We’ve tried all sorts of things to stop us from staring at our devices. Digital detoxes. Abstinence. Now? Bring on the Zoom cocktail hour.
Credit…Andrea Chronopoulos
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By Nellie Bowles
Before the coronavirus, there was something I used to worry about. It was called screen time. Perhaps you remember it.
I thought about it. I wrote about it. A lot. I would try different digital detoxes as if they were fad diets, each working for a week or two before I’d be back on that smooth glowing glass.
Now I have thrown off the shackles of screen-time guilt. My television is on. My computer is open. My phone is unlocked, glittering. I want to be covered in screens. If I had a virtual reality headset nearby, I would strap it on.
The screen is my only contact with my parents, whom I miss but can’t visit because I don’t want to accidentally kill them with the virus. It brings me into happy hours with my high school friends and gives me photos of people cooking on Facebook. Was there a time I thought Facebook was bad? An artery of dangerous propaganda flooding the country’s body politic? Maybe. I can’t remember. That was a different time.
A lot of people are coming around.
Walt Mossberg, my former boss and a longtime influential tech product reviewer, deactivated his Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2018 to protest Facebook’s policies and negligence around fake news. Now, for the duration of the pandemic, he is back.
“I haven’t changed my mind about the company’s policies and actions,” Mr. Mossberg wrote on Twitter last week. “I just want to stay in touch with as many friends as possible.”
Back to the Facebook basics. Here for the friends. Portal, Facebook’s countertop video tool, doesn’t seem so crazy now.
Initiatives that were formed explicitly to help people escape screens are now adapting to, well, screens.
“I started the Forest Bathing Club to get people and myself off screens in the 2-D world and into nature to experience the real world,” said Julia Plevin, a designer and founder of the Forest Bathing Club. “Now we’re doing virtual forest baths.”
Avoiding screens guided the life choices of Arrington McCoy, a therapist in Boston, for many years.
“I picked jobs based in large part on screens not being part of the equation,” she said, like becoming a backpacking instructor and now a therapist. “And as of 10 days ago, I am singing a different tune.”
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