Screen Damage

The Dangers of Digital Media for Children

By: Michel Desmurget, Andrew Brown - translator

Narrated by: Lyle Blaker

All forms of recreational digital consumption—whether on smartphones, tablets, game consoles, or TVs—have skyrocketed in the younger generations. From the age of two, children in the West clock up more than 2.5 hours of screen time a day; by the time they reach thirteen, it's more than seven hours a day. Added up over the first eighteen years of life, this is the equivalent of almost thirty school years, or fifteen years of full-time employment.

Most media experts do not seem overly concerned about this situation: children are adaptable, they say, they are "digital natives," their brains have changed and screens make them smarter. But other specialists—including some pediatricians, psychiatrists, teachers, and speech therapists—dispute these claims, and many parents worry about the long-term consequences of their children's intensive exposure to screens.

Michel Desmurget, a leading neuroscientist, has carefully weighed up the scientific evidence concerning the impact of the digital activities of our children and adolescents, and his assessment does not make for happy listening: he shows that these activities have significant detrimental consequences in terms of the health, behavior, and intellectual abilities of young people, and strongly affect their academic outcomes.

©2019, 2020 Editions du Seuil; English edition copyright 2023 by Polity Press (P)2023 Tantor

interesting book

this book should be readying for parents, teachers and also content creators. show data and specific escenarios.

Narration ruins it

I wanted to like this book but the narrator they chose makes it very difficult. There are a lot of dry topics throughout and the narrators voice makes them even more so. Just buy the physical book.