Cloud of Nuanced Screens

Faced with screens, fear is a bad counselor. I propose substituting a nuanced approach for the ambient panic, one based on the distinction between the medium, the content, and the usage.

The dead end of moral panic

As a parent or member of the educational community in the broad sense, whether we are teachers, godparents, grandparents, or even adolescents and children—since educational sensitivities also exist among peers—we are all questioned and feel concerned by the issue of screens. There is this belief, widely spread and cultivated by studies and other surveys, that screens are dangerous for children. “Scientific studies” are cited, often without precise references, with the aim of corroborating this idea, even going so far as to evoke a “health disaster.” Books with catchy titles, like The Digital Cretin Factory by Michel Desmurget (2019) or Screens: A Health Disaster, There’s Still Time to Act by Servane Mouton (2025), paint an apocalyptic picture of the “situation.” Yet, if we closely examine the experimental modalities, conceptual frameworks, and political presuppositions of the “research” and “studies” on which their claims are based, we find that they are either non-existent, assumed, or conducted with major biases, with the aim of always corroborating the same preconceived hypothesis: that of the intrinsic harmfulness of screens.

In this debate, two schools clash: that of panic and that of nuance. I resolutely align myself with the second, alongside thinkers like psychiatrist Serge Tisseron who, among many other initiatives toward nuance for a long time, published in 2009, updated in 2024, the book 3-6-9-12+ Taming Screens and Growing Up, whose methods can be found on the website 3-6-9-12+. He writes:

I advocate for a reasoned use of screen-related technologies.
[...]
We agree with many criticisms from those who see excessive screen consumption by young people as a source of problems, but we think they only go halfway. The other half consists of seeing the advantages that some derive from guided usage, and developing the means that will allow us to attractively offer other activities to children so that the qualities that some demonstrate with screens can be valued, and other qualities that are absent from screens can be cultivated.

For years we have proposed to those who see only the problematic aspects of screens to reflect with us on these questions: they respond by telling us that we don’t see the digital apocalypse coming, or worse still, they accuse us of contributing to it. We fear that their purely repressive remarks are preparing us for another one.

I share his diagnosis: an educational policy based on fear is not only ineffective but counterproductive. It only leads to parental guilt, youth stigmatization, and the aggravation of inequalities, creating real educational blind spots, when what matters is creating connections. What we need to support are realistic, respectful, concrete, nuanced, and constructive educational choices, not measures based on fear.

For the coercive approach, draped in a well-meaning attitude as deceptive as it is convincing, instrumentalizes collective anxiety. It stages a moral panic worthy of a bad science fiction series, except that here we’re dealing with our real lives. But then, how do we escape this rhetoric of fear? How do we define this nuance that I call for to envision beneficial actions, whatever our place in the educational chain? I propose here several paths, which I hope are concrete and operative, for a school year under the sign not of imaginary and morbid terror, but of realistic educational intelligence.

What is a screen? Deconstructing the obvious

The first step consists of questioning the very concept of “screen.” What is a screen? In its most fundamental sense, it is already present in Plato’s cave allegory: it’s the back of the cave onto which shadows are projected, a surface that reflects back to us a representation of reality. A screen is also the wall or ground onto which our own shadows and those of objects are projected. It is therefore a surface external to us, generally flat, that reflects back to our gaze animated images, in black and white or in color, silent or associated with sound. A screen is an interface, usually flat, that mediates our relationship to the world through images. If I project a film on the facade of a house, the wall becomes a screen. If I contemplate at the end of the day the shadows of trees dancing on the wall of my living room, I am, in a sense, facing a natural screen. Cinema, television, smartphone, computer are all variations of the same principle.

And this family of objects, the screen, is much more heterogeneous than we think. Virtual reality glasses place a screen in front of each eye, seeking to substitute themselves for our direct perception of the world, for example. If we push the reasoning to its limit, we could even consider that the inverted image that forms at the back of our eye on the retina is the first screen, a biological screen from which our brain constructs its representation of reality thanks to its sensitive cells that line its surface. But let’s stick here to objects that are external to us. An e-reader, with its non-backlit electronic ink, is also a screen, of course. But is it so different from a book? The page of a novel read on an e-reader or on paper presents to our eyes an almost identical image, only the materiality of the object changes. What if books were also screens?

