The anti-screen-interaction message is overly prescriptive (and kind of lazy at this point)
The video everyone is sharing right now:
There are a lot of these kinds of videos and essays and comedy routines, and they all say the same things:
- We spend too much time looking down at our devices
- therefore, we are missing out on “real” human interactions and experiences
- the human race is going to die out because no one will ever interact enough to have sex ever again
This is probably a real, daily problem/concern for people who:
- are physically near to all the people they love
- do not have a smartphone, or don’t have a well-developed “screen-based” social network to interact with on that smartphone
- enjoy and expect casual chats with strangers
- are in a place where they feel safe and comfortable to have casual chats with strangers
What I perceive from the video is a general irritation from a person who roughly meets the criteria above — this person wants to start conversations with strangers, and meet their soulmate in the street, but everyone is looking at their phones! (subtext: How dare they, when I want to talk to them?)
This attitude is applied prescriptively, however, and that frustrates me for several reasons:
- Someone probably said the same thing when people first started getting telephones for their homes- it’s just a form of social interaction that is new, and some people have only had a few bad experiences with it, but these technologies are not going to fundamentally corrupt human interaction; in fact -
- This argument fails to recognize how AMAZING it is that we never have to completely lose touch with anyone ever again, that we can live independent lives and pursue our own goals and move far away and still have incredibly close relationships with the people and communities we care about
- It devalues relationships which have to be pursued primarily on screens
- It over-values in-person conversations with random strangers, which makes me ask:
What if I don’t want to talk to you, stranger? What if I live in a city where some strangers are verbally harassing? What if I am just tired and irritable and I don’t want to smile at someone for 10 minutes trying to think of casual, pleasant things to say?
More broadly, what if I love what I am doing on my phone? What if I love my podcasts and my articles and my text messages and my facebook newsfeed? What if I am not searching for ways to avoid human interaction but instead engaging in meaningful if non-traditional forms of human interaction — and I don’t want to be interupted by a non-meaningful traditional interaction?
It’s accurate that people are more often unavailable for in-person conversation because more people are spending more time having conversations on screens. This is true. This can sometimes be a problem, in certain circumstances and for certain people — but it can also be seen as an enabling of geography-irrelevant communities. I celebrate every day the fact that I don’t have to worry about falling out of touch with friends who are now in other cities, coasts, and continents; I find myself re-connecting with people I knew in elementary school or at random summer programs and re-solidifying communities that even a decade ago would have been lost forever.
So, can we please start having balanced conversations about the value of screen-based social interactions, and develop etiquette rules which value both kinds of interactions?
