Screenworld

What time is Family Guy on?

Media Life reports this week that the average American now spends 8.5 hours a day staring at some kind of screen, whether its television, computer or cellphone.

8.5 hours a day, every day, for their entire lives

This means that screenwatching has now become the number one human activity, surpassing even sleep.  We will spend more of our lives staring at screens than doing anything else.

Screenwatching has become the seminal and defining act of our culture.

That says a lot about who we are and where we are headed.

Our world has now come to be dominated by an act that did not even exist 100 years ago.  It now takes up just about all or our time.  For more than 99.99% of human existence, the very concept that we now spent virtually our entire waking day on was not even imaginable.

This is more than just an idle event. This is a seminal turning point in human existence.

We are obviously becoming a kind of cyborg culture – bound to a machine, of one kind or another. This is entirely new for the human race, and as we are just at the very beginning of this transformation we have an opportunity, if we are smart, to focus ourselves on how we will deal with this new iteration of what it means to be human.

If we, as a culture, spent 8.5 hours a day, every day, playing tennis, we would not doubt be masters of physical perfection.

If we spent8.5 hours a day reading, we would be a very different society from the one we are now.

But we have not elected to spend all our waking time reading or playing tennis. We have, collectively, elected to spend all our waking time staring at a screen.

OK.

What becomes of a culture that elects to spend all it’s time staring at a screen?

That, to a large extent, is now a function of what is on the screen.

My guess is that the vast majority of screen time is going to be occupied by video.  Video is by far the most compelling screen event we have created.  And, in a kind of Gresham’s Law, more dynamic media tend to drive out less dynamic media. Thus, it is not inconceivable that in a few years (if not sooner), computer screens and cell phone screens will be dominated by video images. (Television obviously already is).

Thus, it is the content of that video that will drive our culture.

All the more reason why the democratization of video is now so critically important.

8.5 hours a day, every day, for our whole lives is far far far too important to be left to the hands of CBS or NBC or CNN or FOX.

As we extoll a free press as a foundation of democracy, so too must we have a free video press, and that begins with a video literate civilization.