The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released a new policy statement, Digital Ecosystems, Children, and Adolescents, that represents a significant shift in how the medical community views screen time. Instead of fixating on minutes and hours, they’re finally acknowledging what those of us in the digital and media literacy community have been shouting from the rooftops for years: It’s not just about how much time kids spend on screens, but about preparing them for the entire media ecosystem they’re navigating.
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Certainly can’t be the fault of corps directly and aggressively piping a slew of shock and advertising content into their feed to manipulate their audience. No way it could be that.
When you’re being fed shit, it ultimately doesn’t matter how much shit you’re eating.
Yeah but it feels good to blame screen time tho!
Besides when have there ever been consequences to blaming the wrong thing as the cause of a problem?
With this ecosystem in mind, recent restrictive measures that focus solely on keeping kids off social media until age 16, banning smartphones from classrooms, or counting the minutes spent watching TV are woefully incomplete. They fail to prepare youth for the entire system they will interact with one way or another—if not now, then when they’re older (if they want to get a job or communicate with, say, anybody). They need more than just limits or restrictions to be ready for it.
If you feel righteously about kids being banned from social media you are an asshole that wants to feel smug and simplify the problem so you don’t have to think about it.
The same people who condescend kids by kicking them out of digital spaces will turn around and condescend kids for being tech illiterate and ignorant and the cycle of willfully naive jerks will thus continue.
