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Today I was listening to a Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast (paywalled on Substack, but available with ads on Apple Podcast), with Louise Perry interviewing John Daniel Davidson, and there were a lot of both dubious and interesting things there, but the one that caused an emotional reaction for me was the discussion of "screens," which I've been having with some in person friends, and seeing around Substack lately as well. I don't like the paradigms of the discussion, but have trouble articulating why. Especially when Davidson kept repeating "it rewires their brains" over and over again. My pop neuroscience model is built on a few fluffy books about neuroplasticity from a decade ago, but I thought basically everything required our brains?
There are indeed a lot of things on the internet, and especially social media, that are bad in the way casinos are bad, but calling this "screens" feels like calling slot machines "levers" or something. It's not like I could have accessed the podcast, other than by learning about it online, anyway. Was it more virtuous to listen to Davidson talk than to read him on Substack? Maybe! I was doing work with my hands while I listened.
Jonathan Haidt thinks that children shouldn't be able to post on social media or have smart phones (or internet enabled private devices more generally), and I think that may be reasonable, especially in regards to people posting photos of themselves, sure, everyone should think long and hard about doing that, and usually shouldn't. But at the same time, I don't really trust the enforcers, and do think that the rules wouldn't fall where I would hope.
Louise Perry didn't push back as much as I would have liked against the "demonic, insane, evil" rhetoric in regards to "screens" (by which I think Davidson meant something more like "the unfiltered internet"), but did mention something like that she thinks it's probably alright for her children to watch fairy tales sometimes, but that it's weird and a bit disturbing if they're watching another kid play on Youtube. And I agree that, yes, that's kind of weird, I wouldn't let my children watch that. I didn't let my child watch more than one episode of "Is it Cake," either, because that also seemed a bit weird.
Anyway, is there anyone out there who has an actually useful way of discussing "screens," especially in respect to children, but also in general? If I had more attention to devote to the topic, maybe I'd try reading Heidegger's Simulcrum and Simulation, since at least the title seems like it's heading in an interesting direction.
I just listened to the episode myself. He wasn't a great guest, nor did he go into the depth about 'screens' that the subject really merited. If you want that, Jonathan Haidt has done a million interviews.
But I think it's reasonable to use 'screens' as a substitute for 'increasingly addictive technology'. Even tiny, black and white TVs showing linear programming were powerful enough to begin the process of disengagement described in Bowling Alone. But massive, HD colour TVs with infinite TV and video games, plus smartphones with addictive apps and social media have supercharged it. I don't think it's too unreasonable to use 'screens' as shorthand for atomisation, digital addiction and social disengagement, even if something like podcasts and Spotify contributed.
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I think of it in terms of "passive entertainment". That is, anything that you can do that keeps you entertained in some form while requiring minimal input from the user. This also includes reading, watching television, and listening to the radio. Anything where you can sit down and vegetate, stop interacting with the world and still find yourself entertained by someone else. The reason why "screens" are particularly bad, is that the content you can now consume lasts forever. Compared to a book that ends after a few hundred pages and you then have to buy a new one, or Saturday morning cartoons that only lasts until Saturday morning is over, the internet produces content faster than you can consume it. Especially if you don't care that much about the quality (as is often the case with children). Now add all the ways in which online content is designed to capture and hold on to your attention for as long as possible, and I think the problem starts to reveal itself.
You have an eternal source of easy stimulation that is much easier to engage with than anything else, because every other thing you could be doing requires more effort. Even pulling yourself off the screen to go to the bathroom can be hard. This creates a habit of spending as much time on the computer as possible, which then results in spending less time on healthy activities, such as moving your body around or interacting with other people in person. As you neglect those real-world skills, they start to atrophy (or in the case of children, never develop) which makes it even more difficult to do anything but sit with your iPad.
All this is before we get into how a specific piece of content might be bad for you. Just limiting what kind of online content children can watch (like YouTube kids, or requiring ID to access porn sites), I think misses the mark. If children (or anyone, really) spent the majority of their free time watching TV or reading fiction, I would think that is also really bad. But home computers, with social media and video games, are really the first thing to be so engaging as to make this extreme mass consumption viable on a large scale, where it consumes both free time, work, and school. The people spending all day passively reading or in front of the telly, used to be either weird loners or mentally ill. Due to phones and computers, this has now changed to be an increasing amount of the population, and something that starts in childhood. I think that is legitimately a real problem that should be dealt with.
