The Screen Time Tightrope: Too Much, Not Enough

What is a 'normal' amount of screen time?

I get asked this all the time. I wish I could give a number. It would make my life much easier.

Last year I was sweating under studio lights on TVNZ’s Breakfast show while the host asked me this and waited for me to say something authoritative for parents to take home. I mumbled something about “it depends on context” and “I’m not a psychologist”, which is true, but also a bit of a cop out.

Side note: why do we always ask psychologists and doctors for the number? Why do they get to decide what normal looks like? Why do I always say “I’m not a psychologist” when I’m interviewed about screen time?!

Note to self: Alex be proud of your media studies heritage!

I’m a tad annoyed that we default to psychologists and doctors as the only people we ask about what “normal” looks like. A rebellious part of me wants to say: screw the psychologists!!! Not because their work is useless, but because it narrows the question to individual pathology and leaves the economic conditions untouched.

The people we should also be asking? Those writing about work, about capitalism, about attention as something structured and harvested.

The concept of 'normal' attention, or what counts as the right amount of focus, the right pace of thought, the right relationship to stimulation, has never been a neutral biological fact. It has always been calibrated to the needs of the prevailing economic order. One of those orders is platform capitalism: a system in which the primary commodity being extracted is human attention, and the primary infrastructure for extraction is the smartphone.

Useful fact: platform capitalism is how Facebook and Google became billion dollar companies in the less than two decades. They nailed how to extract our attention into $$$

Mark Fisher, the British critic and theorist, focused on another variant called late capitalism, and he put the structural argument with characteristic sharpness in Capitalist Realism (2009): "If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism — a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture."

Sidenote: If you don't know what late capitalism means, you're not alone. My interpretation is that it's about the extension of capitalism into endless domains of life (like having to pay to not use your phone). Hence 'late' because capitalism extends itself into further areas of our lives.

Fisher’s claim is not that ADHD is invented or that neurological differences aren’t real. It is that the salience of attention difficulties as a ‘disorder’ (as a deviation from normality requiring diagnosis, medication, and management) is historically specific. It belongs to a particular economic moment.

Robert Chapman’s Empire of Normality is also useful here because it makes the politics of our attention even clearer. Chapman argues that capitalism did not create neurodivergent people out of nothing, but it did create the historical conditions in which certain traits become legible as deficits, disorders, or failures to meet the standard of the ‘normal’ worker.

That point helps reframe the screen-time debate. We talk endlessly about whether someone has ‘too much’ screen time, but hardly ever ask what kind of work they do, what forms of attention their occupation demands, or what kinds of digital availability their livelihood requires. A journalist, lecturer, administrator, designer, or other knowledge worker will almost inevitably accumulate far more screen time than a builder, gardener, or courier, not simply because of personal weakness or bad habits, but because post-Fordist work reorganises labour around information, communication, and perpetual connectivity. In that sense, ‘normal screen time’ is already stratified by occupation before it is moralised at the level of the individual.

This is one reason the idea of a single healthy or normal amount of screen time can be so misleading. Under post-Fordism, the assembly line has not disappeared; it has become, as Fisher puts it, “a flux of information. Work is communication.”.

We see the same logic with young people. Their screen time is sky-high not simply because they are “addicted to their phones”, but because more and more of their lives have been moved onto screens: lessons and homework through digital platforms, friendships maintained in group chats, youth culture unfolding on feeds rather than in parks, malls, or youth centres. Physical “third spaces” — the informal, low-cost places beyond home and school where you can just exist and muck around — have become scarcer, more commercialised, or less accessible, and digital platforms have stepped in as a kind of ill-suited substitute. At the same time, teenagers are growing up inside an economy that tells them, constantly, to build a brand, to hustle, to stay visible in an increasingly unequal world of haves and have-nots.

In that context, heavy screen time is not a mysterious pathology; it is a rational adaptation to a landscape in which being offline can feel like falling behind.

The economic logic becomes even clearer when we consider another variant of our economic times: limbic platform capitalism. This concept comes from Professor Antonia Lyons, a health psychologist at the University of Auckland.

