Avidly Reads Screen Time

by Phillip Maciak

Overview

What happens when screen time is all the time?

In the early 1990s, the phrase “screen time” emerged to scare parents about the dangers of too much TV for kids. Screen time was something to fret over, police, and judge in a low-grade moral panic. Now, “screen time” has become a metric not only for good parenting, but for our adult lives as well. There’s even an app for it! In the streaming era—and with streaming made nearly ubiquitous during COVID-19—almost every aspect of our day is mediated by these bright surfaces. Whether it was ever the real villain in the first place, or merely a convenient proxy for unaddressed familial, social, and institutional failures, screen time is now all the time.

Avidly Reads Screen Time is a funny, insightful work of cultural criticism and history about how we define screens, and how they now define us. From Mad Men to iCarly, Vine to FaceTime, binge-watching to doom-scrolling, Phillip Maciak leads us on a sometimes heartwarming, sometimes harrowing tour of the media that brings us together and tears us apart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479820580
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	05/16/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	401,536
File size:	843 KB

About the Author

Phillip Maciak is the TV editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a lecturer in English and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s the author of The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), and his writing has appeared in Slate, The New Republic, and The Week, among other places.
Phillip Maciak is the TV editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a lecturer in English and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s the author of The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era, and his writing has appeared in Slate, The New Republic, and The Week, among other places.

Editorial Reviews

05/22/2023

In this original and thought-provoking survey, Maciak (The Disappearing Christ), an editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, considers “the way that the popular discourse of screen time has impacted all of us culturally since the nineties.” Devoting the bulk of his analysis to television, Maciak discusses how opinion writer Tom Engelhardt’s 1991 Mother Jones article, “The Primal Scream,” suggested parents should regulate their children’s access to screens and inaugurated a “moral panic” about the corrupting influence of TV. The rise of prestige television in the late 1990s and 2000s, the author argues, was the result of creators “acknowledging and subverting the worst fears of those who think of television as a corrosive force” by introducing narrative complexity and “interpretive ambiguity.” The author’s analysis is bolstered by clever takes on such shows as Mad Men and WandaVision, both of which he suggests serve as allegories for “what becomes of intimacy, love, grief, friendship when we view them... through screens,” as well as of such apps as FaceTime and Vine, positing that the latter transformed attention “into a creative act.” Elsewhere, Maciak’s willingness to defend screen time refreshes, as when he contends that FaceTiming or watching television with loved ones provides a form of intimacy. Readers will want to tune in to this. Photos. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"The New Republic’s TV critic offers cultural criticism about Succession, Zoom, TikTok and Twin Peaks as well as the many types of screens that demand our attention everywhere, all the time."

The Globe and Mail

"Phillip Maciak is one of the best TV critics alive right now, full stop. Whether he’s writing about Girls or Station Eleven or Bluey, his criticism is always characterized by wit, insight, and a remarkable propensity for close-reading. So yes, I was over the moon to learn about his new book of cultural criticism and history, Avidly Reads Screen Time, about how we define screens and how they define us. There are three Mad Men screen caps within the book’s first 30 pages, so, yeah, it’s gonna be ridiculously good."

The Millions

"Screen Time is a book about this televisual unconscious, about parenting, about a world that children will consume long before they know what they’re digesting—that formed us when we were still children—and about trying to understand the selves we only belatedly discover ourselves to have already always been. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/phillip-maciaks-avidly-reads-screen-time-a-symposium/"

Jorge Cotte

"A witty, intimate meditation on the way we watch now from Phillip Maciak, an author of the celebrated Dear TV column. Hopscotching elegantly from Twin Peaks to bedtime doomscrolling, Zoom school to Vine, Maciak explores the deep paradoxes of ‘screen time,’ the mirror we all gaze into, at once together and alone."

Pulitzer Prize winning author of I Like to Watch&# Emily Nussbaum

"Alas, we are creatures made of screens! But beheld in Maciak’s shrewd, tender gaze, our relationship with these pulsing surfaces that situate our lives loses the flavor of a diagnosis—in its place, wit, and curiosity. This book offers a roomy haven for working out what it means to live and grow up in a modern age, honoring the tangle of feelings—bad, euphoric—that accompany our most sacred rituals, from appointment television to all that scrolling. It prompted me to continue wondering about the screens we take for granted, what they offer us and why we return."

Lauren Michele Jackson

"What a timely and important contribution to the study of the present! Maciak beautifully synthesizes scholarship, art, and his personal experiences of the past decades, teasing apart some of the skeins that get knotted together around that ubiquitous modern experience (and source of anxiety), screen time. Maciak puts aside the scolding that haunts today's parents (and scrollers), and instead shows the complex and sometimes even beautiful ways technology has changed the way we learn, play, communicate, fight, create, and connect, reframing our habits and providing some wonderful cultural criticism along the way. An essential text for our streaming, scrolling era."

Lydia Kiesling

"Avidly Reads Passages is an inventive exploration of the relationship between African American identity and mobility."

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