The Placelessness of Screens

Our movies are becoming less of an embodied experience.

Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash

There’s no telling how many movies I watched with my sister growing up. So many memories in front of the television watching and re-watching Indiana Jones, Star Wars and Clue - we could basically recite those movies from memory. Oftentimes we would watch them and then reenact them outside in the yard.

In our days a screen was directly connected to a sense of place. That is, if I said to my sister, ‘Do you want to watch a movie?’ Our minds would immediately think of the living room, because that was the only screen we had in our house. This meant that when I was in my room, I didn’t associate it with a screen. Dining room, no screen. Outside on our treehouse or driving in the car, no screen.

Today, children expect screens absolutely anywhere they are. Their idea of screens have no limits, no boundaries. How is this shaping them?

Embodied Screens

Before I go any further, I want to be clear that I’m not arguing that we go back to the ‘good ole days’ of our viewing experience. In many ways, it’s a gift to have access to portable screens. Plus, there’s no way to turn back time even if we wanted to.

At the same time, the portable nature of screens is shaping our minds and the minds of our children. We were created by God as embodied creatures, which means a few things. For starters, it means that we’re not omnipresent.

Every human can only be in one place at one time but our portable screens often feed the illusion of omnipresence. We can be in a conversation with someone and check Instagram or texts at the same time. We can be on a car ride with our family and in Middle Earth. We can be watching a movie with friends and scrolling IMDB or Twitter (I talk more about the practice of dual-screens here).

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the less embodied our movie experiences become, the less human we are. We were created for a sense of place but the placelessness of our devices comes with a cost. While portable screens seek to entertain, they can actually end up feeding boredom. Spare moments of space and time are becoming intolerable for young minds and screens are often the answer. This also means impatience can become an unintended consequence. Children can become entitled because of this - it’s their right to have a device at any second.

Perhaps a lack of creativity may also be some of the negative fruit. Instead of being fully present with ourselves and thinking of a creative way to use the time we have or allowing our minds to ruminate, we need visual stimuli. Without a doubt, movies can foster creativity but the lack of embodied experience may actually work against a creative mind.

Where Do We Go From Here?

• Pause and reflect on this reality in your own life.

• While watching movies, strive to be fully present - embodied - in the experience.

• Try to make screens attached to a place with limits and boundaries; e.g., living room instead of kids going off to their bedrooms.

• Foster creativity by allowing spaces, times, days when our children are screen-free.

Hopefully the more we seek to attach our screens to a place, the more human we’ll become.