Screen addiction

The television has only really been invented two generations ago in the 1950s. When I was younger (starting around age 5), and my parents were graduate students and couldn’t afford a babysitter, they–my dad in particular–used to use the television as a substitute despite my insistent that I wanted to learn how to write–I remember, for instance, I used to steal stationaries from stores and dreamt of writing in them. I was even caught once and reprimanded: in retrospect, I’m not really sure what my parents were thinking. My dad would buy me Disney films and I would watch them for hours upon hours on end at home alone on repeat: the same movie over and over again. Since that early age, I learned how to use the television as somewhat of a tool. It can be used to learn about other cultures, to learn a language, for warmth, to keep time, and, most obviously, for entertainment.

However, the television has been shown to not be very beneficial for children perhaps because of its addicting nature. It’s also not the most effective way to learn language. It certainly does not teach writing. Yet, the screen has migrated to computers in modern times and has now been connected to the keyboard. Human beings can now interact with the screen in a dextrous form to produce writing. Thus, the screen has evolved. When I was still a visiting medical student doing research at Stanford University, I invented a digital tool that is still currently under development that has the potential to change the world. It could revolutionize the way we think about how human beings interact with screens to acquire language.