Why do we spend so much time together?

You are the source of so much fun and so much that’s meaningful. From the bread and butter tasks of my work, to entertainment, to communicating, emails, Skype, iMessage – to research on anything from the ephemeral to the sublimely ridiculous. Mostly, our encounters are positive and enriching. Sometimes they are tedious. And then there is the time wasting, which is inevitable. Let’s call it procrastination, rather than time wasting, because there’s a creative purpose to that.

Laptop, I’d love to know how many hours of my week I spend staring into your screen, or whether I touch your keyboard more than I touch a human being. It’s almost as though you are a living thing.

At our house, everyone has a screen. In fact, we each have multiple screens. Sometimes I find myself sitting down with you, laptop, but with iPad and iPhone by my side. Sometimes we are all together in the same room, but nobody is talking, each of us seduced by the silver light of our screens.

At breakfast we now read the news on the iPad. I still feel more than a little antisocial when I do this. I feel my partner is ignoring me, is our relationship going to pot? But then we used to do the same thing with the newspaper, and was anybody accusing anyone else, or themselves of being less human? No, we weren’t. And that was because reading news printed on paper was somehow more worthy. Reading the paper was somehow better than watching TV. But really, it was no different. We were still channeling our attention to a thing, rather than to another person.

So in the end, what makes words printed on paper more virtuous than those that scroll across a screen? Why is reading a book so good for us, but screen time – even when spent doing exactly that: reading – is somehow bad? I don’t buy it.

The guilt needs to go. Out the window with all those old ways that were superseded for good reason.