'Screen time’: how the phrase went from neutral to shameful

It was once used by academics to describe the length of a film – now it is used to scare parents who use technology to distract their children

This week Canadian researchers suggested that more screen time harmed toddlers’ development, in another skirmish in the long-running war over whether an iPad is a good child-pacifier. But where does the phrase “screen time” come from?

In the 20th century, film scholars opposed screen time (the running length of a movie) to “story time” (the duration of the events portrayed). Screen time was also the measure of total cinema showings in countries that imposed national quotas. It was first repurposed by Tom Engelhardt in 1991, in an article about children’s TV and video games (“Even a six-month-old spends an average hour and a half of screen time a day”). Now, iPhones come with an app named Screen Time designed to shame you into staring at them less often.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2RvAmSk