How many hours a day do you spend looking at screens?

My time trackers tell me I am averaging around 10 hours a day on screen, about twice what I would have guessed. My initial response to this? Shock and dismay.

I’ve always considered myself to be a moderate user, spending only a few moments at a time on devices. I check my phone first thing in the morning for any overnight messages. Some days I have a morning chat with one of my mostly ‘text-only’ children. This is usually followed by email processing, which also involves generating a few new ones. After breakfast, I get on the computer again to check a couple of news feeds, which are usually loaded with catchy headlines or clickbait for innovative ‘must have’ products. More days than I’d like to admit, I end up scouring Amazon for something or another. I will also visit various websites to check reviews of the products I find interesting. Throughout the day, in my spare time, I read some of the more than 2,000 books I have on my iPad Kindle. Oh, and I shouldn’t forget the computer games and the time I spend sending jokes or interesting articles to friends. Finally, I’ll spend a few hours working, either on Zoom or writing something like this essay or looking around the Internet doing research on whatever I am interested in at the moment.

And somehow that adds up to 10 hours out of every 24? This doesn’t even include the one or two hours I spend each evening watching on-demand streaming services.

Okay. So I’ve become addicted to the screen, to scouring its avalanche of information, viewing endless content curated by algorithms, and spending way too much time in search of something that is just a few keystrokes away. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Many of us are spending most of our lives looking at screens and drifting into a kind of vicarious relationship with life. We’ve become a society of spectators.

In the past, we needed to experience something—or at least to have a conversation with someone who had experienced it—to know about it. Today, we are becoming less and less able to readily distinguish what’s fabricated from what’s real, especially with artificial intelligence being integrated with our online platforms and tools. I speculate this may be one reason not only for the current controversy about fake news and the general lack of trust in many of our previously trusted sources of information, but also for the complacency I mentioned in my last essay.

Becoming a spectator society eventually leads people to fall in love with their own point of view, their personal notion of reality, often to the exclusion of other views. This can account for much of the ideological polarization in our country. As an individual spectator, it is then easy to drift into a kind of ‘sleep walking’ through life, believing you know what you’re talking about and processing all you take in based on whether you agree or disagree with it. Everything you read or listen to either matches your preexisting beliefs or you reject it or discount it altogether. (Even as you are reading this, notice how many times the little voice in your head says, “I agree” or “I disagree.”)

If this is our principle for ‘sorting’ all incoming information, punditry, educational opportunities and just ordinary conversations, then we’ve essentially created a way of relating to the world where it is rare to learn anything new. It’s all either more of what we already know or simply wrong and ill informed.

As a way of relating to the world, this must inevitably lead us to a future that is ‘more of the same’.

The idea that people will ‘see what they believe’ isn’t new. There is abundant research into human belief and how it may or may not translate into our actions. In a very informative article from The New Yorker, Manvir Singh offers insights into how information, misinformation and disinformation may be affecting how we understand our world. He mentions that, in January, the World Economic Forum reported 1,490 international experts had declared the “leading global risk of the next two years” was neither climate change, migration nor war. It was, you guessed it, “misinformation and disinformation”.

I  am not sure that anyone has suggested a correlation between this and how many hours and how much screen time we spend on the internet. But a correlation makes sense, especially when you consider the ‘echo chamber’ effect of algorithms curating our content and the lack of critical or rigorous thinking underlying much, if not most, of our relationship with information. At the end of the day, however, the value of any speculation, commentary or shared observation is how it impacts or can impact action—specifically in the form of our behaviors or our relationships with others and the world.

Introducing any new technology can be likened to opening Pandora’s Box: the consequences can never be known in advance.

When it comes to the combination of computer technology, the Internet and the many devices we have with screens, the cat is definitely out of the bag. It’s now impossible to roll back time to some idealized pre-screen era. Besides, as my wife pointed out to me, all these screens and the technologies behind them are just tools.

We live in a much larger world than we did a century ago. Most of us have many more relationships than in earlier times. In the past, we might have only been marginally aware of what’s going on the Middle East or Ukraine, not to mention how quickly artificial intelligence is advancing, or how polarized our political discourse has become. The most we can do now is accept the fact that each of us needs to become our own ‘curator’ of what we consume and our own ‘abriter’ of what we do with the information we acquire.

One way of understanding your relationship to the Internet and all of the different kinds of activity it makes possible is to think of everything you do online as a conversation. This seems obvious when it comes to emails, texts and Zoom calls. It is also a good way of observing how you relate to anything online. Think of that content, whatever it may be, as a conversation you are having with yourself as you read, watch or listen. You can read, watch or listen for understanding, not for whether you agree or disagree. As human beings, we all have a choice in how we listen and participate in conversations. Listening is not the same as hearing. We can learn to be interested, to pay attention, to question our own thinking, and to challenge our assumptions.

For myself, I see an opportunity here to improve my ability to listen rigorously in this way and to not jump on the first thought that comes into my mind. I’m taking this on as a self-improvement project: I’ll focus on inquiring into what is said, why it is said, the author’s qualifications, and the value of what is being said.  

I am no longer dismayed by how much screen time I am logging. But now I am committed to pay a lot more attention to the intention behind and quality of the conversations I am part of. I can interrupt tendencies to view everything on the screen as more or less the same, to be titillated by idle curiosity, or to numb myself with topics I have no interest in.

I recognize I’m embarking on developing a new skill. And, as is the case in developing any new skill, it probably won’t be easy.  It requires that I acknowledge how much of my life is lived on automatic and how my way of being is mostly habitual. To listen rigorously requires that I remain conscious and present in the conversation.

I’ll report on progress in future posts.

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Originally published June 13, 2024 at Jim Selman’s Substack “At the Crossroads“