OxTalks Change Freeze Starts 2 March
Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
Do You Think Before You Open Your Phone?
As we spend more and more of our lives on our phones, it’s important to understand how considered this time is, and who is ultimately in the driver’s seat. In this talk, I present findings from the largest study of digital habits to date, combining survey responses from nearly 7,000 people with fine-grained tracking of their actual app usage across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, and Twitter/X.
We find that self-reported digital habit strength exceeds almost all habits psychology has studied to date (including established benchmarks for smoking and drinking). Additionally, people are remarkably poor at estimating their own usage of the most habit-forming apps, with many who denied using an app frequently opening it over 88 times in a given week. When trying to predict people’s future behaviour, simple behavioural markers outperformed a person’s perceived habits by at least 64%, raising important questions about how we measure, understand, and ultimately regulate habitual technology use.
Date:
10 March 2026, 12:00
Venue:
OII Lecture Theatre, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG or Zoom
Speaker:
Matthew Sharpe (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford)
Organising department:
Oxford Internet Institute
Organiser:
Ellen Mobbs (Oxford Internet Institute)
Organiser contact email address:
events@oii.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Professor Andrew Przybylski (The Oxford Internet Institute)
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/do-you-think-before-you-open-your-phone/
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Ellen Mobbs
