The other day I had yet another skirmish with my children in the ongoing battle over screens: I want to limit their screen-time and they think limits are utterly unreasonable. Given that it’s the summer holidays, I gave in to their demands, slightly, and a compromise was reached which, in the true nature of compromise, ultimately pleased no one.
After this recent skirmish, though, I must confess: hours and hours of my life have vanished down the rabbit-hole of social media. It starts innocently enough, with the simple need to check a detail for something I’m working on, and ends hours later, after three quizzes on BuzzFeed, several Upworthy videos about people being nice to each other, and a dose of the ubiquitous Kardashian family, whose existence in popular culture I cannot explain but whose exploits hypnotise me the way snakes hypnotise birds.
The mindless click-throughs happen with roughly the same frequency that I used to stop for a cigarette, decades ago. I’d write a few pages, and then light up as I reread my work. Now I write for a while, then float around in the internet for a while, then return to my work. But unlike cigarettes, the internet has no natural end; it just goes on and on, an infinite space filled with kitten videos.
I’m far from alone in my addiction, however, as even a short walk through almost any city in the world will demonstrate. Parents push their babies in strollers with one hand and hold a phone with the other; couples walk together while they separately check their phones; groups of teenagers stand at the corner and text friends who are somewhere else. Even though I know how difficult it is to relinquish that social-media tether, I have to wonder what our digital habits are doing to our children, particularly to the youngsters who look up at mummy or daddy in the park only to see, instead of that parental smile, the back of a screen, as emails are checked or Instagrams received. How long before the child touches that silver Apple and murmurs: “Papa?”
Earlier this week, I was at a blogging and tech conference held, appropriately, in California’s Silicon Valley. The conference was for the most part a celebration of internet culture: blogging and social media were extolled as ways to build community and create powerful platforms for important but often unheralded issues, particularly those having to do with women and children: difficult issues like eating disorders, post-partum depression, abuse and domestic violence, special needs education. These online communities also provide platforms to women across the globe, giving them an opportunity and a means to work together on globally pressing issues like children’s health and education. The internet – despite the presence of the Kardashians – can be a force for good, there is no question.
One of the speakers at the conference was a woman who founded what has become a portal for the social media rabbit-hole: Arianna Huffington, founder of the ubiquitous Huffington Post.
She sold it in 2013 and now spends her time with other media projects, working on international issues and writing books. During her half-hour speech at the conference, she talked at length about her new book, Thrive, which presents the case for what she calls the “third metric”. She urges us to use this metric –comprising wisdom, well-being, wonder and compassion – to redefine success. She suggests moving away from thinking about our lives in terms of a “résumé”, with priority given to job titles and awards, towards thinking about our lives as they might be eulogised: whose lives we touched, what relationships we created.
I don’t know Ms Huffington and I’m not usually a fan of self-help books, but the advice she offers in Thrive makes sense, particularly the idea of what she calls a “digital detox”: regular time off from all screens.
My children won’t share my enthusiasm for this detox idea, so I will simply lead by example. I’ll do my own private detox, say on Fridays from 11am to 4pm. No smartphone use except to take pictures (but no insta-posts to social media), no email, no tablet except for whatever novel I’m reading.
My fingers will itch to swipe a screen, and I will struggle to get through an entire day without a Kardashian update, but it’s for my own good. Won’t you join me? After, that is, you finish updating your Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her novel The Time Locket (written as Deborah Quinn) is now available on Amazon
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