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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'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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