Reading is a bit different from the others in that it is a useful and valuable real world skill in itself.
Sure, reading is a useful and valuable real world skill. It is also less addictive than watching content on a screen, as the reader generally has to pay attention and extent some amount of effort. Reading is not as mindless as watching TikTok or YouTube. There is also a bit of friction involved, as once you finish one book you have to put effort into finding a new one, and content is produced more slowly, so you don't get the same effect of never-ending scrolling that social media gives. Provided you stick to physical books that is.
But it seems to me that the mass production of fiction was the first step towards the entertainment landscape we see today. Compared to most activities, it is fairly passive, and when you have access to enough fiction, it is tempting to just spend all your free time reading, losing track of the real world in the process. As a means of easy escapism it can be harmful in similar ways to a smartphone with internet access, even if the amount of harm that reading causes is less.
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At 115+ IQ, probably true. But the 100-average masses were watching TV for n hours a day for large enough values of n to support a moral panic back in the 1980's.
Heck - there are middle-aged women with >100 IQs who could spend 4+ hours a day reading romance novels and Readers' Digest short fiction if they had access to enough of it - which is almost as passive as TV-watching. The moral panic about housewives reading novels instead of engaging in the types of community-building activities housewives with free time engaged in was also real - my mother-in-law was not allowed to read novels as a child except when set by the school.
I think the word "moral panic" makes it sound made up. Like people were manufacturing concern for their own gain when none was warranted. I think current internet usage makes it clear there was good reason to be worried about tv watching and reading novels. Like, spending 4 hours a day (28 a week) watching soap operas is probably bad for you. At the time, there was enough friction that people would eventually get back to their daily life. Besides, as long as the activities are done in moderation, there are certainly worse ways to spend your time. But in excess, it turns into vegetating and losing your life to escapism. In the modern day, content has been optimized for engagement, so moderation is becoming increasingly rare. I believe this has very real negative impacts on people that result in negative consequences for society.
Less socializing means less dating and fewer children. People become isolated and easy to manipulate. Their physical condition worsens, which results in worse health, thus more time spent sick, which puts pressure on health care, and reduces quality of life. Your military worsens as an increasing amount of recruits are couch potatoes with no emotional resilience, as they have always been able to escape their problems on the internet. The list goes on.
I don't know how to solve this without resolving to extreme measures, but I think it is overall a good thing that people are noticing the problems.
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I'd go much, much broader than that. It's like calling slot machines, toasters, forklifts, and home gyms "levers". Sure, they all have the same basic interface, but they're wildly different than each other in every way that matters.
"Screens" covers direct communication with IRL friends, pseudonymous (or real-name-but-it-doesn't-matter) social media like Twitter/Discord, longform content like ebooks/movies/TV/podcasts, shortform content like news articles/memes/alerts, official interactions with the government or other institutions, ads, games, work, etc.
Being on screens all day is probably worse than pulling levers all day, but it's still wildly underspecified. Even if they define it better in the actual podcast than your comment, it still feels like they're over-reaching with the label.
(unless they're talking about eyestrain and neck problems, but I have a feeling that never came up)
I'm keeping an eye out, but I haven't really seen it. One step better is people talking about "algorithms", and how there's a race to the bottom as genuine value loses out to virality.
I think the point of "screens" as a concept is to tie in the current moral panic about children's internet use with the earlier moral panic about children watching too much TV.
I remember someone trying to write a serious analysis of what "screens" is actually about and pointing out that there were two different issues:
Moral panics about trash media go back a long way and long predate screens - there was a similar panic about mass-market novels, for example. And they almost never make the distinction between the two issues. My sons spend "too much" time on screens, but I follow what they are doing, and it is net educational. If I thought screen time was stopping them socialising in person (they can't do much of that because autism) I would curtail it. It is making it harder to get them to do outdoor exercise.
