The primary task of all parents is to worry. You are given a thousand things to worry about across the course of the day, ranging all the way from “What’s that in their mouth?” to “How am I going to get this cleaning done?” across to “How will we get through the rest of the year?” and all the way back to “OK, they’ve got something else in their mouth now. What is it?”
Once we are done with the immediate worries, we have the joy of worrying in the abstract, about things entirely out of our control. This again moves on a spectrum all the way from whether they will be a good person to whether they will have a breathable atmosphere. Of all of these, one of the most talked about, stressed about, and judged by other parents about topics is screen time. It’s something that constantly plays on my mind. Every moment my child so much as glances at an electronic billboard I can feel a countdown timer click over in my head. I try to calm myself by remembering how I was raised on television and turned out fine. Then I realise that I currently work in television, believe television to be very important, and have absolutely not “turned out fine”.
All of a sudden, I find myself having to question my own screen time. One would hope my brain is still developing – God forbid this is all I get. Or, if it is, then I would hope that it would at least corrode at a slow pace and not turn to a fine mush overnight.
I justify my time on screens believing that it is important for my work. My job is to stare at the medium-sized glowing rectangle all day. Every so often, I take a little break to scroll on the small glowing rectangle. Then, after a hard day, I like to settle in and stare at the biggest glowing rectangle I can afford. This is called living life to its fullest.
The way we measure time spent on our phone is akin to watching other cars on the highway: Anyone going slower than you is a fool, anyone going faster than you is a maniac. In the same way, anyone who watches more television than me, or scrolls for longer, has a terrible and sad addiction. Anyone who does it less than me is a simpering luddite afraid to embrace the new world.
Really, there are times when every minute of my screen time should count as two because I’m actually looking at a second screen on my phone. Then there’s the third screen, from the laptop I am absent-mindedly typing away on. Honestly, it’s four – I just checked my smartwatch to see a series of very interesting push notifications competing for my attention. Perhaps what I need is some fresh air. I would open my window but unfortunately we’ve just had flyscreens installed and it feels like that is against the spirit of this whole exercise.
Such is my commitment to second-screening, I have caught myself repeatedly checking a second screen while watching a show made in a foreign language. I will check my phone, miss all the subtitles, and listen to characters speak a language I do not know, confident that I am still getting the gist of what is going on.
We must also wonder what is being lost with these distractions. I have heard it said before that one of the real losses from all this distracted living is the ability to sit with a difficult thought or feeling. That is an essential quality both if you wish to create art and if you wish to be a fully realised human being. So it is natural to ask, how do we pare all of this back? What damage have I already caused? How do I reclaim my lost attention span? And importantly, have we just found another thing to feel guilty about for no real reason?
These are difficult questions and require real commitment to be able to answer. Unfortunately, I am already distracted. I’ve begun flicking through my phone, and when that is done I might watch a couple of minutes of the game on the television, then it’s time for another scroll to see what people are saying about the game, and of course I have so many unread tabs on this laptop to click through, and so on, and so on.
