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Screen Damage
The Dangers of Digital Media for Children
Michel Desmurget (Author), Andrew Brown (Translated by)
9781509546404, Polity Press
Paperback / softback, published 28 October 2022
350 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.408 kg
“Let us add this brisk and persuasive work by Michel Desmurget to the necessary list of books warning against the impact of screens on the young. He gives the digiphiles exactly the credit they deserve for having peddled to our kids the tools that clog their heads and seize their eyes. His portrait of the toddler at the screen is frightening, of the teen “submerged” in media dismaying, and he busts one happy myth after another. This is a sober caution to parents, teachers and other supervisors of the young.”
Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future
“Desmurget advances vitally important points.”
City Journal
All forms of recreational digital consumption – whether on smartphones, tablets, game consoles or TVs – have skyrocketed in the younger generations. From the age of 2, children in the West clock up more than 2.5 hours of screen time a day; by the time they reach 13, it’s more than 7 hours a day. Added up over the first 18 years of life, this is the equivalent of almost 30 school years, or 15 years of full-time employment. Most media experts do not seem overly concerned about this situation: children are adaptable, they say, they are ‘digital natives’, their brains have changed and screens make them smarter. But other specialists – including some paediatricians, psychiatrists, teachers and speech therapists – dispute these claims, and many parents worry about the long-term consequences of their children’s intensive exposure to screens. Michel Desmurget, a leading neuroscientist, has carefully weighed up the scientific evidence concerning the impact of the digital activities of our children and adolescents, and his assessment does not make for happy reading: he shows that these activities have significant detrimental consequences in terms of the health, behaviour and intellectual abilities of young people, and strongly affect their academic outcomes. A wake-up call for anyone concerned about the long-term impacts of our children’s over-exposure to screens.
Also available as an audiobook.
Introduction: whom should we believe?
Part One
Digital natives: building a myth
Part Two
Uses: an incredible frenzy of recreational screens
Part Three
Impacts: chronicles of a disaster foretold
1. Preamble. Multiple and intricate impacts
2. Academic success. A powerful prejudice
3. Discussion. A damaging environment
4. Health. A silent aggression
Epilogue: a very old brain for a brave new world
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Subject Areas: Society & culture: general [JF]
