I follow a few digital minimalism-related subreddits and hashtags on Reddit and Mastodon respectively. I started following these communities about a year ago, while trying to work through my then-worrisome addiction to my smartphone. I’ve found them helpful (for the most part), but there’s one aspect about these communities that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: that is, their excessive focus on reducing screen time above all else and an associated blanket repudiation of all screens.
Here’s a slightly-exaggerated example of the sort of conversation you could expect to see on r/digitalminimalism, for instance:
Recovering Screen Addict: So, I bought a dumbphone, shut down all of my social media accounts, sold my gaming computer, and cancelled all of my streaming subscriptions. I’ve gone from looking at screens all of the time, to barely looking at screens at all. I’m happy I’ve managed to achieve that, but I just want to know… What do you guys do in your free time when you’re bored? I’ve tried reading and listening to CDs, but sometimes I get bored with that. What else can I do?
Community Member: Just sit there quietly with your thoughts, bro. It’s OK to be bored.
Community Member: Go for a walk outside! Talk to a friend over coffee! Pick up knitting! Whatever you do, resist all temptation to look at screens, because if you don’t, you’ll be right back where you started. You’ve got this! 🥰
On the surface, these responses are well-intentioned. Yes, it’s OK to be bored. Yes, going out for a walk, meeting up with a friend, or picking up a low-tech hobby are great alternatives to staring slack-jawed at a screen. I think it’s extremely important, though, for proponents of digital minimalism to not lose sight of the strong possibility that screens themselves are not the problem, and that what we do with our screens is what ultimately matters.
Parallels Between Modern Anti-Screen Discourse and the Anti-TV Movements of the 70s, 80s, and 90s
I’m reminded here of the anti-TV movements that grew evermore intense in the years leading up to the dot-com boom. Television, it was said, was the cause of all of society’s ills. It inspired Marie Winn to publish The Plug-In Drug in 1977, and Neil Postman to publish Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985. It’s worth your time to read these manifestos yourself if you’re interested in learning more about anti-TV discourse during that time, but Trine Syvertsen1 offers a good summary of the authors’ arguments that I’ll quote here:
What is at risk for Postman is the entire enlightenment project; television undermines reason, rationality and print culture, the very foundations of society. “Most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth and information” (29), he writes. But in the 1980s The Age of Television had completely succeeded The Age of Typography. Under the governance of the printing press, public discourse was “coherent, serious and rational,” but under the governance of television it had become “shrivelled and absurd” (16), “getting sillier by the minute” (24).
Postman’s message is classical pro-print, anti-screen. And while Mander had tried to use television for beneficial purposes, Postman sees no purpose in trying. But the conclusions are the same: television is irredeemable.
[…]
Like Mander and Postman, Winn is critical of attempts to improve television or using it for beneficial purposes (6). She ridicules researchers for measuring the effects of specific content, when what matters is “[t]he very nature of the television experience” (3). Although Winn sees television itself to be the problem, her concerns differ from Mander’s and Postman’s, and she calls McLuhan “apocalyptic” (3).
To Winn, television destroys mental and physical health, and undermines community, particularly its key element: the family. Life with television is life without stimulation, with television we see a reversal of human development, she draws parallels with animals raised in cages and children raised by animals. Television is addictive, like drugs and alcohol, and impairs cognition, visualization and concentration.
This should all sound very familiar to you if you’ve spent any amount of time in present-day digital minimalism communities. These authors are effectively talking about what we would now refer to as “brainrot.” I find it rather entertaining to revist these arguments at a time when increasing numbers of young people everywhere are seemingly desperate to return to the pre-Internet days of the 80s and 90s…
Critical and Passive Screen Time
Speaking as someone whose childhood and early teens were defined by the tail-end of the Age of Television, in the years prior to and very shortly after the dot-com boom, my take on television aligns more with that of The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who state in the preamble to their awesome “Television: The Drug of the Nation” music video, “I want them to think anything. I don’t want them not to think. Put something in front of them that could be thought of critically, as opposed to passively.”
When the Internet went mainstream, I predominantly used it to talk with other young people my age about entertainment media – including television. For instance, I visited X-Files fan forums and posted long theories about where I thought the show would go next. I wrote many, many pages of horrendous X-Files fan fiction, and discussed other horrendous X-Files fan fiction with fellow precocious teens who, like me, thought of themselves as “writers.” I joined anti-reality TV webrings and wrote impassioned (if juvenile) screeds on my website about how stupid Big Brother was. I seldom engaged with television screens – or computer screens, for that matter – in a passive manner. I frequently thought critically about what I was watching on television screens, and had conversations with other people about those thoughts via computer screens. Sure, there was some mindless entertainment mixed in with it all2, but on the whole, it was hardly “life without stimulation,” as Marie Winn might have put it
Getting back to the present moment, I think that demonizing all screen time is neither realistic nor helpful for all people who are looking to make positive changes in their lives by doing something about their social media addictions. People who insist that any screen time is a dangerous gateway to endless hours wasted on passive, brainless media consumption, end of story, sound just like the anti-television activists of bygone years who insisted that television of any kind was “irredeemable.” There are risks involved with looking at screens, to be certain, but that’s where the hard work comes in for you as an individual. If abstaining completely from all screens is the only thing that works for you, then by all means, abstain. But I strongly encourage you to resist informing other people who are new to the digital minimalism community that what works for you is the only thing that’ll work for them.
Two personal anecdotes that I think demonstrate this point quite well:
I’ve largely replaced my social media doomscrolling with working on this website. I spend many hours staring at my computer screen every week, but I’m giving my brain a workout in the process: I’m writing blog posts; I’m reading new articles while doing research for my blog posts; I’m learning new code tricks and refining my existing knowledge of HTML and CSS; I’m sharing what I’m learning with other people; and so forth. This is a good thing. Telling me (or anyone else, for that matter) that I must go outside, be bored, and sit with my thoughts instead of staring at my computer screen for hours misses the point entirely.
My husband and I have recently started devoting Saturday nights to watching movies together at home. We generally try to pick something we’ve never seen before, that we can rent cheaply. We watch these movies sans distractions (no phones), and talk about them afterwards. I share brief thoughts about what we’re watching in the media logs section of this website. My husband thinks about ways to include what we’ve watched in his university courses. We enjoy these movie nights together immensely (and no, they’re not just excuses to eat popcorn). Could we go out to a coffee shop on Saturdays and chat about books or world events? Sure, but saying that we should only do that as part of “resist[ing] all temptation to look at screens” again misses the point entirely.
I don’t dispute the fact that smartphones and entertainment-focused screens of various kinds can be a significant problem for a lot of people. I still hope, though, that the digital minimalism community as a whole can start moving beyond the reductive all-or-nothing anti-screen thinking dominating the conversation … which increasingly feels like its sole raison d’être is to promote the sale of low-tech analogue products with no screens.
Never lose sight of the big picture (pardon the pun): we ultimately want to improve our lives and our relationships with other people, and it is possible to do so while using screens for positive purposes – maybe not for everyone, true, but certainly for some of us.
Footnotes
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Source: “‘Get a Life!’ Anti-Television Agitation and Activism.” (2017) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-46499-2_4 ↩
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I’m looking at you, Happy Tree Friends and Family Guy. ↩