The pernicious effects of screens on attitudes, social relations and education are obvious to all but the wilfully blind. Screen time may not be as harmful as we previously suspected, but we should all be troubled by the screen-shaped culture that we have become inured to.
In the 1960s, a prescient Canadian academic named Marshall McLuhan asked some perceptive questions about how technology was affecting people and the societies they make up. McLuhan would question what a piece of technology aimed to extend. For example, the light bulb extends the day, the car extends the foot and the phone extends the voice. It’s a useful framework for examining the place of any new gadget or piece of software in your life.
Second, and more crucially, McLuhan asked us to query what happens when a piece of technology is overextended - what does it end up amputating? For example, the car has amputated a walk to work or a commute on public transport with others, and, in turn, the community that routines can build. These questions stimulate useful thinking about how screens are affecting us.
Screens, of course, have many beneficial extensions, and we’re largely aware of them: the ability to communicate more easily and quickly, and having an unfathomably big reservoir of resources at our fingertips, to name but two. The benefits of screens are so obvious that one need only be without one for a few hours to realise our utter reliance on them for just getting through the day. But what do screens amputate in the process, and what do we lose by their overuse? There are many things, but I want to focus on three factors that might strike the classroom teacher as obvious: attention span; knowledge; and moral development.
The poet Mary Oliver said, “To pay attention…is our endless and proper work.” And this is what we teachers hope our students will do. The word “attention” is often accompanied by a verb - attention needs to be grabbed, captured or mobilised. We need our students to pay what psychologists call “executive attention” to our subject, to narrowly engage in what we want them to learn, without distraction.
The screens that we all have in our possession are at war with our ability to pay sustained attention. Behind each screen is an army of people whose job it is to get your attention - as the writer Madeleine Bunting has commented, our eyeballs are now capitalism’s most valuable asset. The screen itself is not at fault - that is neither here nor there - but the applications and games on it are bent on bewitching the masses.
To take an ever-present example, the social media apps that we use are wired to keep us coming back for more. They operate with the same psychology as gambling slot machines, working with what is called variable reinforcement. Sometimes you feel a boost from social media, but often not. It is the fact that the rewards are not consistent that keeps you returning.
What this means is that we essentially have the equivalent of a slot machine in our pockets; for young people who have not learned self-regulation, that is particularly dangerous. Your attention is no longer your own, as it is pushed and pulled by algorithms. This is the case not just when we are looking at our screens; our minds can be troubled even when they are out of sight.
Attention span is something that needs to be trained, and it is something that all of us are being trained out of in our world where our self-regulation is under constant attack through our screens. (For more on this, read Bunting’s excellent article “Disarming the weapons of mass distraction” in The New York Review of Books, bit.ly/BuntingDistract)
Shallow understanding
I would argue that knowledge is also under threat from our screens. This is ironic, given that we have a universe of information at our fingertips. We are capable of accessing incredible resources on all topics under the sun. However, this dawn of information has brought with it at least two significant problems in how we think about knowledge.
One issue is that it has given rise to an explicit belief that learning facts is no longer important. I recently heard of a headteacher commenting: “We do not need to teach children history; we just need to teach them how to google the topic and they can find it out for themselves.” My experience of this kind of learning is that students end up with knowledge that might be a mile wide but is barely an inch deep.
TED prizewinner Sugata Mitra extols the belief that, in an age of instant information, there is no need for long-term memory. However, research tells us in no uncertain terms that we need knowledge if we are to learn to think. Putting knowledge into our long-term memory reduces cognitive load, and allows us to understand new topics. (See Daisy Christodoulou’s book Seven Myths About Education for a powerful argument on this.)
A further issue with knowledge today is that we are growing a generation who do not have the tools to discern between what is credible and what is credulous. Fake news, alternative facts and misinformation - all of these have thrown the idea of truth into confusion. The internet is a platform for anyone with an opinion, no matter how ill-conceived, to try to sell their wares. And they do, often to people who have not learned to evaluate what they are reading. As we know, this has had some frightening real-world consequences.
A final point on the moral dimension of screens: if school is deliberately formative in personal and moral development, then it must take into account how screens are changing interactions, and social and sexual mores. Through becoming more connected, we are, paradoxically, becoming more alienated from one another.
Anxiety issues are endemic, and our ability to interact is diminished in myriad ways. The internet has unleashed cruelty with immunity, as young people do not even see the consequences of what they type from behind a screen. This is not to mention the effect of targeted adverts that tell us what our lives are desperately lacking, and infect us with the horrendously acronymed “Fomo” (fear of missing out). Feelings of inadequacy and insecurity are deliberately nursed by social media. These issues land on the desks of secondary schoolteachers with terrifying frequency.
In writer David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech at Kenyon College, Ohio, he told a short parable about two young fish swimming along. An older fish swims past them and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” They swim on a little, before one says to the other, “What the hell is water?” Wallace’s point was that the most obvious realities are often difficult to see and speak about.
The generation growing up right now has never known a time when screens were not ever-present - they have been fully immersed in a world of screens for as long as they can remember. Whereas, to people like me (those born in the last century), screens remain exotic pieces of sorcery that will always feel like an imposter on life’s natural rhythms. Clearly, this means I am not and cannot become a “digital native”, but perhaps that distance affords me some perspective on these devices. Perhaps pulling back from our lived experience, to ask how we’re being affected by screens, is the place to start.
Humanity unplugged
The problems mentioned above have a raft of evidence to support them, and a slew of suggested antidotes. As is often the case, admitting there is a problem is the first stage of treatment. But the message to “worry less” about children’s screen use (for example, in a recent BBC article, bit.ly/WorryScreen) may delay this. There are guides and gurus if we embark on this process - people who would be glad to share their wisdom.
Take the Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com) as an example. This organisation is composed exclusively of former tech insiders who have first-hand knowledge of how we are being manipulated through our screens. A brief look on its website will lead you to simple directions for becoming more in control of your device, rather than your device controlling you (for example, simply setting your screen to grayscale or turning off notifications). The intention is to harness the potential good that screens and connectivity can do, and awaken us to the fact that our screens put us at the business end of an amoral drive for profit. As the old saying goes, if the product is free, then you’re the product.
Recent research from paediatricians that suggests screen-based devices are neutral and, therefore, need not be feared in themselves may well be right. However, the message that we should “worry less” about screen time, announced with such brazen confidence, is frankly irresponsible. Screens are the conduits for the ills mentioned above, bringing with them a disturbing new kind of normal. To navigate these waters will require an awareness and wisdom that has been absent from much of the conversation so far.
Kenneth Primrose is head of philosophy and religion at Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen
This article originally appeared in the 1 February 2019 issue under the headline “Does the end justify the screens?”
