What happens when screen time is all the time?
In the early 1990s, the phrase -screen time- emerged to scare parents about the dangers of too much TV for kids. Screen time was something to fret over, police, and judge in a low-grade moral panic. Now, -screen time- has become a metric not only for good parenting, but for our adult lives as well. There-s even an app for it! In the streaming era-and with streaming made nearly ubiquitous during COVID-19-almost every aspect of our day is mediated by these bright surfaces. Whether it was ever the real villain in the first place, or merely a convenient proxy for unaddressed familial, social, and institutional failures, screen time is now all the time.
Avidly Reads Screen Time is a funny, insightful work of cultural criticism and history about how we define screens, and how they now define us. From Mad Men to iCarly, Vine to FaceTime, binge-watching to doom-scrolling, Phillip Maciak leads us on a someti
