The Invisible Problem with Screening
The Pew Research Center finds that 59% of teens have experienced cyberbullying. Meanwhile, the cultivation of extremist political dialogues and the normalization of violently sexist frameworks continues online.
Researchers seem divided on the possible causes of or expansions in these phenomena. But this writer suggests a simple and distinctly non-endemic culprit to name, an invisible one at that: screens.
Founding editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, writes in his book of tech trend predictions, The Inevitable (2016) that we have recently entered a transition from being “People of the Book” to being “People of the Screen.”
He details a kind of competition between these two cultures — one, which values authorship, contract, authority secured by writing, and the other which praises the visual new above all — as we move ever towards a society of ubiquitous “screening.”
Screening is, as one may infer, our investment in staring at technologies which employ a screen for interfacing: our, phones, laptops, television sets, et cetera. Kelly suggests that these will only increase as we race into the future, that screens will be steadily built into every surface we encounter.
