‘Screen Time’ Is Over

… Consider what a person can do in just the time it takes to wait for a bus: text, watch a comedy skit, play a video game, buy concert tickets, take five selfies, each with a different set of cartoon ears.

Learning how that behavior shapes an individual’s life experience requires an entirely new approach, one that recognizes that screen time is no mere habit but now a way of life. So argued a consortium of social and data scientists recently in the journal Human-Computer Interaction. The phrase “screen time,” they noted, is too broad to be scientifically helpful; it cannot remotely capture the fragmented, ever-shifting torrent of images that constitutes digital experience. …

Scientists need to look over people’s shoulders, digitally speaking, and record everything, on every device, that an individual sees, does, and types. The researchers call this ultra-fine-grained record a “screenome,” adapting the concept from “genome,” the full blueprint of one’s genetic inheritance. Each person’s daily screenome is similarly unique, a sequential, disjointed series of screens. CONT.

Benedict Carey, New York Times