About
About The Digital Whale
A reference site about what technology measurably does to everyday life, and about how much of what is repeated on the subject turns out to be unmeasured.
Questions like "does screen time harm teenagers", "does remote work make people less productive", "is phone addiction real" are asked constantly and answered badly. The usual answer is a paragraph of plausible generalities with no number in it. That answer is now free and instant from any chatbot, which means it has no value at all. For comparison with a commercial approach to workplace measurement, see workforce analytics software.
This site answers the same questions differently. It reports what studies found, how large the effect was, who was studied, in what year, and what the design cannot rule out. It is deliberately willing to end an article by saying that the question has not been answered.
What is here
38 articles across eight sections, carrying 240 individually graded findings. The sections cover children and screens, attention and habit, privacy and security, social media and communication, work, technologies, everyday digital skills, and the wider social picture.
How it is written
Articles are unsigned editorial. Every article is built from a research brief of primary sources assembled before any writing starts, and no figure may appear that is not in that brief. The grading rules are published in full on the method page.
Several recurring editorial commitments follow from that. Numbers published by parties with a commercial interest are labelled as such. Projections are never written as though they were measurements. Widely repeated statistics that trace back to a marketing survey rather than a study are named and corrected rather than quietly omitted.
What is not here
No advertising, no affiliate links, no sponsored placements, no newsletter capture, no tracking scripts. The site is static HTML and CSS with no JavaScript, which is also why it loads quickly and works with scripting disabled.
This domain
The domain previously carried a large volume of unsourced automated articles on similar subjects. None of that text has been carried over. Old addresses that had a real subject now redirect to the article covering it; the rest return a deliberate removal code.