What do we actually know about the risks of screen time and digital media?
“Yesterday after I wrote to you, I had an attack of asthma,” Marcel Proust wrote to his mother in 1901. “[It] obliged me to walk all doubled up and light anti-asthma cigarettes at every tobacconist’s I passed.”
While that sounds a bit crazy by 2018 standards, Proust was far from alone: “Medicated cigarettes marketed for respiratory complaints continued to be endorsed, and smoked, by doctors until well after the Second World War,” writes medical historian Mark Jackson.
Of course, tobacco eventually joined the list of treacherous substances once thought to be healthy and subsequently discovered to be harmful, keeping excellent company alongside radium and mercury. It's enough to make people constantly wonder what else might make it onto the list of friends turned foe. Could coffee be next? Processed meat? There has been a steady stream of worry that digital media could be next. According to mountains of thinkpieces and concerned researchers, our screens are rendering us the very opposite of zen—increasing the risk of ADHD in children, making them more violent, and leaving us all distracted, twitchy, and depressed.
