Sharing Our Screens

Recently I re-watched The Truman Show, the 1998 film about a man, played by Jim Carey, who discovers that his life has been broadcast to the world as a reality TV show. Though produced a quarter of a century ago, the movie’s critique of an “always-on,” surveillant media culture felt timely and spoke to my social media-fatigued soul. But in other ways, the film reminded me that it is the product of a bygone era.

Namely, it depicts the fictional fans of The Truman Show as people who regularly, and often exuberantly, watch TV together. From the security guards viewing shoulder-to-shoulder in a cramped office on their night shift, to the superfans who cheer on the program’s protagonist before wall-mounted TVs at the Truman Bar, the film captures the waning days of an era defined by stationary television sets and “appointment viewing,” and the gregarious viewing practices they often engendered.

Fans watch The Truman Show in the Truman Bar. (The Truman Show, 1998)

By now, the meaning of “sharing our screens” has changed. What once could have described how spectators regularly watched movies or TV in the company of others, the notion of “sharing a screen” is now more commonly associated with Zoom meetings or gaming platforms, where we momentarily grant each other views of whatever is displayed on our personal devices. Even when we opt to watch movies and TV in the company of others, most of us do so while “second-screening,” or looking at one or more additional devices simultaneously. As Sherry Turkle describes this social shift, we are not only increasingly “alone together” as we gaze at our personal screens in the presence of others, but “always distracted, always elsewhere.”

Even the idea of being alone together doesn’t capture the full picture, as research suggests we are increasingly alone, period. The amount of time that Americans spend alone has surged in the past 20 years. Researchers trace the growing social isolation to a number of problems with our “culture of connection,” including a commercialized Internet that capitalizes on conflict and compulsive use, inadequate access to public gathering spaces, and the decline of participation in faith communities. We are not only more alone and on screens, it seems, but more removed from the physical spaces and practices that have anchored us in communities and supported our search for meaning and purpose beyond the self.

Christian scholars of film and media, including Robert K. Johnson, Craig Detweiler, Kutter Callaway, and my colleague Carl Plantinga, have labored to show how a discerning approach to screen media can nurture our faith, bringing us into spaces, real and imagined, in which we might encounter God. Once criticized for their problematic representations and moral messages, popular movies and TV shows have gained valence in Christian communities as widely-shared texts that can awaken the moral imagination, prompt ethical and spiritual discussions, and draw our attention to the beauty of creation and the problems of worldly suffering.

But less has been written about the manner in which people of faith might engage with screens. If seeking God in communion with others, and loving and serving our neighbors, are foundational beliefs, perhaps our screen habits and media spaces deserve closer attention as fertile fields of action. For the French film theorist Michel Chion, the movie theater is one of the few remaining places in modern society where people of diverse backgrounds can access the sacredness of communal attentiveness and awe. “Few things seem to me as moving as the silence of a disparate group of people gathered together for a communal experience, when this silence isn’t from pure obedience or routine,” he wrote in Film: A Sound Art.

Christians believe that for true communion with God and our neighbors, there is no substitute for that which is experienced through participation in communal houses and practices of worship, as well as in our shared hearing of the Gospels as the greatest story ever told.

But in a world in which a growing portion of our lives is lived on screens, perhaps a turn toward more communal screen practices can be a step toward building better relations with our families and neighbors. By sharing our screens, the transcendence may come not solely from the experience of collectively pausing, sitting still in space and time, and taking in a story together, but in the choice to simply be a collective witness to stories when our technology no longer demands it of us.

Can we share our screens again?

The irony of a technologized world that promises constant contact and worldwide connectivity, wrote the communication scholar Susan Douglas in 2006, is its tendency to support a “turn within:” a redirection of attention to individual preferences from outward-looking concerns. If the trend in contemporary media culture is to pull us further into ourselves, and away from ideas and people that we might otherwise avoid, how can we rethink not only what we choose to view but how, and with whom, we view it?

