Sense about screens
I expected Pete Etchells' book about screen time to be authoritative and sensible, and it is. I didn't expect it to be so warm and personal.
A lot of my day job as a paediatrician is essentially explaining and demystifying stuff- this includes a healthy amount of myth-busting. Perhaps the area where I most frequently need to correct myths, especially with my ASD and ADHD cohort, is when it comes to the influence of screen time. There seems to be a shared belief among parents, as well as many professionals, that screen time is inherently bad for you. Of course, given that screens are ubiquitous and necessary for normal 21st century life, this doesn’t usually lead to very much more than guilt, shame and constant conflict between parents and children.
Enter, stage left, Pete Etchells, Professor of Psychology and Science Communication at Bath Spa University, with Unlocked. His purpose is to examine some of the claims made about the impact of screen-based activities, balance them against the scientific literature, and provide real-world guidance. He succeeds handsomely.
Etchells is not a bombastic or emotive writer- he lays out evidence fairly, and explains with calm clarity why, for example, the claims of Jean Twenge that smart phones have destroyed a generation do not really stack up. He has a knack of making really complex bits of analysis lucid- his description of the mind-boggling statistical work of Amy Orben shed new light on her methods for me, and I have read her papers and talked to her myself. The picture that emerges is that it’s really meaningless to talk about screen time as a single entity, and that what we need to do is think about screens as a way of doing positive or negative things, and as a mirror of our own preoccupations and psychology.
This isn’t a straightforward apologia for screens though- throughout, Etchells emphasises the importance of being reflective about how we use screen-based activities to enhance our lives- he is not blind to the idea that screen-based activity can be harmful, just sceptical that an activity becomes harmful when it is screen-based. Here, it was a surprise to find how much personal confessional there is in the book- his teenage turmoil helped by RPG chatrooms, his feelings about his children’s relationship with his phone, the impact of the pandemic. But it totally works- without the injection of Etchells’ own personality and experience, this could feel like a rather dessicated exercise, removed from people’s everyday experience and understandable worries. But by placing himself in the narrative, as someone who has wrestled with these questions himself, he adds as much credibility as he does by his scientific credentials.
This is the best book on the subject that I know of. It’s not perfect- Etchells is much more comfortable examining the claims of others than advancing his own worries about, for example, loot boxes in games. Whereas other chapters are meticulously referenced and careful, the section on loot boxes and ‘gated delivery’ feel more vague- there is poor industry practice here, and understandable worries, but relatively little in the way of analysis or evidence of harm.
Still, the weakest section of this book would be the strongest in many books on the topic- it really is our best guide to how to navigate our relationship with screens, and closes with a summary that manages to be both admirably clear and appropriately nuanced. One last thing if you are wavering on reading it- unlike too many non-fiction books, there is not a word wasted- 240 pages are just right for this topic, it turns out.
My copy (kindly provided by the publishers) will sit in my clinic office, and I suspect will be well-thumbed within years- any book that explains how we came to have a Control of Space Invaders bill before Parliament is worth revisiting, after all!
Another music recommendation: I am a little obsessed by the new album by Hurray for the Riff Raff- maybe you would be too?
Once again, please do tell people if you are enjoying Play and Words- any recommendation means a great deal.
Next week… not sure. Probably an analysis of why a Alice in Wonderland-themed board game of war and conflict works so very very well. Because it’s what the people want!