America is addicted to screens. It’s not a difficult fact to uncover. Just ride the D.C. metro. As they’re travelling to their various destinations, most commuters will likely be staring down at their mobile devices. Walk into a restaurant. Whole families are sitting around the table waiting for their food, but they’re not talking with each other. They’re staring at their phones. More likely than not, you have personally experienced the dopamine you get from scrolling social media or watching a video. Perhaps you have struggled with wasting hours on Instagram reels or YouTube shorts.
According to Reviews.org, 81% of Americans admit to reaching for their phones within 10 minutes of waking up in the morning. Seventy-eight percent refuse to leave their homes without a phone. Forty percent reported feeling anxious if their phone battery dropped below 20%, and 66% even admitted using their phones on the toilet. NBC reported that the average American picks up their phone 205 times a day. Back in 2023, scientists from the University of Surrey discovered that Americans ages 24 and under averaged six hours a day online. Those over the age of 24 tended to average four hours.
In a recent article, Optimum, a telecommunications company, surveyed 2,000 Americans who have any sort of home internet subscription. They found that on average, these people spent around 10 hours online during any given day. Only half that time was spent on work. The other half of those 10 hours respondents spent entertaining themselves, streaming videos, or watching TV shows.
Our culture-wide screen addiction has led to organizations creating rehab programs for those addicted to social media, the internet, their phones, and even online shopping.
“[Screen addictions] can lead to a wide array of physical and psychological problems, including eye strain, muscle strain, sleep disturbances, anxiety, depression, and social isolation,” stated Addiction Center.
But if everyone addicted to screens went to rehab, most likely the rehab system would be overrun. Stanford Lifestyle defined an excessive amount of screen time as over two hours of screen usage apart from that which is necessary for work. Now compare that to the five hours Optimum found an average American spends on entertainment alone.
The same Stanford Lifestyle study discovered that increased screen usage caused the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for memory and problem-solving, to thin in adults ages 18-25. It also correlated with loss of gray matter in the brain, which is necessary for every daily action a human being performs.
This culture-wide screen addiction has effects that run far beyond just harm to individuals. It harms families, too. Children are at an increased risk of screen addiction. Their brains have not yet fully formed, which means they’re more susceptible to dopamine dependence. As screen addictions tend to lead to isolation, as well as mental health problems like depression and anxiety, children may find themselves struggling in their relationships with their friends, their siblings, and their parents. That struggle is exacerbated by exposures to pornography, which often follow from excessive internet use.
As technologies attack families, they harm the basic building blocks of society. Neil Postman warned about these societal harms coming from an entertainment culture in his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” in 1985, before the smartphone was even invented. But he nevertheless predicted the impact of the internet on the disintegration of society.
“To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple,” Postman warned. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”
Not only is it a clear possibility, but our culture is deteriorating further every day. Every aspect of our daily lives has become part of entertainment culture. News is found on social media and TV with sensational headlines to draw an emotional reaction from the reader. Politicians gain more support through how hard they can verbally destroy the other side.
“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice,” Postman noticed. “The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
This is a dire and extremely discouraging prognosis, especially as our culture does not seem to be addressing the serious problem literally staring them in the face. The first step we must take to address this addiction is to acknowledge it exists, and second, to recognize to what extent it has already harmed society. And it must begin in the family, the foundation of society. We can’t fix a problem until we’ve acknowledged it exists. So, let’s educate ourselves on the harms of the internet so we can avoid amusing ourselves to death.
Evelyn Elliott serves as an intern at Family Research Council.
