Christopher Butler has written another post that struck a chord with me. This one is called In Defense of Screens. He makes the case that screens are an agnostic medium with high potential for utility, if handled correctly via cultural evolution.
The screen itself is obviously not to blame — what’s on the screen is. When we use “screen” as a catch-all for our digital dissatisfaction, we’re conflating the surface with what it displays. It’s like blaming paper for misleading news.
Screens—or paper, or clay tablets—are better for conveying dense information than screenless technologies like voice assistants. The additive content we see on screens and what we mean when we use the “screen time” pejorative is a consequence of perverse business models, not screens themselves.
What I’m more interested in is the idea of screens as extensions of thought. Is this inherently positive? Here’s Butler again:
Think of Einstein’s office at Princeton, with its blackboards covered in equations. Those boards weren’t distractions from his thought — they were extensions of it. They allowed him to externalize complex ideas, manipulate them visually, and free his mind from the burden — the impossibility — of holding every variable simultaneously.
That might have worked well for Einstein, but what about the rest of us? We tend to forget things as soon as we’ve outsourced them. In other words, screens provide an outlet; one-way transfer out of our brains, not an “extension” of them.
Growing up, I used to know all my friends’ home phone numbers. Now I couldn’t tell you my brother’s without looking it up. Let alone his home address. Same thing with driving directions, long division, and so much more.
A screen is a memory surrogate. It’s a surface that holds information so we don’t have to keep it all in our heads.
Butler captures that one-way transfer with the term ‘memory surrogate’. I just wonder how much we see that surrogacy being a good thing. I believe it is paid for by memory atrophy, so we must choose what we transfer to screen wisely.