On Screen Time

 

 

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Screen time is a systemic issue, so an individual response—your screen-time monitoring, your screen-time mitigation—will likely be of little use. Past experience suggests that this problem will resolve itself at historical scale instead. After all, in the early days of literacy, reading—now perhaps the paradigmatic example of a non-screen-time activity—was considered ominous; people reading silently to themselves might have seemed demented. Even in the 19th century, the novel was considered a dangerous medium, one that would trap people—especially impressionable young women—in the thrall of isolation and fantasy. (Today, a couple of centuries later, people instead complain that young adults no longer have the attention span for isolationist fantasy.)

It’s hard to fathom now, but Marshall McLuhan, who became famous in the 1960s for the idea that media forms shape perception, saw the screen as an antidote to the poison of the book. McLuhan appreciated television for its lo-fi ambience that activated many senses all at once. As such, he thought that screens would help usher in a new age, a “global village” in which multisensory media would connect people in small scale, ad hoc ways, replacing the top-down, authoritative forms of media that preceded them, such as books.

The world ended up getting the global village McLuhan had predicted, albeit not in exactly the way he had predicted it. In particular, screens mated to computers, the most flexible machines ever invented. Together, the two amended all previous media forms. The computer-with-a-screen subsumed those media, and it did so at the pace of screen time, that is, with increasing speed and swelling fragmentation.

Will screen time ever slow? Can it ever be controlled? Tom Engelhardt thought such an end was inevitable—if for no other reason than sheer exhaustion. His object lesson was Pee-wee Herman, a “bizarrely hyperactive” screen-time-accelerated counterpoint to Mr. Rogers. Surely, Engelhardt suggested, the limits of the human body and brain could not sustain such extreme energy, not for long. His conclusion was wrong back then, half a lifetime ago: The hyperactive energy of the television age has persisted—and then spread into every corner of contemporary life. Perhaps someday the age of screens will end, at the hand of some unthinkable novelty or civilization-ending calamity. But until that happens, tracking use of screens—let alone trying to curtail it—will have little meaning. For now, at least, you are doomed to live at screen time.

-Ian Bogost in The Atlantic