“That’s enough screen time for today,” you tell your kid, urging them to turn off the video-game console or iPad. As for what they should do instead, you are not quite sure. And what about you? If only you could put down your phone and listen to your spouse, or read a book, or embrace the sensation of your own existence, then surely you would be a happier, better person.
But this is wrong. Screen time is not a metric to optimize downward, but a name for the frenzy of existence in an age defined by screens. You may try to limit the time that you or your children spend with screens, and this may bring you minor triumphs. But you cannot rein in screen time itself, for screen time is the speed of life today. To recognize that fact—and to understand how it happened—is a small, important step toward salvation.
Long before screen time was a brand name for self-loathing—long before it had given rise to smartphone apps that were supposed to cleanse your soul of backlit sin—the notion had to be invented. This happened in the summer of 1991, when Mother Jones published an issue called “We Hate Kids.” Its cover featured Bart and Lisa Simpson, characters then but two years old; tucked away inside was an essay by the writer Tom Engelhardt called “Primal Screen.” “The screen offers only itself as an organizing principle for children’s experience,” it said. Television shows didn’t just tell stories; they showed characters such as Garfield watching television themselves, sometimes obsessively. MTV, then scarcely more than a decade old, famously put literal televisions on-screen and on set. Kids were watching “screens within screens within screens,” Engelhardt wrote, and they were doing it a lot: Even six-month-old babies were getting “an average hour and a half of screen time a day; the typical older child, about four hours.”
Televisions had already been around for decades, and people had lamented their existence from the start. The nickname “boob tube” first appeared in the 1950s. Screen panics of various kinds arose and subsided every decade thereafter. In 1984, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned parents that television might have ill effects on childhood development. Reaffirming the idea in 1990, the AAP reported that American children were spending more time watching television than any other activity, apart from sleeping. Time spent with TV was concerning, it said, because passive viewing of the screen “may displace more active experience of the world.”
But any measure of time spent in front of screens did not—and still does not—explain the changing nature of this experience. For Engelhardt, the problem screen time named was not merely one of duration but one of pace. The endless, frenzied display of screened images proceeds “as if chased by some implacable force,” he wrote, and “it is that pace that drives the child.” Time in the age of screens was rapidly changing, brazenly commercializing, exploding into bits and then getting distributed across multiple venues and devices. By the early ’90s, many American households had multiple televisions, along with VCRs and video-game consoles, and kids carried Game Boys when they went outside. Engelhardt observed that different sorts of screens, including cinema, television, and games, were getting linked together in what would later be described as “franchise media.” Merchandising was a side effect of this infectious spread, an invitation and a demand to consume the trappings of the images that screens emitted.
In the 34 years since Engelhardt’s essay, the outbreak of screens has increased in scale many times over. So has the pace of activity on those screens as the inescapability of screen life became entrenched. Engelhardt probably used a word processor to write his essay in 1991, but the experience would have been quiet and solitary. Today, I write this one on a different sort of screen: a windowed computer operating system. Even as I work, I will receive reminders about my appointments, various requests from friends and family, constant emails, and dozens of notifications from the other apps and services I use. Today’s screens within screens within screens are shredding my attention into bits.
Television foreshadowed this situation. Over the past few decades, all TV has become more like MTV. Commercial-free streamers offer no natural breaks for a viewer’s attention. Even standard news programming is as noisy and disjointed as the output of a Bloomberg terminal. But just using a television now demands a faster pace. Channels have been replaced by streaming services, each of which has its own menu screen with an individual visual language and interaction paradigm. Selecting a show may result in the involuntary viewing of multiple, in-line trailers. And then, once you’ve settled on a program, you probably also tap at and scroll on the smartphone in your hand while watching, whether to respond to work messages or shop for home goods or argue on social media or crush candy. If you go to the gym, you might watch a trainer or a YouTube video on the screen atop your stationary bike. You might even operate your motor vehicle (at your peril) by touching screens. The car I bought recently asks drivers to sign in to its screen with a profile, as if the vehicle were just another Netflix. Its hybrid engine adds yet one more screen to my instrument panel for monitoring electrification. When I go to fill up the tank, the gas pump has a screen, too, hawking services that might also take place on screens.
In this context of screen omnipresence, to measure the amount of time you spend looking at a screen is simply to ask how much time you spend awake and cogent, for almost everything you do now requires a screen to do it. (If you wear a watch or a ring at night for sleep tracking, your slumber will be reclaimed by a screen, too.) The fallacy of screen time holds that measuring a ubiquitous phenomenon provides information that allows for control of that phenomenon—that keeping records of a chronic state will give rise to certain habits of self-healing.
This won’t really help you to adopt new habits, for two reasons. First, because general-purpose computing made screens so widespread that many worthwhile activities take place on them. You are almost certainly reading this article on a screen! My Washington University in St. Louis colleague Phillip Maciak, who wrote a book called Avidly Reads Screen Time, points to the obviously beneficial practice of using screens to text or video-call friends and family. The raw quantity of time one spends in the thrall of screens says almost nothing about the value of the time spent.
Measuring screen time for self-improvement also fails because few, if any, activities even exist outside of screen time. Nature has been conquered by cellular coverage. Bars and restaurants were already riddled with screens before everyone at the table also clutched one in their hand. Psychologists and educators are calling for bans on smartphones at schools, but many schools have already replaced chalkboards with computer-controlled smartboards, or distributed Chromebooks or iPads to every student. Even bowling alleys—the fantasy site for mid-century, prosocial communion, thanks to the political scientist Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone—require programming and then operating screens to keep score.
What to do, then, about screen time? The fact is, you cannot participate fully in contemporary life without devoting a substantial amount of time to the screen. Even if you try to pare back your screen time to some bare minimum for engagement with the world today, whatever quantity remains will still be chaotic and attention-shattering by nature. You might rationally take steps to protect your children from that situation while their identity (and brain) is still forming, but those efforts will only delay the inevitable. Every kid will be thrust into the frenzy of screen life at some point during their adolescence, or else they will fail to enter contemporary adulthood.
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.
The post ‘Screen Time’ Does Not Exist appeared first on The Atlantic.
