Can spending a lot of time on screens really be detrimental to one’s physical and/or mental health–especially for children? There are a lot of people who say yes, but apparently, a recent study is disputing this position. The article about the study notes three main takeaways:

• Leading pediatricians say the assumption that screen time is behind problems is not really supported by research.
• The danger has more to do with a screen being a gateway for unwanted intrusions into a child’s life.
• While recommendations are difficult based on the limited amount of research that has been done, the report offers a few.

Put another way, it’s not so much about how much time is spent on screens as it is about what content is being viewed. Here’s the link:

https://bigthink.com/screen-time-okay?rebelltitem=4#rebelltitem4

Time magazine has published an excellent article on the George Orwell 1984 outcome that we are now living under, in a way that Orwell would never have imagined. It turns out, it’s not state surveillance we need to fear, it’s surveillance by private businesses. The author, Shoshana Duboff, coins the terms “surveillance capitalism” and and “instrumentarian power” and notes:

“Instrumentarian power delivers our futures to surveillance capitalism’s interests, yet because this new power does not claim our bodies through violence and fear, we undervalue its effects and lower our guard [emphasis mine]. Instrumentarian power does not want to break us; it simply wants to automate us. To this end, it exiles us from our own behavior. It does not care what we think, feel or do, as long as we think, feel and do things in ways that are accessible to Big Other’s billions of sensate, computational, actuating eyes and ears.”

The psychological effects this is having are not be underestimated. The article is here:

https://time.com/5602363/george-orwell-1984-anniversary-surveillance-capitalism/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2019060710am&xid=newsletter-brief

There’s been a lot of research about the relationship of playing violent video games and real-world violent behavior. Now comes a study reported on by Medscape that apparently shows the arrow of causality has little to do with violent game playing and a LOT to do with a person’s “trait aggression.” As the article points out, “…although the violent video game condition had some effect, it was washed out by trait aggression, the natural aggressive tendency of the child.”

Here’s the link:

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/913679?nlid=130107_381&src=WNL_mdplsnews_190607_mscpedit_wir&uac=172126CK&spon=17&impID=1987730&faf=1

Michael Spencer, writing in Medium, says yes, they are. He has some good information to share about why they are leaving and what it means for the social media genre. Here’s the link:

https://medium.com/wom-protocol/why-gen-z-are-breaking-up-with-social-media-5ebc1755a744