This ambiguity reveals our cultural biases. When I was a child, a cousin my age spent her days reading novels, neglecting her homework and social life. Her parents were panicked by what they perceived as an addiction to reading, a closing off to the world, “screen time” before its time. Today, a child who read that much would be praised, considered a model of openness and curiosity. Yet what do children largely do on screens? They read and write! Texts, conversations, articles. They also look at images, still and moving, entertain themselves, discover and learn, and listen to music or play networked video games, all activities that would be valued if they took place in the city’s media library, for example. This example illustrates a first major confusion: we judge the medium while forgetting to analyze the real activity it enables, that is, its uses.

Distinguishing medium, content, and usage

The second point, absolutely essential, is to rigorously distinguish three dimensions that alarmist discourse constantly confuses:

1. the screen (the medium),
2. the contents (what we find there),
3. and the uses (what we do with it).

When we are told that “screens wreak havoc,” which screens are we talking about? Which contents? And above all, which uses? We often invoke Marshall McLuhan’s famous formula, “the medium is the message” (1964), whose meaning is political and anthropological, not educational, to sanctify or demonize a medium in itself, independently of the other two dimensions. Yet this vision is extremely reductive, it’s an instrumentalization of McLuhan’s thought. My personal experience testifies to this: as a young adolescent, I frequented movie theaters assiduously, spending hours in front of that screen, without anyone worrying about it. Cinema, adorned with its status as the “seventh art,” was perceived as a virtuous screen. This prejudice reveals a real historical irony. The cinema screen, where one could see violent, dark films sometimes not recommended for young audiences, was valued by adults in reference to their own cultural experiences. I admit to having been personally traumatized in my childhood by Walt Disney cartoons seen in the cinema, and having nightmares about them for a long time! I must have seen them too young.

Conversely, the television screen, notably that of French public service in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, was despised and qualified as dumbing-down, when in reality the institutions and teams that produced the programs did so with extraordinary educational integrity (ORTF, Pierre Schaeffer and his teams, etc.). Conceived without audience pressure, these programs aimed at the cultural edification of the greatest number. Objectively, television of this era was much more “educational,” and even creative than the commercial cinema of the same period, but a tenacious cultural hierarchy placed ancient art above the new medium, as is still the case for the judgments we make about current new media.

This confusion between the medium and the value of its contents and uses persists today. We cannot intelligently analyze the impact of screens without asking this triple question: which medium? for which contents? and for which uses? It is by refusing extreme simplification, by entering into nuances, that we can exercise relevant educational action. For the reality is that we live, whether we want it or not, in the middle of a “cloud of screens.” Rather than looking at them as an opaque and threatening mass, I propose to consider them as a “cloud of nuanced screens,” whose problems and potentials it is up to us to illuminate in a nuanced way.

For a pedagogy of usage

Let us now focus on the essential, that is, on the uses of screens. The traditional distinction between a “passive” use (watching television) and an “active” use (creating, interacting) sets us a first conceptual trap. We have long valued activity against passivity, yet social networks, which embody the most active use there is—content production, permanent interactions, community management—are precisely those we judge most dangerous and addictive for young people! This contradiction shows the fragility of our categories of thought. I’m not sure that the very long hours spent in front of television by the youth of the 80s and 90s were more virtuous than the hours on today’s social networks, quite the opposite perhaps. At the same time, parents “freaked out” that their teenagers spent hours on the phone with their friends in the evening, blocking the family line, when they were going to see each other the next day at middle or high school. We need to look at things with a bit of seriousness and stop producing shortcuts that only serve to comfort fears, themselves stirred up by Cassandras who have well understood that fear sells (books, conferences, training, political projects, domination power).

Let’s take the example of revisionist content present on YouTube: if it is very little watched, so its usage is very low, its social impact remains extremely limited, even though it is present. Of course, it’s not impossible that their audience might explode one day, but usage is still much more determining than the simple existence of content, because it’s what makes it exist in people’s minds. And in reality, this usage itself is much more nuanced than the simple active/passive dichotomy:

• There is a usage of consumption, of reception, as in front of television. But even there, we can change channels, and at the cinema, we can change theaters or leave during the film. Reception usage is therefore never actually passive, because we experience sensory, emotional, intellectual, and philosophical experiences in front of images.
• With contemporary social networks, which appeared not with Facebook in 2004 but from the late 90s with Skyblog, then Myspace, we entered Web 2.0, that is, a space where users are no longer simple receivers, but also content producers and creators of links, of communities. These interactive screens, accessed today mainly via mobile phones, correspond to young people’s main usage, alongside video games and consumption of linear videos.

