Digital overconsumption

You can put your children in front of screens, but those who make the screens will continue to put their children in front of books.»
Guillaume Erner, professor of sociology

Across from my apartment lives a family with a large TV covering an entire wall in their apartment. Even from a couple hundred meters away, the heads on the TV screen are many times larger than those of the residents inside. From my kitchen, I can see about half the screen, and when I glance up from my home office desk at the trees at the end of the street to ponder something, the immense TV screen grabs my attention. It starts in the left corner of my eye, quickly drawing in the rest of the eye and then the other eye. For behold! A giant football slowly crosses the screen. A car speeds wildly down a highway. An abnormally large head talks, its mouth alone bigger than my hand. And I, who don’t even own a TV, find myself following what the neighbors are watching. I have to imagine the sounds. I assume they have a surround sound system.

After the neighbours had a child, the programming quickly expanded. Blocks, balls, and various colourful shapes now move around on the TV screen when I wake up and in the afternoon. One children’s program after another on the voluminous screen has left me horrified and uneasy.

When I came across Michel Desmurget’s Screen Damage, I felt the urge to cross the street, ring their doorbell, and ask them to read this important book about children’s screen use and its consequences, especially for children between zero and six. Desmurget questions whether the digital revolution is an opportunity for future generations or is it, in Desmurget’s own words, “a grim mechanism for creating imbeciles”?

The digital adventure

According to Desmurget, we are today witnessing a digital overconsumption among children and adolescents that, like any other addiction, would set off all alarm bells. Using research and scientific studies, he debunks myths and urban legends about how smart children and adolescents become from exposure to the digital adventure. According to him, they become good at multitasking but not at evaluating the information that flows in the media channels, and they spend much more time consuming than creating themselves. He also debunks the myth that children and young people fall behind if they do not have access to screens. Instead, he emphasises the importance of other forms of learning between zero and six, while the brain is most plastic, and writes that the digital can steal vital and valuable interaction and development time that a child can never get back. The opportunity to learn the digital, however, always remains open.

My apartment also has several screens, even though I don’t have a TV. None of the neighbours know, but I have, for several years, placed my seven-year-old in front of an iPad, laptop, or phone. Often, the one hour per day we have agreed upon gets stretched. I do not always have good control over the content, for seven is lightning-fast at online maneuvering. The more I read in Screen Damage, the stronger my guilt feels for the damage I must have inflicted on her and my nineteen-year-old son. The reading is so uncomfortable that I google the author Michel Desmurget. He writes with the anger and conviction of an activist. Can he be trusted? Is he really right? Are there no benefits to all these screens? My children are much better at English than I was at their age. Isn’t that something, or?

Desmurget, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, acknowledges in Screen Damage all the obviously positive sides of digital development. But he writes mercilessly about the recreational use of screens by children and adolescents and the digital industry that seeks profit at the expense of consumer health: “If recent history has taught us anything, it is that our industrial friends do not easily give up the profits they amass, even if this is detrimental to consumer health.”

he writes mercilessly about the recreational use of screens by children and adolescents and the digital industry that seeks profit at the expense of consumer health

Minimise accessibility

According to Screen Damage, we may end up with a class divide between those who have been spared screen use and those who have been allowed to consume freely and perhaps been robbed of both sleep and life quality – as well as opportunities for optimal development of their human potential, socially as well as professionally. But fortunately, Desmurget has a cure. It’s free. It’s strict. It’s simple. And it’s reminiscent of any cure for addiction. Minimise accessibility. Children between zero and six should not be exposed to screens at all. Children over six years and adolescents should at most be exposed to screen use in the form of entertainment for half an hour to an hour per day, including watching TV. Preferably not early in the morning before school and not in the evening before they go to sleep. That simple. And that is difficult.