"screen time" is too broad a term and is too often described as something bad. But we need to understand screens are more like papers, and what we consume off the paper is what matters.
Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
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Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah me too. Anecdotally with my two children, they make huge educational jumps every time we increase their screen time. Screen time for us was playing games with an educational value and watching TV with at least some educational value. Recently we've started letting the five year old watch TV purely for entertainment, and the three year old sometimes watches too, but even then, both of them suddenly got a lot bett…
I think it's irrational. "Screen time" is today's Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal. People are doing things differently today than I did at that age, therefore it's bad and needs to be limited.
I love the fact that my generation (nearly 40) and the one after me both grew up playing ultra violent games and listening to rap etc and yet the crime statistics for violent crime are lower than they've been for about a century.
Schadenfreude on that one.
Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
#153Well, personally I don't sit staring at a screen, I watch movies, play games, talk to people, build stuff and learn new things. You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?
I really wish this was discussed more often. As a parent, I am constantly bombarded with people telling me I should limit my kids' "screen time." Generational skepticism of new technology is played out. Can we move on yet?
I SURE am glad my parents didn't limit my screen time as a kid. I taught myself how to program from age 14 spending countless, countless late night hours staring at the DOS computer screen programming whatever caught my fancy. My career would look so much worse if my parents had forbade me from using the computer.
Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
#154Well, personally I don't sit staring at a screen, I watch movies, play games, talk to people, build stuff and learn new things. You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?
Fully in agreement with your take on this. One small clarification, however.
>You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?
In our day and age, you wouldn't. But this was definitely a thing in 1800s (regarding books) and in early 1900s (regarding newspapers). Using very similar excuses to rant about those, as the excuses being used today regarding screens too.
And even earlier, in Ancient Greece, tons of prolific philosophers were strongly opposed to writing and books as a concept, as they believed that writing things down and learning from that (as opposed to oral learning) was eroding abilities that relied on memory (which parallels really well with people currently complaining about search engines removing the hard need for memorizing things).
However, knowing this only makes your original point stronger.
Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
#155Staring is an embarrassing word for this person to have imposed upon the actual study.
Science journalism is a real problem.
Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah me too. Anecdotally with my two children, they make huge educational jumps every time we increase their screen time. Screen time for us was playing games with an educational value and watching TV with at least some educational value. Recently we've started letting the five year old watch TV purely for entertainment, and the three year old sometimes watches too, but even then, both of them suddenly got a lot bett…
I think it's irrational. "Screen time" is today's Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal. People are doing things differently today than I did at that age, therefore it's bad and needs to be limited.
As a millennial who spent most of the past decade behind a computer screen (and probably the previous decade before that inside of books), I mourn the time I lost that could have been spent interacting with the world.
Moreover, maybe both sides are right? Maybe you need heavy "screen interaction" to be successful in this world and maybe too much time is being consumed by screens rather than physically interacting with the world. Maybe there is a balance that isn't close to being struck by most.
Maybe I would like my future children (if I have them) to interpret the world largely through their own eyes rather than a clickbait interpretation manufactured to get more money.
Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
And will use that infinite potential to binge watch Friends for the 11th time.
I have a large collection of movies and ripped them all to Kodi. I was going though marking a bunch as watched and I started to get slightly upset at myself as I marked each one and thought "watched that one 8-10 times, watched that one 5-6 times, watched that one 3-4 times, watched that one 5-6 times, etc etc. for many many movies. And there are TV series I've watch multiple times as well. So much time. Sure I enjoy…
If you assume that rest time had no value, possibly, yeah, but we have fun for a reason. Productivity can't be the only thing in our lives.
Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the parents' job to teach kids how to tell junk food from healthy food; predatory apps from apps which add value; "you're the product" from "you're consuming the product". I do this with my kid, and technology is a boon for her. However, most adults aren't qualified to make the distinction between good and evil, so their kids suffer too.
Lots of “teaching” is literally excluding from consumption for young kids. Parents know better than their kids, why entrust that kind of advanced decision making within them?
>Lots of “teaching” is literally excluding from consumption for young kids
Sure, I agree with you. Limit what they have access to while using the screen, but not the actual screen time.
Somewhat analogous to the difference between limiting junk food from kids' diets vs. making them go full vegan and doing intermittent fasting.
Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
#159Well, personally I don't sit staring at a screen, I watch movies, play games, talk to people, build stuff and learn new things. You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?
Funnily enough, I remember talking to a historian who said centuries ago, reading a book was considered "mindless entertainment", much as we think about our smartphones now. Eventually, reading evolved into being considered something generally "smart" people did.
Many were quite opposed to books and have been throughout history. This is a fun read https://www.historytoday.com/archive/reading-bad-your-health
Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> last week I've probably spent 50 hours with people front different parts of the word on screen You've spent time with a simulation of those people, their voices lossily compressed with a biased frequency response, their images projected through a non-eye lens on a 2D surface, their heads bigger and closer than you would have in real life, while rest of their bodies hidden, with hundreds of milliseconds delay betwee…
Speaking personally, most of my good friendships growing up (and even now) were with people online and they feel perfectly fulfilling and real to me. I've been really surprised to hear people (who seem to have been forced into interacting with folks online because of covid) start popping up claiming that online interactions aren't real and are somehow invalid or inferior, as your post seems to imply. I would have tho…
> they feel perfectly fulfilling and real to me
That is the whole point of a simulation. Hyper-palatable food, cocaine, porn etc. they also feel good and even hyper-real in our nervous systems in the short term, but that’s not a good way to judge if they pose long term complications. Though, I’m not saying video chat is necessarily a hyperstimulus, we don’t know yet.
> claiming that online interactions aren't real and are somehow wrong
I’m not saying it is wrong, and in the absence of real thing it is the rational thing to do. But thinking that it is the real thing is kidding ourselves and to the extent it replaces real life interactions, it could have long term harm. I know this is not an exact comparison, but we have already seen this with uni-directional audio-visual entertainment replacing real relationship time. We feel like our favorite youtubers, podcasters, netflix protagonists etc are our friends, or at least relationally worth investing time in (otherwise we wouldn’t consume them). Same might go with the 50 people around the world we videochat.