A Screen-Less World
Suppose we had no screens , those flat panels on which images and data are displayed. Electronic devices, such as televisions, computers and smartphones have them. And when we go to the cinema, we see gigantic screens, the biggest IMAX being over 35 metres (100 foot) tall. Every city has advertising hoardings, or billboards, which used to be printed on card, but are now more likely to be digitally projected on huge screens, the online betting company Betfair boasting one in Vienna the size of 50 football fields.
Wherever you are, you can probably raise your head, look around and see some kind of screen in your immediate environment; thatâs in addition to the one youâre carrying. Screens are so ubiquitous and inescapable that we barely notice them. Try to find public space, whether in a bar, restaurant, department store, or in the street where there is no screen pleading for your attention with moving text and images.
History would be different in the parallel screen-free universe: one in which no one came up with the idea of projecting images onto a blank surface in the early sixteenth century and no one saw the potential in turning this into a way of distracting us in an agreeable way in the seventeenth. We wouldnât have been entertained by the magic lantern, as it was called, and we wouldnât have been captivated by moving images called motion pictures in the early twentieth century. And we wouldnât have had our culture transformed in the 1950s by arguably the most influential invention in history: television.
Television changed culture and, by implication the people who create cultureâwe humans. The idea of not having to travel to and gather at public places to be entertained by sound and image had far-reaching effects on practically every aspect of our lives. In its day, early tv sets were like portable Aladdinâs caves: instead of going somewhere to find a place filled with an exotic miscellany of strange and precious items, we could have a cave of our own; even better, we could take it with us wherever we went.
From the concept of a screen thatâs our own possession and which we can use whenever and wherever we choose, weâve fashioned any number of portable devices. Personal computers arrived in force in the 1990s. Then in 1997, Nokia introduced its 6110 model phone, which was light enough to carry around. And the merger of phones and computers brought us smartphones, Appleâs first iPhone arriving in 2007.
How could we cope without them? What would we do first thing in the morning if not check our email inbox? How would we communicate without sliding and tapping our fingers? From where would we get our information, including world news, if the particulars of events werenât right in front of us? How could we organize our days and nights without a constant flow of instruction about whoâs going to where and when? Perhaps most fundamentally, how could we sustain social life without them? Weâve created and maintain a culture in which we live through and depend on media. And we access that media through our screens.
Think about how you get your knowledge: your facts, information, intelligence and understanding of a subject. Obviously, we talk to each other face-to-face, though scholars and politicians often complain that we donât do enough of this. They probably donât grasp that communicating via the phone or tablet is as rewarding and meaningful as standing next to someone and exchanging thoughts. Often it is more enjoyable. This is one of those basic points thatâs frequently missed by self-appointed authorities who pontificate on the uses and abuses of digital media. People use their devices for communicating because they enjoy it. Simple but true: users derive pleasure from using their devices. If they didnât, they probably opt to communicate via different methods, or communicate less.
The pleasure people take from their computers, phones and tablets is, like many other types of pleasure, not necessarily intelligible to those who are not habitual users. In this sense, itâs like music. Some people will listen to hip-hop and scratch their heads in wonder why itâs one of the worldâs most popular genres. The minimalist music of Steve Reich or Philip Glass some listeners will find tedious, while others will rhapsodize over the different musical languages and decree that outsiders just donât get it. As weâll argue later in this book, many critics of social media are not just like but actually are outsiders, who are trying to fathom out a new language word-by-word, but without any understanding of its grammar.
In a screen-less world, itâs difficult to fathom how weâd learn about practically anything. And by learn, we donât mean learn in a narrow academic sense, but in the broader sense of becoming aware by receiving and transmitting information. Everything we know and much of what we do is mediated. Itâs connected through other people or things. It involves an intermediate agency. How could it not? We couldnât possibly experience first-hand everything we know about the world. There never was a time when people did that. Thereâs always been a category of people, like messengers, town cryers, or things, like newsheets, books, and, before them, scrolls or even wall drawings such as hieroglyphs in the ancient world. Most knowledge is mediated in some way.
Yet there is something different about today. Thereâs never been a time in history in which we spend so much time engaged with the media and rely on it to such an extent, not only for our knowledge but for our friendships. Print media has been with us theoretically since the mid-fifteenth century, when the German printer Johannes Gutenberg developed movable type on the machine known as the press. The term became shorthand for print media. Four hundred years later, the world relied on the press for its information about almost everything.
Print media made demands on us: the ability to read being the principal one. It became, with printed books, one of the catalysts of literacy. To understand the content of newspapers, gazettes, magazine, newsheets and the several other forms of press the consumer needed a working knowledge of the written word. Radio made no comparable demands on its consumers: they could just listen to spoken words. From the early twentieth century, sound messages carried information to us through electromagnetic waves and the transmission became known as broadcasting.
Like television, which followed in mid-century, it tended to tax consumers less: broadcasting information required consumers to listen or look and to think, though not necessarily concentrate in the way they would when reading. It took until the late twentieth century before university scholars argued persuasively that listening to radio or looking at tv required cognitive action or interpretive skill comparable with reading a written text. In fact, the output of radio and tv was actually called text and the process of making sense of it was calledâin the manner of rendering the written material comprehensibleâreading.
Amusing Ourselves
Think about the very concept of watching a screen. Audiences in the eighteenth century, or possibly before, would have gasped at the images they saw projected onto blank screens by the invention known as laterna magica and we will trace this history more thoroughly in Chapter 2. They would have probably suspected some kind of magic or a diabolical deception to induce their attention. Three hundred or so years later and there are still people who insist our fixation on screens is the devilâs work.
