Doing Screen Time
Reflections on the screen at home and in school
Several months ago I participated in an NPR listening session, Signal and Noise: Parenting in the Digital Age, skillfully facilitated by Anya Kamenetz of NPR. The session was convened to guide parents desperate for information on how to raise kids in this screen-saturated world when they themselves are spending, on average, 9 hours and 22 minutes a day in front of a screen. The room, filled with researchers, bloggers, teachers, and academics who were also parents, vibrated with a complex stew of emotions as participants grappled with and sought to reconcile questions of professional and personal identity. I left the event newly curious about screen time as a discursive frame and what its salience and stickiness says about our culture, and how we might learn from our collective anxieties.
Implicit in the formulation of screen time is the assumption that a good parent carefully manages and curates children’s exposure to screens in the home. The “good parent” is positioned as a consumer of best practices generated by supposedly neutral science. One such provider of expert knowledge is the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recently issued updated screen time recommendations, even if, as Sonia Livingstone has pointed out, there is a surprising lack of empirical evidence behind some of the recommendations. To guard against threats like obesity, lack of sleep, problems at school, aggression, declining attention spans, and other behavioral issues, families are advised to adopt Family Media Plans, using the AAP’s own interactive tool. Posted on the refrigerator, the plan presumably disciplines the entire family into compliance by its simple existence, or else by drawing attention to the gap between intention and reality.
Juxtapose the disciplining rhetoric surrounding domestic screen time (bad screens) with the comparably enthusiastic embrace of the digital within formal educational settings (good screens). Within schools, screen-mediated activities are imagined to enhance the efficient delivery of “content,” create economies of scale, permit learners to access high quality instructional materials at any time and at any pace, enable more personalized instruction, facilitate formative assessment to improve teachers’ practice and students’ outcomes, lead to breakthroughs in learning theory, and prepare students for possible future employment in the tech sector. One such initiative is the new Computer Science For All (CS4All) program in New York City, an $81 million program that will roll out over ten years with the goal that every public school student in grades K-12 in all 1,700 of NYC public schools receives a “meaningful, high-quality computer science education” by 2025. The proposal is an ambitious one, especially given the state of the physical plant and technological infrastructure (or lack thereof) in most NYC public schools, but it has attracted the support of foundations, the tech sector, and venture capital, as well as the public sector.
To ask what seems like an obvious question, why are we putting so much pressure on parents to manage and limit screen time, while schools are facing the opposite pressure to incorporate digital tools?
Ellen Seiter has written about how parents and teachers claim social status and cultural capital by distinguishing between passive and active uses of screens. In an earlier era this distinction mapped to material differences: the television versus the computer; now it maps to the private space of reproduction and renewal, the home, versus the public space of productive citizenship, the school. What are the ideological forces and organizational and institutional actors playing in the educational space, and what are their agendas in linking the use of digital tools, platforms, and technologies to individual and national economic competitiveness in a global knowledge economy? Whose interests are served by coding domestic spaces as problematic, risky sites for technology usage and whose interests are served when big data comes to school? Why must parents be anxious about home screen use, while we talk about the transformative power of technology in the educational space? Each produces and enables the other.
In the cultural turn toward the scientific management and datafication of everything, parenting is figured as a practice, a becoming, existing in tension with the parent as a being, that which one is by virtue of having biological offspring or dependents by other means. With the breakdown of traditional social structures, the regentrification of urban America and its consequent resegregation by race and income, the decline in multigenerational family living, the neurocognitive turn in scientific thinking, the neoliberal emphasis on personal responsibility, and the popularity of self improvement and life hacking, just being starts to feel like a profoundly risky endeavor. Better to do something, to manage and apportion our temporal, energetic and financial resources, for such acts feel safe, soothing somehow, an insurance policy against insecure and anxious times.
As C.G. Jung remarked, “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
Unresolved issues in our own psychology and experience prevent us from seeing our children in their fullness and particularity as human beings, and predisposes us to projecting our own regrets, anxieties, and blockages onto them, obstructing their process of coming fully into themselves. We might likewise look at the discursive construction of screen time as a feature of our collective psyche and ask what its resonance reveals about our society and its fault lines. Rather than as a framework for the temporal management of screen-based media consumption, the construct might be more usefully taken as an invitation to look more closely at our society and to ask ourselves how it is that we want to live. Perhaps the unlived life of our society, that which we are afraid to examine, poses the greatest risk to our collective future.
Claire Fontaine is an educational researcher at Data & Society committed to social justice, with a background in collaborative youth-centered methodologies. Her work interrogates the relationship between educational data and inequality, highlighting the ways that data masks processes of social reproduction and proposing interventions that flip the script of accountability.
Points: Claire Fontaine’s debut on Points, “Doing Screen Time,” resourcefully unwinds the apparent contradiction between anxiety around screen time at home and support for screen time at school: “Each produces and enables the other.” Looking into this dynamic is an occasion for asking, collectively, how we want to live. (For more essays from Data & Society on tech, data, and education, visit Enabling Connected Learning on Medium.)— Ed.