Sidenote: I know Antonia. She is friggin amazing! Shout out Antonia.

She argues with her colleagues that social media platforms work directly on the brain’s limbic reward system — the same neurological architecture targeted by the tobacco and alcohol industries — but now at a scale, intimacy, and personalisation that is historically unprecedented.

The compulsive quality of the scroll is not an accidental byproduct of platform design. It is the design!!! The attentional fragmentation that follows is not a pathology users bring to their devices — it is a condition the devices are built to produce, because fractured attention is more monetisable than sustained attention. The more ads we get distracted by, the more 'valuable' they are.

But here’s the tightrope: the same platforms that fracture attention also demand that users remain available, productive, and engaged. Too much scrolling, too much distraction, too much digital pleasure: pathology. Not enough responsiveness, not enough availability, not enough platform participation: also pathology, or at least a failure of professionalism. The result is that screen time becomes a moving target whose ‘healthy’ threshold is calibrated less by any universal human need than by what the current economy can extract from us without breakdown.

Sometimes I am frustrated that Fisher’s spookily prescient writing is not read more widely. I wonder if the relative inaccessibility of his work (its density, its circulation in particular subcultures) is itself a product of capitalist realism: the sense that serious structural critique is niche, optional, extracurricular. Something for “theory" or "Marxism nerds”, not for parents being asked about screen time on morning television.

Fisher’s point, put bluntly earlier, is that contemporary attention distress has to be read as part of the history of late capitalism, not just as private malfunction. What his work does is relocate ADHD and related forms of distress from the clinic back into the wider conditions that make certain forms of consciousness so hard to inhabit.

But this does not mean that all neurodiversity derives from late capitalism, or that capitalism simply invents ADHD out of whole cloth. That would collapse lived neurological difference into a crude economic determinism. Chapman is more careful than that: the point is not that neurodivergence is unreal, but that the disabling force of particular traits is intensified, organised, and judged within historically specific material conditions.

In other words, the economy does not explain everything. But it does explain a great deal about why some forms of attention become problems now, why they are distributed and diagnosed in the ways they are, and why ‘normality’ keeps getting redrawn around the needs of productivity.

The famous bandana wearing literary author David Foster Wallace had a name for these murky waters we’re all swimming in. His 2005 commencement address “This is Water” argued that the really important kind of freedom involves attention: “awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people.” Wallace’s fish-in-water metaphor is also Fisher’s point about capitalist realism — the difficulty of thinking outside a system precisely because you are inside it, constituted by it, breathing it. The hardest thing to see is the medium you’re already moving through.

And Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest, written a full decade before the smartphone, is a speculative anatomy of exactly this condition: an entertainment so perfectly engineered for the limbic system that consuming it is fatal. Wallace imagined, with comic horror, what a culture fully organised around the logic of limbic capitalism would feel like from the inside. It would feel, he suggested, like the inability to stop — not because you’re weak, but because the architecture of the experience is designed to make stopping impossible.

Sidenote: My first-born child is called Wallace. There may be a connection.

So what is a normal amount of screen time? The honest answer, in our current economic moment, is: “whatever keeps you on the tightrope”.

Right now, capitalism demands that we be permanently reachable, perpetually scrolling, continuously producing and consuming content. Any deviation from that, such as switching off at 9pm, refusing to check email on weekends, preferring a walk to your inbox, begins to look like a failure of productivity. And any excess of it, when the limbic circuitry breaks down under the load, gets diagnosed as a disorder.

It is exhausting to live there. To keep calibrating your own availability, your children’s availability, your pleasure, your productivity, so that you do not fall off either side.

The question we should be asking instead is the one Fisher identified as urgent: how has it become acceptable that so many people, especially so many young people, are ill? Not “what is wrong with this individual?” but “what is wrong with the conditions under which this individual is living?”

That is not a clinical question. It is a political one.

And until we start answering it politically, all the phone bans and screen time guidelines in the world will keep doing exactly what the economic order demands: keeping us balanced precariously between overload and optimisation.