I’m sure my wife Katie and I are not alone in negotiating screen time with our children. I’m sure we’re not unique in being concerned that our kids might have too much screen time. And I’m sure there’s nothing all that uncommon about me worrying about my screen time.
It is 2023 and much of reality is filtered through screens. Much of my day revolves around my phone and my laptop. And my Xbox and Nintendo Switch get their fair share of attention too.
I’m no Luddite, but it does seem to me that our little screens are demolishing democracy, ideating isolation, and sucking out our souls. I tried for some alliteration there. I came close. Ideating isolation is a real stretch.
I don’t know. Sitting here staring at a screen, penning this humble blog, I’m struck by how different 2023 is from 1998.
***
Lord, how democracy flourished in 1998. Isolation? We didn’t know the meaning of the word! And my soul, rather than being sucked out by Steve Jobs, was happily resting in my chest. Assuming that’s where a soul rests.
I kid, of course. 1998 had its own fair share of problems. And I spent hours playing Madden, watching movies, or sitting in front of a screen. It was just a bigger screen. Really, my whole life has been littered with pixels. Television in the 80’s. Bigger televisions in the 90’s. And then computers and phones took hold. And now Twitter is a raging inferno of death threats, polarization, and thirst traps. I mean, it’s not even called Twitter anymore!
An aside about thirst traps: I don’t think this blog is a thirst trap. Though I’m very, very attractive.
All thirst trapping aside, I do have a nostalgic feeling towards the 90’s. Towards a time before there were phones. The screens of my youth felt less apocalyptic than the screens of my adulthood.
And don’t get me started on the way these screens infiltrate my job as a humble scholar! The emails. Lord, the emails. I’m sure many of you know what I mean.
“What do you think it was like being a professor before there was email?” I asked a staff member on campus the other day. They misunderstood my lament.
“Yeah, I bet it would have been hard.”
“Hard?” I gasped. “No! Liberating! I bet we would have had time to hear ourselves think.”
Maybe. Maybe not. I wasn’t a professor in the 90’s. I was just a humble teenager in my dad’s basement, playing Madden late into the night, bracing for the isolating connectivity to come.
***
So let this be a short rant about screens, I guess. In all seriousness, the way they have demolished political discourse in the United States and across the world is terrifying. Things feel unstable. People feel like they’re caught up in realities that I worry have little to do with reality.
Brainwashing people in the 1940’s was hard work. Pamphlets and whatnot. Now all you need is a podcast, a social media account, and a following. You can create any sort of reality you might imagine. And then people can buy into that reality. It can be ugly when different realities that don’t accept each other clash. I’ll admit I worry about that clashing. War is bad. You can’t convince me otherwise. And much of what I witness on social media feels like war. Other than the cute pictures of kids. Or my face. I’m a walking thirst trap, baby.
Anyway, just a reminder to myself to look up from my phone, look away from my screen, and suggest to others they’d be well served in doing the same. Of course, even mentioning this to my children would be heresy, but it sure would be nice to go a day or two without my phone, without any video games and, dear Lord, without any email.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 