EDITORIAL

Honey, I extended the kids’ screen time

This past week, TikTok announced that kids under 18 will have a default one-hour screen time limit placed on their accounts.

As young adults who grew up during the birth of the digital age, we partially applaud the decision — knowing how social media can corrupt mental health and corrode relationships. TikTok is especially pervasive, with millions and millions of young kids exposed to the depths of human depravity on an app typically known for its dance trends.

Also as young adults who grew up during the birth of the digital age, we can’t help but laugh. How many kids actually use their own birthday when creating TikTok or Snapchat accounts? We all remember being 14 years old in 2017, yet born in 1992 on Instagram.

TikTok’s recent screen-time decision reflects a broader pattern within digital spaces, as tech conglomerates — largely due to public and even political pressure — meekly attempt to slow kids’ descent into endless social media scrolling.

But it’s starting to feel like too little, too late.

We’ve all seen silent, glass-eyed babies watching iPads in their high chairs, their faces lit up by the glowing screens.

We’ve seen toddlers use their chubby, grubby fingers to endlessly tug down on their tablet screens, prompting constant refreshes to flood their feed with new, loud and ever-more-obnoxious videos.

Elementary school kids no longer write their names on the inside front covers of ancient, dogeared textbooks — they use impersonal E-books instead.

Middle-school kids are hardly kids at all anymore — instead, they regularly FaceTune themselves into identical, glossy caricatures, digitally erasing the adolescent normalcy of braces or bumpy foreheads.

And kids our age, those in high school and college, are in-between. Most of us had relatively normal childhoods, full of boredom, creativity, muddy feet and thick books that we could hold in our hands. But we also grew up in the early, unfiltered days of social media, and know firsthand the obscurity of deep-fried memes, the viciousness of anonymous commenters and the intricacies of online do’s and don’ts.

Although most of us miss the simplicity of our offline childhoods — the same wild, sun-dappled childhoods that billions of kids had throughout history — and lament the fickle cruelty of social media, we still find ourselves stuck in a digital trap.

The nauseating mundanity of doomscrolling and constant exposure to blue light now comprise much of our days. We compare our lives to the carefully curated feeds of “that girl” and can’t eat lunch unless we’re mindlessly binge-watching shows we’ve seen a hundred times.

There’s just a dullness to the world now, a muted sheen deadening all that was once simple, good and exciting.

The rich smell of an old book, stargazing on a warm summer night, imaginative art borne from boredom, knocking on a neighbor’s backdoor and asking them to come play: there might come a day when these are nothing but foreign, esoteric memories, especially as metaverses and virtual reality become more and more feasible.

This is not to say that all of social media is bad or world-ruining. In many ways, social media is a microcosm of humanity at large: people connect with long-lost friends, make passionate pleas for change, help each other after disasters, laugh at inside jokes, express vicious hate towards strangers and work together for causes both good and bad.

To lay blanket judgment on social media would be the same as judging all of human reads through your résumé, tells you the weather and tells you what shows it thinks you’ll enjoy. society. It’s impossible to do so fairly or meaningfully.

But until now, we haven’t had conversational AI at this level of sophistication. It’s altering the game and opening eyes. There’s no denying it — the next frontier of tech is in AI.

With the race for dominance in the AI language model already creating a whole new verb, can already see myself waking up in the morning and asking my Jarvisesque personal AI assistant to tell me the weather, play some music, clean up the house and go shopping for groceries to cook me some dinner when I get back from work. And God, am I excited.

In the same way, TikTok placing a screen-time limit for teenagers really doesn’t make sense. Besides all the kids who will just ignore the new rule, think of those who find freedom and community virtually or who have been saved by seeing people like them thrive across the internet.

Like it or not, the digital age is alive and well. To succeed — or even exist — in today’s world, digital literacy is essential. Living an anarcho-primitivist fantasy is just that: a fantasy.

We hate to be basic — an adjective akin to a slur on Twitter and TikTok — but it really does seem like balance is key. We need to make social media exist for us, not the other way around. If we strengthen our culture’s connection to the natural world, kids might grow up to care about trees and oceans, instead of strangers videoing themselves playing Fortnite.

If we become content with quiet and stillness, we might naturally have reason to forget about the chaotic box in our pocket. If our society becomes more communal and less individualistic, perhaps we’d finally stop feeling so at odds with each other, so overwhelmed, so alone. Perhaps our screen time would naturally diminish, without surface-level corporate interventions.

Perhaps we’d be ready to live in the real world again.

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1. Public Open Nights are held most Wednesday evenings at the Observatory

3. The Boston University transports students to different places

4. This tech company makes watches, computers, iPhones and more

6. The primary learning management system at Boston University

7. Publication exploring Boston University's pioneering research

8. Ben & Jerry's is a popular client for this Lab

9. Video conferencing platform

12. In 1877, this BU alum became the first woman to earn a doctorate in the United States

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