ask.

Every action recorded by a recommendation system is personal data: data about you. Put together, months of it can say a lot: what you like, what worries you, when you sleep, which school you go to, who your friends are, even your mood. Some of this you never chose to tell anyone.

Collecting it has benefits:

• The feed shows you more of what interests you, and the search finds what you meant.
• The app can spot a stolen account, like a login from a strange place at 3 am.
• Ads pay for the app, so you don’t have to.

And it has risks:

• It can be used against your interests. A model that knows what holds you can keep you on longer than you meant, or show you ads at the moment you are most likely to buy.
• It can leak. Companies are broken into, and lists of users’ data are stolen and sold: a data breach (Unit 8).
• It lasts. Data is often kept for years, long after you have forgotten it, and may be used in ways nobody has thought of yet.
• It is out of your hands. The data sits on the company’s servers, often in another country, under that country’s laws, not Nepal’s. Who may see it, and what the company must tell you about it, is decided by laws you didn’t vote for. The idea that data about a country’s people should be under that country’s own laws is called data sovereignty.

Who owns it? The photos and words you post are usually still yours, but when you join an app you agree to its terms of service, the long rules nobody reads, which usually give the company permission to store, copy, show and use them. The records of what you did, the passive footprint below, are usually kept and used by the company.

Photos carry hidden data

A phone photo carries more than the picture. With it, the phone saves metadata: the date and time it was taken, the type of phone, and often the exact place from the phone’s GPS. Many apps remove this when you post a photo, but not all do, and a photo sent as a file usually keeps it. A photo taken in your bedroom, shared as a file, could tell a stranger where you live.

You can’t redesign the apps. But you can change how they reach you, and you can decide before they decide for you. Here are the ways that help most people.

1. Know your numbers. Your phone already counts how long you spend in each app and how many times you pick it up (the box below says where). Look at a week of it before deciding anything. Most people are surprised.
2. Switch off notifications from everything except people you want to hear from. An app that wants you back can wait until you choose to open it.
3. Set limits before you start. A daily time limit on the apps that take the most time, or a timer before you open one. The phone asks you to decide at the limit, instead of the feed deciding for you.
4. Put distance in the way. Move the most tempting apps off the first screen, into a folder. Log out after using one. Every extra step is a moment to ask “Do I really want this?”
5. Make some times and places phone-free: meals with your family, homework time, and your bed.
6. Turn the screen gray at night. For many people, colorful apps lose some of their pull in black and white.
7. Replace, don’t just remove. Decide what you will do instead: a game outside, a book, music, helping at home, time with a friend.

Sleep

Sleep is when your body grows and repairs itself, and when your brain sorts and stores what you learned during the day. Doctors’ groups agree on how much young people need. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a body of 67,000 children’s doctors, recommends:

Age	Hours of sleep in every 24 hours
6 to 12 years	9 to 12 hours
13 to 18 years	8 to 10 hours

Screens get in the way of sleep in two ways. The main one is simple: a feed with no end keeps you up long after you meant to sleep, and a notification at midnight wakes you. And bright light from a screen late at night can make it harder to fall asleep. So the AAP advises switching off screens at least an hour before bedtime, and keeping phones, tablets and TVs out of the bedroom at night. Charge your phone in another room, and use an ordinary alarm clock if you need one.

Your eyes

Can screens damage your eyes? The American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), the body of eye doctors in the United States, says screens don’t cause lasting damage. But staring at one for a long time can make your eyes tired, sore or dry, for a simple reason: people normally blink about 15 times a minute, but only about 5 to 7 times a minute while looking at a screen, so the eyes dry out. This is called eye strain. It goes away with rest.

What helps:

• The 20-20-20 rule. Every 20 minutes, look at something at least 20 feet (about 6 meters) away for at least 20 seconds. Out of a window is perfect.
• Blink on purpose now and then.
• Keep the screen at a good distance: a computer screen about an arm’s length away, a phone not right up to your nose.
• Match the brightness of the screen to the room: not glaring in the dark, not dim in sunshine.

There is one more reason to look up and get out. More and more children around the world are becoming short-sighted (they see near things clearly but far things blurred), and both lots of close-up work and too little time outdoors are linked to it. In a study in Guangzhou, China, with six-year-olds starting school, some schools added one 40-minute class of outdoor activity to each school day. After three years, about 30 in every 100 of those children had become short-sighted, against almost 40 in every 100 at schools without the extra time (JAMA, 2015). And a review of 45 studies of more than 335,000 children and young people (JAMA Network Open, 2025) found that each extra hour of screen time a day was linked to about one-fifth higher chances of being short-sighted. (“Linked to” means the two go together; studies like that can’t prove that one causes the other.)

Your body

You may have heard that bending your head over a phone ruins your neck. The truth is less frightening. A study of 150 students aged 18 to 21 at a school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, published in 2018, found no link between how far people bent their necks while texting and whether they had neck pain. Bodies are made to move; what they don’t like is staying in one position for a long time, whatever position it is.

So the best advice is to move often:

• Change your position every so often, and get up and move around at least every half hour or so.
• At a computer: feet flat on the floor (or on a box), back supported, the top of the screen at about eye level, an arm’s length away, wrists straight (as in Grade 6’s touch typing).
• Be active every day. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that children and young people aged 5 to 17 get an average of at least 60 minutes a day of moderate to hard physical activity, the kind that makes you breathe faster, and that they limit time spent sitting, especially sitting for screens in their free time.

