Vidiots and Doomscrollers!
Back in my day, if you wasted your time watching TV or playing video games, you were referred to as a vidiot. This is a great amalgamation of two words video and idiot. I didn’t have a gaming system in the 80’s or 90’s as a youngster but I sure did waste a lot of time watching Much Music, X-Files, The Simpsons, live sports, and movies. My parents may have categorized myself as a vidiot. Fast forward to now. I have graduated from a vidiot to a doomscroller and I’m not too happy about it.
Allow me to share some background knowledge here. In week six of our class, we were lucky to have Andrew McLuhan as our guest speaker. He is highly intellectual and a lot of what he was talking about flew right over my head. But something did stick. In preparing for his talk, I read his article Can We Survive AI? Spoiler alert. He says yes, we will. “This is not humanity’s first rodeo.” Phew! The robots aren’t going to murder us. Yay! He went on to share some facts about screentime.
“The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention says that US “children between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of 7.5 hours a day in front of a screen for entertainment each day.” They continue: “over a year, that adds up to 114 full days watching a screen for fun. That’s just the time they spend in front of a screen for entertainment. It doesn’t include the time they spend on the computer at school for educational purposes or at home for homework.””
What?! That is one colossal waste of time! Get outside and enjoy life! Talk to real people! Look up at the night sky! Go for a hike! Sit by a campfire! Easy to say, difficult to do. Now there are a couple definitions of doomscrolling out there. One is defined as spending a lot of time online consuming negative news and another can be defined as the excessive consumption of shortform videos or social media content for an excessive period of time without stopping. It is the latter that I find myself battling. And if I, a 50+ professional adult struggles with doomscrolling from time to time, how are our students dealing with it? Eeeep! I hope they have more self control than I. Doubtful. And that is why digital and media literacy is so important. We need to help them out. And maybe even ourselves.
Here are some articles with helpful hints to reduce screen time. Check them out! On your screen. Dammit!
6 Tips to Reduce Children’s Screentime
I have never heard of the term vidiot before, but this title pulled me in right away 🙂
Yesterday, I was a serious vidiot… I started the afternoon with Fantastic 4, before moving on to Taken, Taken 2, and some trash reality tv to finish off the evening. I need to clarify that all of these were playing while I was either cleaning or working on schoolwork.
I find that I’ve become accustomed to doing everything with the TV on or an audiobook playing at the same time. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because teachers are used to being in noisy, busy environments, or if it’s because we just have too much access to too many things.
I’m going to work on doing just one thing at a time to see if it improves my productivity, or even my appreciations of things!
Part of my final project is on this topic. As a mom and a teacher, I see how much time kids are spending on technology, but I am just as bad. ***The night of my class is a overload screentime night for my kids if my husband is working** so I tell myself it’s ok, because their mom is getting smarter? Thank you for the links!
I totally agree with you. It’s easy to get stuck in doomscrolling, and it’s even harder when we realize how much time we have wasted. Digital literacy is crucial, and as adults, we need to model healthy habits that the younger ones can emulate. I love the tips you shared and will definitely check them out. Thanks for expanding my knowledge with these terms.