Young Scots are experiencing a tortuous relationship with digital technology, a five year study has concluded.

Researchers from York University studied 16- to 24-year-olds in Scotland, Australia and Canada, uncovering details of their love/hate relationship with tech.

A ‘no-phone experiment’ asked study participants to live without their mobile phones for a week.

In the experiment and in-depth interviews, they expressed both a deeply ingrained and taken-for-granted connection to their phones, while simultaneously feeling despair about a foreboding sense of technology taking over human lives.

Youngsters reported a heightened awareness of a sense of acute conflict of missing instant online connection. One person said living without their phone was “like the Earth stood still”.

Participants also described a loss of human contact, finding more freedom and focus and having a chance to consider ethical and moral problems of living on mobile phones, apps and media.

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Naomi, one youth participant, highlighted a feeling of vulnerability. She said: “Most apps and social media apps are geared towards our age group…I don’t know why. It feels like they want to make us do damage. I don’t know who ‘they’ even is, but I feel like we’re just the most vulnerable crowd for them to zone in on, and for them to get as much as they possibly can out of us for their benefit.”

Several youngsters commented that, without the phone, they lacked the confidence to solve basic problems or feared for their safety.

One said: “Believe it or not, I had to walk up to a stranger and ask what time it was. It honestly took me a lot of guts and confidence to ask someone.

“Another thing I didn’t like about not having a cellphone that made me kind of scared at times was if someone were to attack me or kidnap me. I really wouldn’t be in any position to get help for myself.”

Kate Tilleczek, who co-edited Youth in the Digital Age: Paradox, Promise, Predicament along with Valerie Campbell, said: “From these accounts, it’s clear to me they don’t think technology is the panacea for well-being it was once argued to be.

“Young people say that digital tools and ways of living are morphing beyond recognition. They live a deep modern techno-paradox and are left to their own devices to sort it out. They worry about what digital media is doing.”

Today, when digital surveillance is higher than ever, there is a hollowing out of learning, a shallowness that comes with abuses of privacy and surveillance and from a loss of cherished human contact, she added.

It is time to ask whether and how societies will support youth wellness in the the digital age, she said, adding: “To do this well, we must engage and listen to young people.”