Personal Screens
I know it is popular to talk about how so much screen time for kids is harmful for their development, but I’m less sure of that than ever. I am sitting in my living room with my two granddaughters, who are eleven and eight years old. They are each on their own iPads wrapped in protective and colorful plastic bumpers. I’ve asked them what they are doing and Charlotte, the older one was watching YouTube short videos on various interesting topics while Evelyn was playing and strategizing about Minecraft, a simulation game for kids to build their own realities. I am busy writing my latest story and Kim is reading news stories and doing her daily word teaser games. Daughter Carolyn is keeping up on pop culture on her iPhone and her husband, John, is studying market price trends of Cryptocurrencies while generally staying tuned into all the cutting edge issues of the day that I personally can never be bothered to follow. I’m not sure how these diverse interests could be better fulfilled than by everyone having their own screen.
We have decided to go out to the beach in Oceanside today for lunch and a walk on the pier, a nice healthy family activity that’s suitable for all ages, since we span over six decades among the six of us. The temperature is headed to the mid-80’s up here on the hillside and should top out at the beach in the mid-70s, so a pretty typical San Diego summer day. In the meantime since everyone woke up and had their breakfast mini muffins, my daughter and I have gone to the gym for an hour, her to run 6 or 7 miles on the treadmill and me to do stretches and calisthenics to help my hip joints work with less twinge. When we return, the girls are amusing themselves on their iPads again, killing time until we are all six of us ready to head out for the beach.
If screens are used in the extreme to keep kids, or adults for that matter, from enjoying th out of doors or socializing, then they are a bad thing, but if they are a gap filler and a way to pursue personal interests, I seem them as only adding to the richness of our lives. Like anything in life, things taken to excess are generally not so good for any of us. If a person has a natural tendency to be introverted and kept to themselves, I’m sure I might conclude that having a screen to escape into is not helpful to that person being forced out into the big wide world. But luckily, most people are not like that. It should also be noted that since the invention of Guttenberg’s printing press, people inclined to keep to themselves have had vehicles to do so and haven’t necessarily needed screens to give them the excuse to do so.
When I think about my own journey of self-discovery, I am reminded that for a portion of my early youth I had little or no exposure to television. That was while we lived in Venezuela and Costa Rica. I knew it existed and I knew it was back there in the United States with all the other things American that I missed, but I learned to live without it. When I returned to the states at age 7, television was in its golden era of the early 1960s and I enjoyed every bit of it. I don’t know that I have a greater addiction to TV than the normal American of my age, but I certainly am in the running with the best of them as an aficionado of the entertainment mechanism. I was also the sort of inquisitive and mildly nerdy kid who saw the earliest computers getting built in Popular Mechanics and had an unfulfilled hankering to be one of those guys with a soldering iron who took on such a project. Something inside me told me that this whole computer thing was going to be big. I suppose it was more than just an affinity for gadgets and more a belief that anything that expanded the horizons and capabilities of the mind was bound to be a good thing.
As I started high school we once again moved overseas, this time to Italy, where there were two nationally-controlled TV stations, both in Italian and both mostly dedicated to sports (mostly soccer/football) and news. My attention shifted first and foremost to reading English-language books purchased for a small fortune in paperback (Penguin Publishers mostly) at the magazine and book stalls on the Via Veneto. Books were my source of inspiration in all directions. I can even remember getting a copy of the Memoirs of Casanova when I was 14 and having it serve all of my prurient interest needs as an adolescent. For social gathering, we expats gathered at the movie theater in Trastevere, the Pasquino Theater, which charged billing daily and which enabled us for 500 lira (80 cents) to see all the second run movies our hearts and gas coupons could afford. That movie screen was my screen for high school. Only when I got back for college was television reintroduced to my system. That first year of college also introduced me finally to computers, where as an engineering student I took an introductory programming course and learned how to design a do-loop to spin the computer through its paces. But those early computer forays were absent a screen since we used cards and paper readouts and had no visual element.
Obviously that computer format changed fairly soon with the introduction of first a simple DOS green on black screen (thanks to the phosphor coating) and then by the mid to late 80s to a full GUI screen with mostly a white background that began in earnest with the introduction of Windows 1.0 in 1985 even though the Apple Lisa predates that by two years. The screens became ubiquitous in offices and on home desktops and laptops. But it was the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010 that really solidified everyone’s personal connection to their screens. After many foreign and domestic mobile phone iterations, it was Apple’s blend of communications, work, and entertainment into the smartphone that made mobile phones a necessity rather than a luxury. And after years of fussing with the tablet form factor, it was the simple and relatively small iPad (since enlarged to a full page size) hit the spot for most of us. Kim is an iPhone user from start to finish where I find an iPad a perfect substitute for a laptop with the phone acting as the travel companion for that. I do r even know how to think of the Apple Watch in that array other than to say both Kim and I now each have and use one.
This I know that it is in vogue to denigrate our collective use of screens saying that they are a bad substitute for real life. I just don’t think that’s fair anymore because screens are now an integral and, dare I say, necessary part of our lives assuming we choose to live more or less in the modern world. As a culture, we managed to evolve from verbal storytelling to the written word and from the written word to the broadcast word and the broadcast word and images. We all used to talk about and hear about interactivity when it came to media and now we have it we are almost all of us, totally interactive with our screens, and I think it’s a bit of a Luddite frame of reference to think there’s something wrong or bad about that reliance on screens. If you go back and look at the dystopian world of George Orwell in his novel 1984, the screen was a symbol for Big Brother, and that was because the screen told you what to do rather than allowing you to interact and tell it what to do. Perhaps that will all change now with the advent of AI, but I doubt it. I choose to think of personal screens as a great productivity enhancer and a great embellishment to our daily lifestyle. I’m not sure I want more screen time in my life, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want less either so I would say tend to your own frailties and don’t generalize, putting the blame on screens. If you feel you’re abusing your personal screen, fix that and don’t discourage the rest of us from embracing this valuable part of modern technology technological society.