""That's enough screen time for today," you tell your kid, urging them to turn off the video-game console or iPad. As for what they should do instead, you are not quite sure. And what about you? If only you could put down your phone and listen to your spouse, or read a book, or embrace the sensation of your own existence, then surely you would be a happier, better person."
"But this is wrong. Screen time is not a metric to optimize downward, but a name for the frenzy of existence in an age defined by screens. You may try to limit the time that you or your children spend with screens, and this may bring you minor triumphs. But you cannot rein in screen time itself, for screen time is the speed of life today. To recognize that fact-and to understand how it happened-is a small, important step toward salvation."
"Television shows didn't just tell stories; they showed characters such as Garfield watching television themselves, sometimes obsessively. MTV, then scarcely more than a decade old, famously put literal televisions on-screen and on set. Kids were watching "screens within screens within screens," Engelhardt wrote, and they were doing it a lot: Even six-month-old babies were getting "an average hour and a half of screen time a day; the typical older child, about four hours.""
Screen time represents the accelerated tempo of contemporary existence rather than a simple behavior to minimize. Attempts to limit device hours can yield small victories but cannot reverse the broader cultural velocity that screens embody. The idea of screen time was shaped in the early 1990s as televisions and emerging media began organizing children's experiences, with programs often depicting characters watching screens themselves. Media practices such as MTV’s on-screen televisions created recursive viewing, and reported averages showed very young children accumulating substantial daily screen exposure, reflecting how screens structured everyday life.
Read at The Atlantic
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