It’s no surprise that our phone fixation has some dangers associated with it.
Whether it’s ignoring the people around us or spending hours focused on the latest drama, society’s obsession with what’s on our screens can have both emotional and physical impacts and in her new book, “Stuck in our Screens,” Kathleen Allen does a deep dive into those effects.
In this article, Allen talks about what inspired the book, those it applies to, and her takeaways for the readers.
As someone who remembers a time before social media, this book is really appealing. What inspired you to write this?
It began with my own research on adolescent social drama… the kind of interaction characterized by overreaction to something trivial, that gets blown out of proportion and causes a flurry of outrageous behaviors played out in grand fashion over social media. Adolescents who “do drama” are often trying to find themselves and create an identity that fits them. While I thought I would be writing a book about teens, it became clear that there are many adults, influential and powerful ones, who are behaving worse than adolescents and are doing social drama au extraordinaire. For example, recall the June 5, 2025, public X posts between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. It was a perfect example of what I write about in the book, and really a quite terrifying one.
Is this geared more to the current generation, or does it apply to the previous ones?
This is for everyone who spends too much of their life living it through a screen. Everywhere I go, I see people ignoring those who are physically around them while they escape into a screen… couples at dinner, families at a social gathering, students in classrooms. Screens have taken a huge toll on our social communication skills, and hence, on our humanity. Our relationships are falling apart. Our civil society is unhealthy.
What kind of research was done and what were the paths it took you down?
As I mentioned, my research was on adolescent social drama, and I thought that was what the book was going to be about, but in the end, I had to write about adult social drama. I began with my work on teens but then expanded it to research on adult behavior. I am a human developmentalist by training, so the transfer was smooth, but I ended up being very concerned about a society where too many powerful adults are failing to mature beyond the social drama of the teen world. What seems relatively normal for adolescents is not healthy for adults. The world is not a reality TV show, but many people behave as if it is.
How has social media changed our social interactions?
We’ve lost our sense of where to draw the line. In our quest for connections with one another, we put our thoughts on display for consumption by the masses. Yet, the more we live through our screens, the lonelier and more isolated we have become. We tell our online “friends” all kinds of intimate information about ourselves and our families, but hardly look at our neighbors as we pass them on the street because our faces are buried in a screen.
What’s your hope for the impact that this book will have?
I hope my book helps people see that it is time for a social and relational reset. Our needs for human connection are not being met. Our political discourse is hostile. Our fixation on the absurdities that play out on social media are making it harder for us to understand what is real and what is not. We need to get out of the screen and reengage with each other in the real world. My hope is that we could begin an honest conversation about how to restore the humanity that we lose when we live through screens.
No comments:
Post a Comment