Screen Time and the Oldest Human Escape

Freya India’s recent book, GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything, relates the struggles of young women growing up in the 2010s and later, increasing amounts of whose lives are conducted entirely online. Her central thesis is that the virtual world of Snapchat, Facetune, TikTok, and Instagram has magnified the angst that has always been part of adolescence—perhaps especially for girls, with their greater susceptibility to social contagions.

India’s book is at its strongest when it delineates situations that, in one form or another, almost everyone living in the modern world has encountered. There are the constant temptations towards low-effort interactions—instead of asking someone out on a date, you can simply swipe right on Tinder and then never communicate again; instead of calling a friend on their birthday, you can just post on their Facebook wall. Human beings naturally seek shortcuts: we all evolved from ancestors who found ways to husband their precious energy reserves. Entropy is the law that governs the universe and we will always seek out the lowest energy state. But some shortcuts are clearly impoverishing.  

There are other ways, too, in which the online world crowds out the real in ways that seem to cheapen the latter: when holidays turn into photo shoots for Instagram; when gossiping on a group chat replaces a night of gin and tonics with friends; when people are distracted from in-person conversations by the hypnotic light of a phone screen; when couples sit up in bed scrolling until their phones are dropping from their hands, substituting the dubious pleasures of “monitoring the situation” for sexual intimacies. And there is also the ever-present danger of narcissism. The online world is a world you can control and customise. You can post your recipes, your holiday snaps, your new outfits, your new body or—perhaps worst of all—your opinions and instead of genuinely challenging feedback that might force you to reconsider your views or behaviour receive a heady mixture of affirmation and attacks. And most of the latter will come from semi-literate trolls, making them easy to dismiss. But does this technology present unprecedented perils, as India argues?