Yeah. I've got a two year old and if you leave any sort of an autoplay going for more than 2-3 videos you quickly end up offramping to some mix of pure AI sloptent, Elsagate content or 'Youtube Poop designed to stimulate unattended toddlers via a mix of stock sound effects and popular action figures'. Say what you want about 'unattended child stays up till 2AM and ends up accidentally seeing the Indie French Avant Garde stuff' atleast that was gated by time and attention spans.
6yo uses Youtube Kids on iPad so we have to approve each channel individually. 9yo mostly drives himself, and is primarily interested in educational channels when he is less tired and Minecraft slop when he is knackered, which is pretty harmless. He has unintentionally conditioned the algorithm only to show Minecraft slop if he lets it autoplay.
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I rate the the harm of screen time roughly by how hard the content on the screen tries to claim your attention. At one end of the scale would be a screen that displays a static image of a still life painting - this is clearly no more harmful than an actual physical painting, except that it might hurt more if it fell on you. At the other end is rapidly cutting and highly animated brain-rot videos with over-the-top sound effects, in an endless stream that a child can flip through continuously. (Or the equivalent for adults).
Mr. Rogers is the show I always go to for what I would consider to be a beneficial use of screens. Aside from the positive lessons, it's slow and very minimally attention grabbing:
The show is more attention grabbing to a child than staring at a blank wall, and roughly on the order of playing with some toys or having a conversation with an adult. All of the aspects I mentioned are in very stark contrast to what's on youtube shorts or tiktok today. If Mr. Rogers is an oatmeal raisin cookie in terms of appeal, the stuff many kids watch today is heroin.
Of course, this is all aside from violent, emotionally disturbing or mature content, which, while there are probably disagreements about what is harmful at the boundary, most of us would agree is not appropriate for children -- though adults know how to process it healthily. I do think though that hyper-attention-grabbing content is bad for adults too, even if we're better at restraining ourselves from indulging in it too much.
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One big issue with Haidt's stance is the question of effectiveness and the rights we have to give up in order to ban children to begin with. Meaningful age verification by necessity means ID verification, anything else can be easily bypassed.
Maybe it's worth the cost for no one to have anonymity to the sites they use, and for the possibility of everyone's face and identity connected directly to the accounts to leak (like what happened somewhat with Discord recently where they leaked face scans) just to stop children, but it's not free.
And that's still assuming it does stop children. China's attempts to curb childhood gaming has not worked out that well. Because they just used someone else's face/ID as identification. Either by sneaking it, or the parents who are cool with that behavior just allowing them on. Just like how the parents who hand their kids an iPhone already are liable to just make an account for them too when asked.
This is China and they're failing to keep kids from doing what they want. It's not just enough to have facial scans or ID uploads, doing those is sacrificing privacy for little benefit. At least if it worked the sacrifice would have some meaning! But it's not going to be enough, we have to be Mega China to be meaningfully effective, we have to be more invasive than the authoritarian communists because even they are failing.
Is that still worth it? Haidt correctly diagnosed a problem in society and then decided the only solution is nuking everyone's freedom just to fail anyway.
The social media ban isn't really the main goal of organisations like Haidt's. The goal is to get kids off smartphones. That is much easier for parents to do when 'I need Snapchat to talk to all my friends' is no longer true. Even if a social media ban can be bypassed, there's no reason to do so if none of a child's peers are using the platforms. The same is true of school smartphone bans. It's much easier for parents to say 'no you can't have a smartphone' if smartphones are a prohibited item in school.
Worrying about kids' privacy when preventing them from accessing social media is kind of ironic. The kids are already sharing their deepest, darkest secrets with these platforms. We're trying to prevent them giving up their privacy.
It's also worth talking about the actual technology used for age verification. In the UK we have it for porn sites already. 90% of them use third parties like AgeGo which don't require you to upload ID (although you can), they just use age estimation from a face scan, which isn't even saved once the check has been done. It's fine.
It's not kid's privacy, it's adult's privacy at risk. The only meaningful way to have age verification is to have ID verification (and even that isn't actually enough even with China's much more strict ID system). The entire idea of being anonymous on the internet must be destroyed just for a chance that kids might get off the phones.
Parents can do that already anyway! You can simply not give your kid a smartphone if you wish. You can lock it down via various methods if you want to. There's not a bunch of smartphone drug dealers passing out free samples to children.
