It's a handy explanation, and it happens in a phrase or just a single word. At different times it might’ve been “television,” the addictive properties of which produced “couch potatoes.” Then it was “the internet” in general and then “social media.” “Gaming” makes incels and shooters, allegedly. Finally all bad things narrowed down to one villain responsible for making us all idiots and addicts: “screens.” Perhaps you've heard this. There is a consensus that merely looking at screens damages brains. I don't really believe it, but does it damage brains more than looking at a piece of paper with images and words on it?
When I was a kid, and though I started kind of late, I was addicted to reading. I read The Washington Post front to back every morning from age 12. I couldn't go to the bathroom or eat a meal without a book or magazine. I'd sit at the table reading the cereal box over and over. My parents, far from worrying about my brain damage and corruptibility, found this encouraging. They thought I might end up as a writer. I spent all day staring at the pages of books and magazines and random scraps of paper. These days you'd call it "doomscrolling."
A study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2020, says that more than seven hours a day of screen time “thins the brain's white matter” and reduces “auditory processing,” probably because it’s primarily visual. Did reading text on paper all day every day thin my white matter? No one cared because everyone was encouraging me to read. And even now, no one is going into a moral panic about books. Wait, I take that back.
Paper and screen are both absorbing mediums for presenting words and images. What’s supposed to account for the alleged fact that paper has salutary effects while screens destroy brains? The backlighting? In your attack on screens, I think that this is all you've got, the only plausibly relevant difference between the two mediums. If that's the problem you might work on your screen's color scheme or try a Kindle Paperwhite™.
Many seemingly responsible commentators as well as many who aren’t so responsible blame “screens” for just about everything that goes wrong. In a typical construction, Thomas Edsall in The New York Times writes about "the rise of the smart phone and the fall of western democracy."
Was the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 and 2024 one of the costs of social media? Is the rise in right-wing populism in the United States and Europe — accompanied by democratic backsliding in country after country — another cost? On another front of equal importance, has a generation of young men and women, especially young liberal women, suffered heightened levels of depression and anxiety because of social media? Are new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, weakening the ability of students to think and reason at length and in depth? Do they help explain declining reading scores?
Edsall doesn’t, in that headline or the article that follows, assert causation between screens and Trump, screens and depression among young women, screens and sinking test scores. He merely hints at it with every question mark.
Facebook is a doomsday machine, wrote the Atlantic editor Adrienne LaFrance in 2020. I don't think the magazine's readership, most of which was reading that on a screen, could’ve been surprised by the claim. By '20, these were commonplaces, but then and now they’re vague and implausible.
The claims made by LaFrance or encoded in Edsall's questions tend to pass through us without quibble or question. Of course, social media is responsible for the rise of right-wing populism. They seemed to increase around the same time, after all. And what else could be responsible? But as an explanation of any widespread social phenomenon, “social media” or “screens” are just words. They don’t amount to a causal account of anything. And in their role as universal explainers of everything that ails us, they’re absurdly inadequate.
It's true that screens, social media and artificial intelligence feature “algorithms,” which are often portrayed as a kind of super-villain, drawing us in to their dens of destruction. But the daily newspaper or magazine also had many semi-mechanical procedures for sorting out stories and deciding which to present to whom. They had “style guides” and a house style. They decided to cover story x and ditch story y. Mademoiselle or The New Yorker had or has certain target audiences, modes of self-promotion, kinds of stories or people they emphasized, political prepossessions that they consistently confirmed. Ernest Hemingway was, among other things, a device for sorting, leaving some things out and emphasizing others.
And by the way, the novel and the newspaper emphasized sensational stories of love and murder, though for some reason people seem to think that print is rational and screens emotional. George Will quotes a pet expert to the effect that “The shift from rationality to emotionality" has "made negativity mandatory." Will's explanation for “negativity” seems to be sheer “velocity” of information crossing screens, but the daily newspaper's five-or-so editions also moved text and image quickly through your city. Something has gone wrong, we can agree. We don't agree, however, on whether “screens” and “velocity” amount to an adequate explanation.
You can present any sort of material, rational or emotional or both or neither, on the page or on the screen. David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding has been electronically published and is available for download. It reads just the same on the screen or on paper, except for the backlighting. Same with Stephen King's horror novels or The Story of O.
And I want to remind young naifs such as Edsall and Will that bad shit happened even before everyone was staring at screens. Facebook didn't invent “emotionality,” for example, or “negativity.” Blaming the backlighting for everything that ails us isn’t sensible. It's a bunch of panicky hand-waving that means something like "everything's wrong and we don't know why!" Well, stay calm and keep scrolling. There’s no convincing reason not to.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X and Bluesky: @CrispinSartwell