Screen Time

Dr. Vrooman

Social Media and Society

Emma Taylor

February 23, 2019

Screen Time

Today we’re going to be talking about the idea and reality of the iTreaner.  James Williams gave us the concept of the iTrainer in his book Bring Your Own Boundaries.  They are small bricks that you can fit in your pocket so you can carry them with you anywhere you go and always have them easily accessible.  It can do all these amazing things like search things on google, tell you what the weather's like so you don’t have to go outside and check for yourself, you can play games on it, it can even wake you up in the morning.  Sounds pretty great right? A dream come true? But what about the catch? It sends you little notifications every few minutes maybe even few seconds and vibrates and rings for your attention constantly. It is designed to be an, “impuls training device.”  It wants all your undivided attention, all the time, all day, and all night long. Would you still have one? Chances are that you already do. Technology in our day in age works in a way that is designed to be attention catching and distracting. We are supposed to want to be engaged with it constantly so that the companies that create the devices generate more and more money.  Is there a way to still interact with technology in a society that is obsessed with it without being engulfed by it ourselves? I say there is.

We miss so much through staring at our screens.  Walking down the sidewalk engulfed in your phone instead of smiling at people walking around you, maybe even using your screen as an excuse to avoid making eye contact.  Think about it, even as you are right now, right this second reading this blog, what are you missing around you? Details of things happening around you or missing an opportunity to talk with a friend or embrace your surroundings.  But then again what would we be missing if we didn’t have technology as it is today? The knowledge that it brings to our fingertips is endless, knowledge that can teach you how to better your chances of obtaining a job that makes you happy, knowledge that can better help you understand different cultures and societies, knowledge that could even potentially save someone's life… So what would we be missing without it?  Is the loss greater than the reward of leaving our screens behind or would deciding to be screen free make our lives oh so much better? The happy medium I think most of us can deal with (or at least learn to live with) is cutting back on screen time a little every day. Setting timers on social medias can really help with stripping away useless screen time. This would keep us from mindlessly getting caught in the numbness of  I think the benefits of this could be outstanding to our society and everyone in it. More face to face conversations could lead to more confident and emotionally intelligent people. It might sound cliche and sunshiny, but I truly believe that the more real life and meaningful connections we make the better off we will be because of it.

Right now children are growing up on screens and already being trained to have a few seconds of attention span for any given thing.  Our societies attentions spans are steadily decreasing as it is and with further technological advancements I fear that our attentions spans will further decrees.  It is not that technology itself steals our attention and time, but the way we use it that greatly affects us. We often check our phones hundreds of times per day and spend countless hours scrolling, liking, posting and commenting.  Our phones make it so easy for us to stay connected and constantly have everything at our fingertips so that it is hard to peel ourselves away once you have started. Millions of people are addicted to technology and cell phones and don’t even know it.  Technology is so prevalent in our society that we don’t see the signs of addiction when they are present. It is so normal to keep checking your phone or freak out if you lose it or are parted from it for even a little while or forget it at you house that people don’t think about the fact that their bodies are becoming reliant on having the constant stimulation that it gives us.  Our society needs to learn how to control the impulses we have to gain all the virtual reality stimulant we can obtain. We’ve become so overwhelmed with all the noise of the internet and social media that we don’t pay attention to the real world quiet as much as we possibly should. I think if we learn more self control and learn to recognize the unuseful time we spend on our screens we could become a much more productive and successful culture.