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Lifestyle
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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15, 2020
‘Screen time’ has gone from sin to survival tool
Geoffrey A Fowler and Heather Kelly
THE WASHINGTON POST - We’re on Zoom calls six
hours per day. The kids have gotten their own iPads.
And no need to keep asking, Netlix - we’re deinitely
still watching.
But we should stop being hard on ourselves
for staring at screens and start embracing how
they’re helping us survive. And in this extraordinary
moment, that’s just what the doctor ordered.
Before the coronavirus outbreak, Brett Vergara
abided by the trendy advice that excessive “screen
time” was as bad as smoking, but for your brain. He
would put his phone on airplane mode at work to
make its screen less alluring.
Then last month, New York forced him to stay at
home with roommates he hardly knows.
“There’s just a different lens to the world we’re
currently in,” the 27-year-old said during a break from
playing the latest
Animal Crossing
video game.
Vergara joked he was “personally victimised”
by a recent notiication from Apple that his screen
use had surged to 10 hours per day. “What do you
expect from me? Get out of here, iPhone.”
A few weeks in, America’s great self-quarantine
is prompting a rethink of one of the great villains of
modern technology: screens.
Now your devices are portals to employment
and education, ways to keep you inside and build
community, and vital reminders you’re not alone.
The old concerns aren’t gone, but they look different
when people are just trying to get by.
Artist Anne-Marie Kavulla, a 44-year-old mother
of three, said what many overwhelmed parents are
thinking: “We’re tapped out and we get to the point
where that’s all I want to do, too.”
Her kids now attend online classes for their
previously media-free Waldorf school and she’s
been letting them earn extra YouTube time, too.
“That’s why we give in: We get it.”
Before our new normal, screen time concerns
had spawned an industry of screen “addiction”
experts, books and detox events.
Researchers have linked excessive screen time
to depression and obesity. In 2016, the American
Academy of Paediatrics decreed that kids aged two
to ive should have no more than one hour of screen
time per day.
In2018, facingcriticismfrom lawmakers andeven
some investors, Apple and Google added controls
to their software to, theoretically, encourage people
to use their devices less.
Now many experts are reframing the issue, at
least temporarily, and rejecting screen shame.
Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO)
oficially encouraged people to play video games as
a way to get us to stay at home.
And the United States (US) Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended
people “call, video chat, or stay connected using
social media.”
Those screens are doing important jobs. They’re
a way to keep kids distracted while parents working
from home try to balance nonstop video meetings
and Slack notiications.
With seniors conined to their rooms for safety,
nursing homes have replaced daily activities with
family video calls. Shows like Netlix’s top-ranked
Tiger King
are escapes to even-crazier realities.
And for millions of Americans now struggling
with isolation or depression, screens are a path
for healing.
Every day at 9pm, 28-year-old New York
comedian Kelly Bachman hops on a video chat
with complete strangers from around the world to
read aloud
Harry Potter
.
The connection is a “joyful constant,” she
said. “We are trying to ind light in dark places as
Dumbledore would.”
Unsurprising to anyone sheltering in place
alone or home schooling kids, Americans fortunate
enough to have home broadband have never used
it more. Comcast said its peak network trafic is up
as much as 60 per cent in some regions.
Verizon said overall network trafic for video
games is up 102 per cent .
Half of Americans think a home Internet outage
would be a “very big” problem right now, according
to the Pew Research Center.
We tried reaching out to some of the people
who made screen time a bad word.
Some declined to talk about how they were
coping holed up sans screens, even though they
sure seemed busy tweeting and blogging.
What we heard from most other doctors and
therapists is that it’s okay to have more screen time
now - just try to focus on the quality kind.
“I don’t want parents to beat themselves up
about anything,” said Nusheen Ameenuddin, a Mayo
Clinic doctor and chair of the American Academy of
Pediatrics council on communications and media.
“These are really extraordinary, unusual circum-
stances and we don’t expect anyone - even before
COVID¢19 - to follow rules 100 per cent.”
It’s not so much that phones and tablets are all
good now.
The lesson, as family media advocacy
organisation Common Sense Media advised this
week, is that perhaps the wrong idea entered
popular culture: that all screen time was the same.
EvenJeanTwenge,theauthorofthealarm-ringing
2017 book
IGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids
Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less
Happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood
,
has some slightly updated advice for parents.
“Spending an hour or two a day with devices
during leisure time doesn’t seem to be harmful for
mental health,” she wrote in a blog post last week.
In an interview, Twenge said what’s new is that
shewould “givemore leeway for video chat, because
that is the closest we can come to in-person social
interaction.”
She still has concerns about the mental health
of teens who spend too much time on Facebook,
Instagram and TikTok, and recommends limiting
that to an hour a day.
There’s no way yet to quantify the impact
weeks or months of extra screen time could have,
she warned. Kids’ minds aren’t the same as those
of adults. “The advent of the smartphone and
social media was already this vast uncontrolled
experiment, and then we put this pandemic on top
of it. We’re all kind of living like rats in a cage, so
who knows what’s going to happen,” said Twenge.
Technology