If you told a 10 year old today that watching too much TV would turn their eyes square. They wouldn’t even so much as look up from their iPad.
In a world of hi-res screens in our pockets. The idea of a stationary screen with limited capabilities, seems frankly archaic. Now, the TV is simply something that is on in the background whilst scrolling on your phone.
The proposal of sitting down as a family to watch a film, or going to the cinema. Is viewed as a lovely way to spend time together. Once considered an indulgence, now is quality family time. The big screen, gets you off your small screen.
Spending two hours watching a film with your phone turned off, is modernist meditation. An exercise in mindfulness if you will. With a multitude of voices constantly vying for our attention, focussing on any one thing for over 5 minutes will get rewarded with nothing short of a pat on the back.
30 years ago, being stuck in front of the TV watching films was considered an evil that was corrupting the youth. Parents would beg their kids to go and read a book, or at least that’s how it plays out in the films from that era. Whereas being stuck in front of the TV is nowadays considered nostalgic and passé. Furthermore, it’s not ridiculous to presume that in another 30 years we will bargaining with our kids, exclaiming “why can’t you just play on your iPad instead?”.
These shifting goalposts aren’t a slight at parents, or even adults who themselves are trying to deal with putting limitations on their own screen-time. Nor are they a reflection of the decline in our greater society’s moral fibre, which some fire and brimstone news outlets would have you believe. It’s all a lot less dramatic than that.
When boiled down, it is not our standards slipping. Rather it is just clear evidence that these “standards” are toothless and inane. In a world where the technology that humanity creates, is leaps and bounds ahead of our ability to fully understand it. These rules are mostly put in place out of fear of the unknown. A hapless attempt to get a grasp on technology we don’t understand, by promoting a technology that we do understand. Whether that be a book instead of the TV, or the TV instead of an iPad. We are encouraging the one we understand, the one we think we can better control.
With mental health at the forefront of all these conversations, as the component that will be negatively affected by the overuse of a screen. It is then better to move the conversation from one which is centred around choosing the lesser of these two evils. To realising what all of these pastimes have in common, and what it is that we are essentially discouraging: isolation.
For some, isolation is relaxation. For others it is a sign of declining mental health. Truth be told, communication is the only way to discern the difference. Relaxation can indeed be as simple as doing one thing at a time, and if that is watching a film with no other distractions. It cannot be faulted.