In Grade 6 you learned that cyberbullying is hurting someone online again and again, why it can hurt even more than bullying at school, and what to do if you see it or it happens to you. Here you will look more closely at the forms it takes, at how an app’s design can make it worse, and at the decisions that you, as one of the people watching, can make.

Grade 6 listed the common forms: name-calling, spreading rumors, leaving someone out on purpose, sharing an embarrassing photo or a private message, and pretending to be someone else. Phones and apps add a few more:

• Fake accounts: an account in a classmate’s name, posting things that make them look bad.
• Edited or AI-made pictures: a classmate’s face put onto something to laugh at, with an editing app or an AI program (Unit 7).
• Pile-ons: many people joining in to mock one person, each adding “just one” comment.
• Threats to share a photo unless the person sends money or more photos. This is a crime: never send anything, and tell an adult at once, who can go to the police.

Design can make it worse

The same features that keep you on an app can turn unkindness into something much bigger. One tap forwards a photo to a group of 200. A comment that gets many likes is shown to more people. A fake account takes a minute to make. A message that “disappears” can still be screenshotted. And in a big group chat, everyone sees everyone else saying nothing, so each person thinks it can’t be that bad.

The bystander’s decision

Most people in a cyberbullying story are not the bully or the target. They are the watchers, the bystanders: everyone in the group who sees it. Each of them makes a decision, even by doing nothing. A “like”, a laughing emoji or a forward tells the bully that people enjoy it. Silence tells the target that nobody cares.

A bystander who does something to help is sometimes called an upstander. You don’t have to be brave in front of everyone. Quiet things work too:

• Don’t like, laugh at or forward it. Each one spreads it further.
• Message the person privately: “That wasn’t okay. Are you all right?”
• Report it in the app (every big app has a Report button on posts, messages and accounts) and save screenshots.
• Tell an adult you trust, or a teacher, who can stop it.

If it happens to you, or if you were unkind

If you are the target, do what you learned in Grade 6: don’t reply in anger, save the proof, block and report, and tell an adult. It is not your fault, and you won’t be in trouble for telling.

If you realize you were part of it, even with a like or a forward, you can still make it better: delete what you posted or shared, say sorry to the person, and tell the others to stop. Everyone makes mistakes online; what matters is what you do next.

In Grade 6 you learned to ask a friend before posting a photo of them. That rule goes further than it seems. A photo of a person is about them: their face, their body, where they were, what they were doing. Once it is posted, anyone can save it, and the person can’t take it back.

Before you share a photo of anyone else, ask yourself:

1. Would they agree? If you don’t know, ask. If you can’t ask, don’t share.
2. Could it embarrass or hurt them, now or in five years, in front of their family, their school or a future employer?
3. Does it show where they are, such as their school uniform, their house, the place they go every day?
4. Is it a child? Then ask a parent too.
5. Was it meant only for you? A photo sent to you privately isn’t yours to pass on.

Some photos must never be shared, by anyone, whatever the person says: a photo of someone injured, ill or dead, a picture made to mock someone, and above all a sexual or naked picture of anyone under 18.

That last one is a law, not only a rule of kindness. Nepal’s Act Relating to Children, 2075 (2018), says that sending on, storing or using an obscene picture of a child (anyone under 18) is child sexual abuse, a crime, and so is making one or getting a child to make one. So never make, ask for or forward such a picture, of anyone, even of yourself, even as a joke, even if they say yes. If someone asks you for one, or sends you one, don’t reply and don’t show it to anyone else: tell a parent or another trusted adult straight away. You will not be in trouble for telling.

If someone shares a photo of you that you didn’t agree to: ask them to delete it, report it in the app (apps take down private and harmful photos when reported), keep a screenshot, and tell an adult.

Walk across a wet field and you leave footprints behind you. Use the internet and you leave a trail too: everything you post, and everything recorded about what you do. The trail of data you leave online is called your digital footprint.

It has two parts:

• Your active footprint is what you put there yourself: posts, photos, comments, reviews, your profile and your name.
• Your passive footprint is what is recorded about you without your posting it: the videos you watched, your searches, the places your phone has been, the ads you tapped, the times you were online.

What stays

Much of a footprint lasts for years. Search engines and archives keep copies of public pages. Friends’ screenshots and downloads keep posts you deleted. Companies keep records of what you did on their apps. Something you post at 13 can still be found when you are 23.

And people look. Schools, colleges, scholarship committees and employers often search an applicant’s name before deciding. A cruel joke, a fight in a comment thread or a photo you are ashamed of can count against you. So can the opposite: a science fair project, a blog about birds of the Chitwan forest, a video of your band, or helpful answers to other people’s questions can show the person you are.

Everything in this unit can go wrong for anyone, however careful. When it does, tell someone.

What happened	Who can help
A screen habit you can’t stop, or lost sleep	a parent or guardian; then set a plan together (the project below)
Cyberbullying, of you or someone else	a parent, a teacher, a school counselor; and the app’s Report button
A photo of you shared without your agreement	a parent or teacher; report it in the app
Threats, or someone asking for photos or money	a parent at once; Nepal Police’s Cyber Bureau, or any police office
Feeling very sad, scared or alone because of what is happening online	a trusted adult, today; Child Helpline 1098

You will not be in trouble for telling, even if you made a mistake first. Keep the proof (screenshots with names, dates and links) until an adult has seen it.