why Matty can't read

on the screen, that is

We have instituted a new rule in our house: a hard recreational screen time cap for all family members of one hour per day.¹ The reason for this new stricture is some emerging evidence—anecdotal, but confirmed by light googling to be backed by our prestige medical and social scientific authorities—that too much screen time makes our kids sullen, grumpy, and, counterintuitively, aggressive. Lately we’ve noticed that all our children’s biggest meltdowns and fights all happen in and around screen time. A simple request—“can you please come to the table for dinner?”—can become an enormous brawl with our younger kids, and can even be met with eye rolls from the larger ones, who, I assure you, know and usually choose much better. Maybe my kids are unusually ill-tempered, but my, again anecdotal, evidence suggests a fairly clear cause. But why?

It seems odd that this would be the case—shouldn’t the passivity of the experience of screens make us passive in turn? But we also all know people who become much more aggressive in online interactions than in person. My own phenomenological² explanation for the connection goes something like this: screens make us aggressive because they are themselves tractable, amenable to our desires. “Lag” is the chief vice of any screen, and what is lag but the screen’s failure to give immediate compliance to my touch? Less tangibly, screens are programmed to show us what we want—or at least to guess. So the experience of the world on a screen is ideally without friction.

Real life, by comparison, and especially relationship with other human beings, pushes back. The world does not conform itself to my desires, but often resists them (thank goodness). Not only this, the most rewarding parts of human life often involve this dynamic relationship between human input and the resonance of the world. If I want the world to reflect what I want, I have to give it a bit of what it wants: an improved running time requires the pain and inconvenience of training, maybe overcoming injuries. If I could simply pay to win or select a faster time from a drop-down menu, I would cease to be interested in running. The world, especially the human world, needs to be resonant if it is going to be meaningful. but too much time on the screens leads me to believe I live in a ductile world, one that ought to respond to my desires. When I experience the resonance of the world, I do not see it not as an opportunity for self-efficacy, but as an act of aggression against me.³

Sometimes I think about something a therapist friend once told me about adult children of alcoholics: they often have difficulty coping with their emotions, because they’ve never had someone model appropriate coping mechanisms for them. Why? Because alcoholics characteristically deal with emotions by, you guessed it, drinking. Do I unconsciously do the same thing with my phone and my own kids? Rather than experiencing the unpleasant friction of the world, isn’t it easier to retreat to the “place” where all the rough edges are smoothed away? Why does everyone Millennial and younger hate phone calls so much? An incoming call overrides whatever else I am trying to do on the phone, making it both not a what and a when.

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But I started thinking about screens today for another reason, which is related. I was trying to remember a series of requirements for an administrative task I was doing at work today. I was reading them on a PDF and they’d flee my mind whenever I had to relate them to the file I was assessing. Then I remembered I had a paper copy of the PDF, and after reading the same document once on paper, my comprehension and retention were both far better. I know this is the case from the year and a half I spent teaching online, but the difference is as striking as it is persistent.

I have wondered why paper is better than the screen for a long time now: but isn’t it a version of the same problem? When I approach a text on a screen, I’m expecting it to be as easy and pleasing there as everything else is. I immediately start to skim, to read badly. This is, of course, if I don’t immediately address my frustration by distracting myself with, say, a wiki on the magic system of a manga I’ve never read, or a YouTube video of professional esports I’m not even that interested in. It’s embarrassing to admit, and I think people in my line of work have powerful incentives not to do so (if we can’t read well, what can we do?).

I also happen to believe that the best books are often difficult or obscure on purpose, and that we are often not the best readers of older books because of our expectations of clarity and ease. And so the form of the screen actively works against the content of the sorts of things I often have to read. So I think the good news here is that we can not only learn to appreciate the resonance of the world through books, but that, often, the very way they’re written reinforces this lesson. It also gives me a good idea of what to do with my kids when they inevitably run through their hour, and that what educators at every level can easily do to introduce some salutary frustration.

1. This is in addition to the longstanding rules of no screen time before 4pm ever, and no screen time before rooms are cleaned, homework finished, music practiced, immediately before bed, etc.

2. Phenomenology, here, means something like “a science of intentions:” what description can we give to the world as human beings inhabit it?

3. I’m applying sociologist' Hartmutt Rosa’s concepts of “resonance” and “uncontrollability” here, though the application of the concepts to screen time are mine. Here is a good primer. I also can’t recommend his little book The Uncontrollability of the World enough.