I’ve recently seen a number of different things that address the issue of how much time we are all spending on our screens. For a number of years now we have all heard admonitions to children and young people about the fact that they are spending too much time in front of their screens rather than directly interacting with other human beings or out in the fresh air of nature. It’s always been hard to tell if this is sage advice or a generationally-motivated Luddite reaction to our own wistful memories of youth chasing butterflies and running around the sandlot. Perhaps it was motivated by adult fears of being left behind as the technology juggernaut lurches forward. I feel like it started with the whole video gaming trend that started with that simple Pong game that sent a little digital blip skittering across the screen from one plain hyphenated dash paddle to the other (I actually remember the pleasure of playing that the first time at the apartment of my college friend Cliff who was the first of us to go out and get a real job in the working world). That was 1975. What started as a cool new toy quickly blew up into video gaming that replaced all the pinball machines with PacMan and Asteroids machines. And there were those arrested development sorts who sat in the basement in specialty gaming chairs, starting to look dystopic in their gaming stupors. When the movie The Last Starfighter came out in 1984 it was almost a relief to be able to quip back at the Luddites that maybe we were really preparing the next generation of high-tech warriors who were developing the requisite eye-hand coordination skills by playing the latest video games.
As the LBO-80s came on and the advent of the personal computer entrenched itself in the full breadth of the American home, we started getting used to having computers and keyboards in our lives…at home and at work. I think of the 80s as a digital transition era when I would spend entire days (literally more than 12 hours) glued to my screen, in my case glued tightly to spreadsheets and email). It was hard to equate this huge surge in productivity, driven by expanded calculating capability and communication capability, as anything but a good thing, even though I knew that there were guys like Mike Myers and Dana Carvey just hanging out in their moms’ basements getting wasted and playing video games.
Then this era took a hard turn in the 90s as the digital rocket fuel of the internet slicked back out hair and took us ballistic into the World Wide Web. As hard as it must have been in 1920 to remember an era without electricity and indoor plumbing, it is equally hard now to remember a time when the internet was not there for us to expand our horizons with a few simple keystrokes. Sure, there were lots of gaming applications like Doom and EverQuest (and eventually Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto) and other things that used the connectivity of the internet to turbocharge the less productive side of screen time, but the productive stuff was so energizing that I suspect that was all just eyewash and made it seem like little old ladies harping about “these kids today…” getting too much screen time. In the midst of all of that, we did start to see some people starting to suffer from things like Carpel Tunnel Syndrome and retinal overload from those old green screens and then bright background blue screens. What started sounding like hypochondria became a real thing and we all learned that human bodies and computers screens needed to find their sweet spots, but while input modes shifted slowly (QWERTY still rules and voice command is only moving forward glacially) screen quality, mouses, touchpads, rollerballs and general computer ergonomics were getting better. Our new frustrations were increasingly about portability and smaller size, helped by the side-by-side growth of the cell phone phenomenon. I remember in 2000 being frustrated that we still had multiple devices like PDAs and cell phones and laptops (wannabe tablets, but not yet there). Form factor and functionality were the focus of people like Steve Jobs, and then, WHAM! The day of the smartphone arrived all at once. Suddenly everything was in a proverbial cocked hat. Did we want smaller phones that flipped or were too small for our fingers, Blackberry’s to use for work while Nokias were for home, portrait or landscape styles with keyboards that were there full time or hidden and slid out of some hidden compartment? This made the VHS/BetaMax decision seem like child’s play.
We seem to be down to two sizes of smartphone and two sizes of iPad. Some use one device for everything (that would be Kim), others (like me) need a regular-sized iPhone and an iPad Pro to feel good about the world. I don’t even know who uses Android anymore though apparently 40% of America does (that number is 70% globally due to the much lower price point and multiple alternative manufacturers). Regardless of the operating platform and form factor of choice, the world is spending more and more more time on their screens from these compounding advancements. One might default to those gamers in mom’s basement, but that would be wrong, its only in small part driven by gaming. The lion’s share seems to be coming from social media, which, while not all that surprising, is pretty disturbing. The chart I was just sent by my old high school pal Mike, shows that this compounding has driven screen time for the average American (from what I have seen in Asia and Europe, I’m guessing to is the same or more there) up to 13.5 hours per day. That means that over half of the average person’s day is spent looking at something on a screen (increasingly a smartphone screen… up to 9 hours now) and also increasingly of a social media nature, which may be news (fake or real) or advertising or shopping or just gossiping/influencing.
The other statistic I just saw was about the size of screen used and the length of play of the latest in entertainment. This came from an interview by Scott Galloway of Ted Sarandos of Netflix. As a side note, isn’t it interesting to see Netflix be the source authority on a major screen time issue like this while Blockbuster sits as flotsam and jetsam in some ditch by the side of the road? Now Netflix is worried about its $45 billion in subscriber revenues and not wanting to be the next guy in the ditch (had the Warner Brothers deal gone another way, it might have been Hollywood in the ditch while Netflix kept careening forward). It seems that not unlike the badly-timed but potentially omniscient Quibi short-form video offering, the world seems to be shortening its entertainment attention span. Clearly TikTok has contributed to this, but more likely TikTok is the tail and not the dog. I sense that social media in general may be the dog that’s waging us all. This trend shows up in increased preference for series entertainment versus full-length movies, but as Sarandos points out, why do seasonal series drops then get binged in one eight-hour marathon sitting as often as they do?
I do not yet have a definitive read on the answers to these conundrums. How far can screen time grow beyond today’s 13.5 hour level? Is that the end of reality-based activity or is it all multitasking? Is feature-length film getting killed by social media in a way that COVID put the terminal bullet in movie theaters? Is it all just one big dead man walking media universe or are Murdoch, Ellison, Musk and Bezos just taking over the world leaving us all as the AI-evicted flotsam and jetsam in the ditch this time.