One analogy I find myself grasping at, with some hope as I confront my own battles with digital distraction and parenting, is that of the “digital hearth.” This idea comes from the media scholar Bernadette Flynn, who studied, in the early 2000s, the adoption of video game consoles in suburban households in Australia. Flynn observed that despite prevailing fears at the time that video games were straining at familial and social relationships, in practice, they offered a surprisingly lively focal point for social interaction in the home—a kind of “digital hearth.”

Noting that the word focus in Latin means “fireplace,” or “hearth,” Flynn observed that video game consoles offered some continuity with previous domestic technologies around which families had traditionally gathered, sharing their attention, activity, and time. “Over time, the focus of the gaze has shifted from the fireplace to radio, to television and now to games console,” she wrote. Around the hearth, whether a crackling fireplace or a glowing television screen, people have found warmth, rest, and the enjoyment of shared stories.

Since encountering this concept, I’ve taken to the idea of keeping a kind of “digital hearth” going in my household. But as my family and I are learning, it is not so easy when the screens are so ubiquitous and their content so fragmented, and the platforms’ behavioral designs so effective at diverting one’s focus to individual preferences.

Family movie nights, for example, have become my husband’s and my small act of resistance against a media ecosystem that would otherwise have us consuming different content on separate screens and in separate rooms. Navigating the Netflix menu with our kids on the couch, we try to teach them the endangered skill, honed in our youth in the aisles of Blockbuster stores, of building consensus around our entertainment choices. We have, likewise, become devoted fans of the Olympic Games, less for their athletic significance than for the simple joy of following a single spectacle, intelligible to kids and adults alike, for days on end on the living room TV.

But the biggest leap we’ve taken toward building a digital hearth is in setting up a “family computer,” drawing on a mix of nostalgic and pragmatic memories of how computers were shared in our 1990s childhood homes. A couple of years ago, our then-kindergartner encountered some disturbing content on a digital tablet that was ostensibly designed for kids. Needing to respond somehow, but not feeling ready to banish the Internet entirely from our home, we sought a middle way. We swapped the kids’ individual tablets for a communal computer and declared that it would remain stationed on a desk in the living room, for all to see.

With a screen that faces outward, toward the living space, rather than inward, toward the individual user, the family computer has transformed our experience of media and, in some ways, our relationships with each other. It has become a digital hearth of sorts; a new focus. The activities that my kids used to enjoy on their tablets, such as playing games and watching funny videos, are now more visible to us parents, inviting our supervision and shared viewing experiences. Likewise, the digital activities that I do as a parent—reading news, writing emails, scrolling through social media—are now visible to my kids, inviting their questions and sparking conversations about how to navigate the Internet’s wild and varied terrain.

Our imperfect attempts at building these rituals of sharing our screens at home remind me of the parenting struggles that the journalist Susan Dominus chronicled nearly a decade ago. In 2015, Dominus noticed that since she had adopted a smartphone, much of her motherly work had become “screened off” to her children. The technology had collapsed and rendered opaque many of her daily informational tasks, from paying bills and writing correspondence, to immersing herself in the narrative of an e-book. Dominus realized that her smartphone was making all of these important activities—which she had grown up observing her mother do in more transparent and tangible ways with analog or print media—invisible to her children. “They are shut out twice over,” she observed. “They see that I am otherwise occupied, but with what, they have no idea.”

It may be naive of me to think that tending a familial “digital hearth” can offer a way out of this predicament, or help my kids and me practice neighborliness, as the technology industry nudges us toward ever-greater reliance on personal apps and devices. But I will keep trying to keep our movie nights going and our family computer glowing for my kids and our guests, inviting them to share in the view. These small moments of sharing in the enjoyment and transcendence of screens, whether to resist the forces of fragmentation or to simply revive what feels like a meaningful, communal tradition at risk of being lost—have been worthwhile so far. Like a fireplace, the act of sharing our focus feels worth the effort that it takes to maintain.