Shedd Aquarium, Chicago, United States. Photo by Lance Anderson
It’s so easy to use the default vocabulary—screentime, smartphone, newsfeed, texting, digital native/digital immigrant…but is it serving us?
I think we’re continually called—as parents, educators, and tech users ourselves—to question our language and become more nuanced and articulate in how we communicate about our interactions with technology.
I have been appreciating the recent efforts by Sonia Livingstone and colleague Natalia Kucirkova to “explore the problematic concept of screen time and measuring technology usage in terms of quantity rather than quality.” Sonia Livingstone is Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the lead investigator of the Parenting for a Digital Future research project. Natalia Kucirkova is a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London.
In this recent post, “Why the very idea of ‘screen time’ is muddled and misguided,” they write:
Most screens are now multifunctional, so unless we specify the content, context, and connections involved in particular screen time activities, any discussion will be muddled…Technology use is complex and takes time to understand. Content matters. Context matters. Connections matter.
And in the July 2016 report, Families and screentime: Current advice and emerging research, co-authored with Alicia Blum-Ross, Sonia expands on what she means by content, context, and connections:
…screen time now includes time for learning, entertainment, a conduit to relationships and information, a place for creativity and even civic action, as well as a source of problems and risk. The historical focus on screen time has been at the expense of supporting parents to assess the contexts in which their children use screens (where, when, why and with what effects), the content they are accessing (a minority of content is objectionable while the majority is innocuous or indeed positive), and the connections they are fostering through screens.
Here’s an experiment: Challenge yourself and the whole family to strike screen time from your vocabulary this week. Try keeping a daily log for seven days, visually mapping Content, Context, and Connections. Share your maps with each other. You could even gamify the experiment with points for breaking down and describing content, context, and connections, and minus points for saying the “S” word. Send me photos of your leaderboard (write me here and I’ll tell you how to share your photos with me). I’ll schedule a video conversation with you (and your fellow players if they’re interested).
What’s ahead? I’ll take on the default word “smartphone” next. Stay tuned.
What I’m listening to: BirdNote (you have subscribed by now, haven’t you?) answers the big question, Is that big black bird a crow or a raven?