These uses are extremely diversified and vary for each person, at each moment, depending on trends and new platforms. It is false to believe that an adolescent always does the same thing on their phone. No, they go through a very great multiplicity of activities, in the same way that at the cinema we see different films. Simply, on a phone, we are exposed to a greater diversity of activities, interactions, and content, and this at a greater speed. This requires greater brain agility, which can be hastily qualified as attention deficit or superficiality. But in purely objective terms, the brain is solicited by more information than before, and it has never been scientifically proven that this reduces intelligence. For AI usage for example, the only study (disclosed by the prestigious MIT in June 2025) “proving” that AI usage made people stupid, “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, was quickly debunked for its methodological biases, its non-transparency on the veracity of data, and inconsistencies in analysis. MIT therefore removed it from its official channels. But some will still continue to cite this “scientific study” without restraint, not mentioning its debunking.

Catastrophism is often a matter of symbolic power, of human vanity. It is easier to pose as an expert prophesying decline, which is actually very seductive by its simplicity, than to tackle the complex task of understanding ongoing mutations. Philosopher Michel Serres, in Little Thumbelina (2012), rightly postulated that the world had changed and that our brains, endowed with immense plasticity, adapt, that we invent a new world, new ways of thinking. There is no reason to make a moral judgment about this transformation. During the invention of printing by Gutenberg around 1450, similar fears were raging: erudite holders of power worried about this deluge of information that risked corrupting minds and destroying the coherence of culture, cement of society. History showed that this innovation was on the contrary the engine of unprecedented emancipation, which led to the Age of Enlightenment, source of our contemporary societies. What if what overwhelms us today was actually the seed of major future human progress?

The only viable educational approach is therefore one that consists of focusing on uses. As with food, there are beneficial uses and harmful uses. The heart of our role as educators is to discover, with curiosity and without a priori judgment, the real uses of young people. This is particularly difficult, because these uses constantly evolve and are singular to each person. Yes, there are some surveys that are done from time to time. These are quantitative surveys, operated by online questionnaires on “representative samples” that give some information, biased, about the general uses of screens by adolescents. This kind of study is generally pretty much useless because it responds above all to the grids of questions that were constituted by the people conducting the survey. We therefore find quite few things that we hadn’t previously supposed. We must return to the reality of the people we address, to ourselves, to our life, to our singularities.

As educators, we therefore have responsibilities to take, and it is crucial that we take them. The first thing is to take an interest in the real uses of screens by young people and children, but also in our own uses. We must dialogue with children, restore trust, overcome judgment and, above all, stop thinking only in terms of “screen time,” a measure that makes no sense. Everything depends on what we do with these screens. The only way is dialogue. Let us take an interest in what they do, create, share, learn, and feel with their “screens.”

From surveillance to dialogue: a new educational pact

This approach first implies introspection. How much time do we, adults, spend in front of our own screens? Most of our days, us too! But since we work, respond to emails, or participate in video conferences, we don’t perceive this time as excessive, because it is justified by diverse purposes. We rarely asked ourselves the question of purpose for our children. Without knowledge of their activities, their “screen time” can seem abysmal and futile to us. And if, in turn, they judged us only on our screen time, without seeing the content of our work, their verdict about us would undoubtedly be just as severe!

Let us therefore put ourselves in their shoes. What they do with their screens undoubtedly seems just as legitimate to them as what we do with ours. And they often also have awareness of moments of excess, for which they would benefit from being accompanied, without being judged.

Putting ourselves in their shoes is therefore the first step, because what they do on their screens has meaning and legitimacy for them. This does not mean renouncing all regulation; it’s about basing the latter on mutual understanding and real interest in their world, rather than on anxious surveillance. Perhaps we ourselves are poorly organized, constantly interrupted by notifications from our phone. Discussions with our children about our own difficulties could prove constructive for everyone, leading to concerted family decisions: only checking emails at fixed hours, banning phones from certain spaces, etc. To progress, we need others to take an interest in our particular problems, which also take place, largely in front of screens. Maybe our children will also educate us about our own uses of screens!

Here then is my advice for a renewed educational approach: let us sincerely take an interest in the uses of screens, ours as well as those of others. This simple opening, if we really practice it, can elevate us to a superior level of collective intelligence. This is the path to mutually emancipate ourselves from possible addictions, to build richer daily lives and, above all, to reweave intergenerational bonds based on trust. It is our duty to cultivate this dialogue, for our benefit, that of our peers, and that of the youngest, in order to replace snap judgments with the constructive force of the collective.