You’ll Get Square Eyes!
Klaxon, Klaxon, your weekly screen time report is ready! ‘Once again you have upped the anti and wasted even more time on your phone this week than last’-the annoying little Apple man says in my head as I look at the running shoes that haven’t been used in weeks, and the book I’ve barely picked up in days. When our elders said, ‘you’ll get square eyes” when we sat in front of the TV watching Sunday cartoons for a few hours, I’m not sure they were quite ready for what was to come. The year is 2021, we’re onto the fourth month and it still feels like that period of nothingness between Christmas Day and NYE. Groundhog Day today, Groundhog Day tomorrow, suddenly a week has gone by and I’m still in the same loungewear I was in on Monday. The climate crisis that seems to worsen by the day has rendered our experience of distinct seasons a distant memory and the mini heat wave of yesterday has transformed, as if a dream, into a sub-zero dip in temperature today. New Years resolutions have suffered an untimely demotion into the limbo space where we put things we don’t want to deal with. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe next month when things are getting better. But when will things get better? At this moment, as the current lockdown begins to slope into, what seems like rock bottom for many of us, I wonder how much of ourselves are reflected in the screens we stare at each day. 9 to 5 it’s a work screen, 5-9 it’s the TV screen, 9-11….you guessed it, the infinite scroll. Searching for nothing but searching ferociously nonetheless, our screens are like one big questions mark that ask, who are you? Such questions are of course answered for us, by way of the clever little algorithms that quietly navigate our fingers around the screen. Speaking of Algorithms, Facebook have changed their algorithm, AGAIN.
