Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, every successive generation has held the belief that while their parents did not quite 'get it', their children were an unmitigated disaster waiting to happen.
A study released today by Common Sense Media makes the anxieties of the Athenians, (and pretty much everyone else) pale by comparison. According to the study, teens today spend a mind-boggline 9 hours a day on entertainment media -- music, videos, video games and checking social media.
That is nine hours a day pretty much glued to their iPhones.
OK. Maybe the Ancient Greeks yelled at their kids: "Put down that damned stone tablet," but I don't think they were busy carving away nine hours a day. Nine hours is astonishing. It makes screen time (and this apparently does not include online schoolwork), the number one activity, surpassing reading (for sure), athletics, school and even sleep.
This represents a fundamental and seminal change in basic human behavior. We are in uncharted territory. No one has ever lived like this before. No one has ever spent so much time immersed in what is basically entertainment and amusement.
The report, (and subsequent articles and TV spots covering it), all go on to the rather predictable "what can we do to change this" stuff. Limit screen time. "How Parents Can Limit The Worst of Social Media." Blah, blah, blah.
Let me propose something completely different.
This is going to happen. In fact, it has already happened.
Think of this as a kind of evolution. The next generation has evolved into a different kind of species -- one appended to a smart phone or a tablet or a TV screen. They are not giving them up. The attraction to being entertained by flashing images is deep in our DNA.
When we first stood erect in the savannas of Africa, a quick response to flashing light in the tall grass was a matter of survival. That flash of light meant either something to eat, or something to eat you. In either case, it set off a very visceral and important response in our brains: Pay attention!
That deep-seated need to pay attention to flashes of light is still with us. And it always has will be. It is fundamental to our survival as a species. So, no, given the choice between a printed page in a book and the far more interesting flashing lights of a video game or a TV show, it is no contest. And no amount of moralizing and lecturing is going to make a difference.
There was a time, way back in the 1990s and everything prior to that, when exposure to flashes of light was limited to a movie theater or the family TV set. Those halcyon days are over. Today, every 12 year old carries a magic flashing light box in their pocket 24 hours a day. Think of it as visual heroin.
It is an addiction, this desire to check emails, to watch YouTube, to play Candy Crush (what ever happened to Candy Crush?) that is absolutely overpowering. Resistance is futile. Sorry.
What then is the alternative? Do we simply accept the fact that we are raising a generation of addle-minded idiots who would rather wallow in Instagram all day long than read Shakespeare (are you kidding me? Does anyone read Shakespeare anymore?)
Is there an alternative?
I think there is.
I think that instead of bewailing the inevitable, it is far better to co-opt it. That is, to seize control of the medium ourselves and bend it to more intelligent uses.
In the 1990s, I sold one of my companies to The New York Times and became, for two years, the President of NY Times TV. On one of my first days in my new corporate home, I was introduced to Joe Lelyveld, who was then the Managing Editor of the paper and a very smart man.
We had lunch. Lelyveld was mildly interested in what I did, but only very very mildly. "I don't own a TV set" he told me with great pride.
He was a man of print. Literate. Literate in print, but not in video. "Not interested" he said.
Too bad.
Video needed people like Lelyveld. The medium needed really smart people to embrace the medium -- not as occasional guests on Charlie Rose, but rather to pick up a video camera and learn to do in video what they could do so well in text.
Today, that need is greater than ever.
The world of video -- the attraction to flashing lights and entertainment is not going to go away If anything, it is going to become the common touchpoint of the next generation. All the more reason why smart, thinking people -- people with something to say -- in literature, in the arts, in politics, in public discourse -- must embrace the very texture of the medium -- become fluent in it -- the way thinkers had to become fluent in writing after Gutenberg.
For better for for worse, this is going to be the lingua franca of the future. If you wish to influence young minds, you must learn to speak their language and bring great ideas to it. Don't leave this new medium to The Kardashians.