How easy is it to unplug from seemingly omnipresent smart phones, laptops and television streaming options?
In this episode of What's The Frequency, we dig into the arrival of Screen-Free Week, which is the first full week of May, beginning May 6. Some people will go cold turkey and cut out screens, while the group heading up the endeavor says even lessening screen time in some way will give gains.
Technology over the last 100 years has given people more ways to be entertained and informed.
At first, people were enthused to sit around their homes with a radio on a table, to hear music and news and other shows. Then televisions arrived, with images to be viewed, then more ways to consume music, then personal computers came to be in homes.
All those advances were quickly embraced by Americans and people worldwide, changing how they spent their free time away from occupations.
Eventually, some cultural observers began seeing there were downsides of so much media consumption. In 1994, Henry Labalme and Matt Pawa created TV Turnoff Week in 1994. In 2010, TV Turnoff Week became Screen-Free Week, which is now slated for the first full week in May.
One of the points of the week back initially in the 1990s was to challenge people to scrutinize just how much TV they passively watched.
That now seems quaint in terms of viewing options, before the advent of internet options such as YouTube, before streaming services where people choose what shows they want to watch, and before the biggest user of time, smart phones that are likely used least for calling people, while stacking up hours on social media, video clips, and entire shows or movies.
What's The Frequency guests discussing Screen-Free Week are Professor Doug Gentile, an Iowa State University professor who has studied the positive and negative effects of mass media on children, plus Rachel Franz, who is the Education Manager for Fairplay, the organization that oversees Screen-Free Week.
Franz said children spend about six to nine hours on devices daily, or about a combined 114 days on average over a full year, being online, which is an breathtaking statistic.
According to a January 2024 Pew Research Center study, 90 percent of American adults have a smartphone. That number was 56 percent in 2013 and 35 percent in 2011, when Pew first surveyed on the smartphone topic.
Gentile said with people having their own smartphones, there are substantially less shared experiences with other people, which makes them more isolated and anxious at times.
“We are not feeling human connections, so we feel that loss,” Gentile said.
Franz said lots of people will take part in Screen-Free Week in the week ahead, while others will do so in other days or weeks of the year. A county in Wisconsin in 2023 slated 19 active events for people as alternatives to being consumed with screens.
Click on the audio link above to hear the entire show.
*What's The Frequency, Episode 15