Twentieth century audiences, as weâll also discover in later chapters, were used to big screens. The first known cinema was built in 1894 and movie theatres sprung up across Europe and North America in the following decades. Sitting in a crowded auditorium was not uncomfortable for audiences brought up on theatre, music hall and, in the USA, ragtime. Yet the gigantic stationary, flat, two-dimensional screen was a big change from a stage populated by live performers.
Readers of this book will not have known a time when television did not have a prominent presence. Anyone born before 1940 may have a recollection of the age before television, though the majority of their lives will have been lived in an environment that will have been massively affected by television. Practically every habit was, in some way, influenced by our captivation with tv.
In a way, film prepared audiences for television. Goggling at a 12-inch (30 cm) diameter tv screen (that was the size of the early models) was actually not so different from staring at a cinema screen. The big difference was that audiences were obliged to keep quiet while a film was playing and couldnât dictate when to switch on or off (though they could always walk out, of course). But televisions were portable: tv sets were either bought or rented, so they were effectively our possessions; our own private screens. Television ownership soared in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, no home was complete without at least one set. For a while, it seemed it would wreck the film industry. But what would it do to us?
The scares about television were many: watching tv would shorten our attention spans, delimit our social abilities, break down families, affect our propensities, particularly to violence, and so on. There were dozens of possible harmful effects. But no one seemed interested as programmes proliferated and sales of domestic sets climbed.
There was what seemed a wilful disregard of the informed opinion of the time (we should bear this in mind when we think about todayâs habits). Television was seen as one of the most menacing developments around. It cultivates abnormal relationships, pins us in our homes and nurtures passivity, said critics. One of the most brilliant books on television, written in 1985 by the American media critic Neil Postman, had the title Amusing Ourselves to Death. The idea being that we were feasting on too much entertainment. And, the bookâs justifiable assumption was that television is good for only one thing: entertaining us. This supposition is worth unpicking.
Every time we turn to our screens we expect to be entertained. If not weâre disappointed. Obviously entertainment has to be entertaining, but nowadays, so does politics, crime, health reports, and so on. If they donât entertain us, we dump them. By entertain, we mean engage us in a way we find agreeable, even better enjoyable. Notice we donât include words like superficial, shallow or trivial in our definition of entertain. Some forms of entertainment might be all of these, but other forms require serious thought and deep consideration. We can learn at the same time weâre being entertained.
Entertainment might be regarded as a mode for everything: a way or manner in which politics, crime, health, education, even religion are expressed and experienced. If anything is going to get our attention for any length of time it had better be presented in a style that engages us agreeably. Television started with different ambitions. In the US, it was intended to be an extension of radio, which itself was an advertising medium; the programmes were merely to catch and keep listeners rapt.
In Britain and other European nations, tv was launched with loftier ambitions. BBC television was, like its American counterpart, a descendant of radio; but radio in Britain carried no advertising and was never envisaged as having commercial value. Rather it was meant to contain quality arts programmes, major documentaries about history and culture, and large-scale live coverage of major national events and anniversaries. A theatre of the airwaves, as it was known. Television in both the US and the UK and everywhere else in the world, succeeded because it was supple and flexible in its design and adapted effectively to suit changing environments. Actually, tv didnât just adapt to environments: it became a catalyst in instigating changes. It was the captivating medium not only of the twentieth century but of all time.
There had never been a phenomenon like television for inciting peoplesâ attention. In 1969, 530 million people, thatâs 14% of the population of the world at the time, watched the moon landing. Even this seems modest compared to the estimated 2.5 billion who watched in some part the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. These were unique events, though some sports events, particularly footballâs World Cup Final and the Super Bowl regularly attract hundreds of millions. Television arrived after cinema, but was much more influential in inculcating audiences into the habit of staring at screens while they made sense of the unfolding narratives. Postman was a piercingly intelligent critic of television, but even he couldnât accept that the cognitive work required when watching tv was comparable with that needed to engage with other media.
Television had no competitors up till quite recently. The fortunes of the film industry fluctuated, though it survived tvâs initial onslaught, then withstood pressure from home videos, DVDs and piracy. It remains afloat. For a period, it appeared television too would be under threat from social media sites like Facebook and YouTube. The latter in particular sent a frisson through the advertising industry when the numbers were revealed. A YouTube star like Zoella could remain anonymous in traditional media but command 6.5 million subscribers on her YouTube channel. Companies such as Pepsi started to advertise more on digital platforms than they did on conventional media. Since 2010, the amount of television watched by those aged 16â34 has fallen steadily. But, far from going under, traditional tv has prospered from the internet, sharing platforms with streaming providers and subscription broadcasters, so that its content can be consumed on a variety of portable devices, not just the home appliance. Itâs probably inaccurate even to call it traditional television nowadays: there are so many ways to view television that there is little traditional about it. In fact, television remains an integral part of the Screen Society.
Some say it was the defining invention of the twentieth century: not only did it change our social habits and our cognitive abilities, but it made the world smaller. News of events in any part of the world could circulate, at first in days, later in hours, and eventually in minutes, thanks to rapidly changing technology. Television also induced a reliance that we may not have shrugged. It became the main source for news and current affairs as well as entertainment. Cinema, theatre, nightclubs, bars: none of them had magic strong enough to rival televisionâs.
Its relevance to the current century is uncertain. But televisionâs legacy will be felt for the next several decades. It was the device that habituated us to screens. We became habituated to them very easily, it seemed. Despite the warnings, we accepted television as we might welcome a new friend who brought with her or him an endless trove of delightfully amusing treasures. Almost paradoxically, that meant staring for hours and hours at a limited surface. We still do this. The big difference is that we can now carry the screens around with us.
Were we speculating on this development twenty years ago, we might have argued persuasively that consumers will use the portable screens as and when they need...