Alec Ward | Romancing the Screen

Talking Backward | Is there a virtue ethic of technology use?

By Alec Ward 08/20/15 5:00am

As a kid growing up, my parents gave me a daily allowance of what we then called “screen time.” At first 30 minutes, later extended to an hour, this was the single portion of the day when I was allowed to watch TV or use our family’s single computer — my dad’s office desktop. We never had video game systems. The philosophical foundation of this restriction, as I always understood it, was that time spent in front of a screen, no matter how much enjoyed, was essentially time wasted; a guilty pleasure akin to sweets — at best, lacking any real virtue, downright harmful in large quantities.

As I aged into late middle and high school, and the number of screens in our household grew to include laptops, iPods, tablets and cell phones, the restrictions loosened and then collapsed altogether. Part of this was certainly due to the ever-increasing use of computers as engines of scholastic productivity, rather than simply entertainment, but as screen-tech proliferated, its perceived status — at least in my household — as essentially devoid of virtue seemed to fade as well.

But it never disappeared entirely. To this day, when I have an empty hour, I find myself performing a sort of automatic moral calculus when I decide whether to spend it in front of a screen or not. Non-screen activities, in my mind, possess a quality of virtue, screen ones a quality of vice. What’s odd is that this persists even when the medium itself is the only difference. On a recent flight to visit family, I read a hard copy of a magazine cover to cover and felt a real sense of accomplishment as I finished the last page. It felt like time well spent. Had I read all the same articles on my laptop, I don’t doubt I would have harbored a sense that I had, in some vague way, wasted those same 90 minutes.

In that particular case, reason tells me that my differing reactions must be born of mere empty prejudice, perhaps a residual neural pathway from those bygone days of being told that TV was bad. Yet there are other times when I think I’m onto something. For years I’ve taken class notes by hand, driven by the general prejudice that not-screen is better than screen. In 2014, however, that particular manifestation of my prejudice was vindicated when the esteemed journal Psychological Science published a joint Princeton/UCLA study which found that students who took longhand paper-and-ink notes retained complex conceptual information better in the long-term than students who typed, even in the absence of any digitally-enabled multitasking. Something about the screen medium itself, independent of what it was used for, was producing inferior results.

Communication is another realm where I think I’m vindicated in my anti-tech biases. Say you had a relative who you hadn’t heard a word from in five years. One day, you get word from him, giving you an update on his status, saying that he’ll be in your area soon and wants to meet up. I suspect you’d find the exact same words far more meaningful if they came through your mail slot, handwritten and stamped, than if they popped up in your inbox amid listserv clutter and weekly notifications from Career Services. I don’t claim to know precisely why that is, but I don’t think I’m wrong.

I don’t really have a strong, writing-seminar-type justificatory proposition about the inherent viciousness of technology to plug here, other than to say that I retain a vague sense — which I suspect others share, and which merits broad consideration — that the tech-as-candy simile which governed my upbringing wasn’t far off the mark. As such, when I see a room full of friends staring zombie-like into their various screens, I can take some solace in the thought (hope?) that, in the timescale of the iPhone age, society is still only about six years old, and that we may yet grow out of our single-minded craving for empty sweets.

ALEC WARD is a College junior from Washington, D.C., studying history. His email address is alecward@sas.upenn.edu.

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