The parents who just hand their 3 year old a phone to babysit for them are the same parents who are just gonna let their kid scan their face to make the Instagram account. We can see by their choice that they're fine with their kids being online.
Not only is it very easy to bypass (as we saw with people even using video game characters with it) and you could just use your parents/older friends like the kids in China do but it's an obvious lie and Discord already leaked tons of users just a little bit ago. If you seriously believe that they're deleting everything, I got a bridge to sell you if you want.
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My ideal policy would be one that sidesteps this problem by being a uniform policy for everyone. I don't know if it's possible, but what I'd aim for is putting a bit of friction on the slot machine lever.
For example -- banning endless scrolling feeds. Banning autoplay, except in certain cases like music playlists or playlists created by the user themselves. Having a delay (5 or 10 seconds?) before showing recommendations of other videos to watch. Or even a gradually increasing delay the longer you've been watching. Anything to making watching the next video a bit less appealing than doing something else.
Would people start just making compilation videos to work around this limitation? Probably. It's a hard problem to solve.
What I'd really like is a lot stricter rules around what is appropriate for a "kids" section of a website, like Youtube Kids. Some sort of maximum measurement of how hyper-attention-grabbing a video is, and while this could be done with objective rules, it's pretty hard to measure for every video. But we do manage to have rules around content, so I don't think it's undoable. Then at least parents could let their kids use just that app and not worry about their brains turning to mush at such a rapid rate.
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Yeah, I think it's very difficult to implement policies from the company side. Davidson said that he thought it was utterly insane that families in the 90s bought computers and connected them to the internet at all, but as I say, he was on a podcast and published a book, so how extreme could he really be in that respect?
Instagram is interesting, because it shows different faces to different people. Also on Maiden Mother Matriarch, Jean Twenge was talking about how it conforms to the insecurities of girls, especially, but an adult might get a totally acceptable Instagram feed. My feed is a couple of IRL friends, a bunch of totally normal art, and some costumes, but I didn't have an account until I was almost 30. AI also sees extremely sensitive to phrasing, so if you write to it as an adult who's trying to get something done, it will be your colleague, but it's hard to pretend to be someone else effectively enough to guess how it will respond to them.
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This is the part where I think you’re wrong. Because it’s possible to have a lever that is not attached to a slot machine, so there is no slippery slope from “Here’s a lever (that teaches you the educational engineering mechanics of fulcrums!)” to “You are now addicted to penny slots”. But it is NOT possible to have an internet-enabled device that lacks a slippery slope from “You are watching an educational Youtube video” to “You are now addicted to dopaminagenic slop”. It’s literally one click away. With the physical lever, you have to actually get off your ass and go to a casino; and as Scott tells us: you get an outsize effect from minor inconveniences.
I have a hard enough time avoiding slipping on the Youtube slope, and I’m a 30-year-old academic with enough self-discipline to finish a PhD. You wanna put five year olds on the top of the slope? Get outta heeeeeere
(What I will say, though, is that it’s better to have a five year old addicted to dopaminagenic slop than no five year old at all, so I actually support kids being raised by screens if it means TFR goes up. Just don’t delude yourself that the practice ain’t cookin’ their brains)
What does that mean? I'm pretty picky, and often do look at Youtube or Instagram, see that there's nothing interesting there, and then close the tabs and go to bed or sit under a tree with a physical book. Maybe I'm a bit odd. If I'm feeling... stressed? I'm not sure what the state is... I'll refresh The Motte or something over and over for a while, and yeah that's dumb, I shouldn't do that. I should probably take a nap at that point.
I was listening to my daughter play Hytale, and she was narrating some story about a dragon, and she was going to send it food so it wouldn't eat the villagers, and then she was making them a protector, and then it was raining pigs, and there was a zoo, and it sounded very similar to when she's drawing and narrating stories about how her doll is putting on a party, and these are invitations, here have an invitation, and now they need to reverse for their performance, and so on and so forth.
I'm right there with you, but I don't think it's universal. I feel like I won the lottery of fascinations because the supposedly-addictive (and also useless) content that gets spread around is just boring to me, so I don't get sucked into those holes. It takes zero effort whatsoever on my part.
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