Calls for projects now fund sport as a “lever to limit screen time” among teenagers. The intention is serious, the wording is a trap: it turns the body into a punishment for the screen and the screen into a rival of the body. We build ourselves by speaking, by moving and by making images; a project that articulates these three registers achieves more than the subtraction of one by the other.
An assignment landing on our desks
The prevention of addictive behaviour among teenagers mobilises funding, and physical activity appears in it as a tool for care and emotional regulation. So far, so good: it is accurate, and it is documented. The slippage occurs when the project is worded as a balance: more sport for less screen, as if the two were competing for the same reservoir of hours and the virtue of one were measured by the retreat of the other. On the ground, this logic produces blackmail devices (the activity earned once you have let go of the phone) and teenagers who do sport while thinking about their phone, which heals nothing. Above all, it produces a message: your digital world is the enemy of your body. That message is false, and teenagers know it.
Three registers of one and the same construction
Serge Tisseron put it into words during a training course we were leading together: we build ourselves by speaking, we build ourselves by moving, we build ourselves by making images, and these three paths are parallel, not competing. He gave the example of dance, where the construction of the self goes first through the body, and recalled that for many young people, it is from the body that we must start again to build an identity, because language is less solid ground for them. Image practices themselves engage the body: filming means moving around, framing, holding, getting closer; in my itinerant projections, we walk at night through a town carrying the images with us; and some of the liveliest teenage digital practices are bodily practices, choreographies that are learned, filmed and passed on. The border between screen and body is far less watertight than public debate assumes.
Nature as seen from video games
The sociologist Jocelyn Lachance, who conducts his research through interviews with teenagers, reported an observation that struck me: young people who wander through natural spaces inside video games transform their way of seeing real nature, to the point of noticing pollution more, because the nature of the game, for its part, is perfect. One can see a paradox in this; I see in it the demonstration that the digital world and the physical world are not split apart but parallel and connected, each working on the perception of the other. The game makes possible experiences that the physical world forbids, and there is meaning, including meaning for the construction of the self, in digital practices that seem insignificant from a distance. An educational project that goes to war against these practices deprives itself of everything they contain.
What physical activity brings in its own right
Nothing in the above relativises the contribution of sport. Physical activity regulates emotions, discharges tensions, provides a sense of competence, inscribes you in a group and in rules, makes you feel the healthy tiredness that prepares sleep. For teenagers whose bodies have sometimes been the site of abuse, finding again a body that plays, runs and cooperates is in itself a piece of work. All of this belongs to psychosocial skills, those cognitive, emotional and social abilities that Santé publique France reorganised in 2022 and about which I showed, in the article Developing psychosocial skills through artistic practice, that they develop through experience, not through discourse. Sport is one training ground for them; artistic and digital practices are another; neither is more moral than the other.
Devices that articulate
Concretely, rather than opposing, we can cross. Filming the sporting gesture and watching it together: top-level athletes work on the mental image of their movement, and I showed in the article The selfie, the filter and the two bodies what the imagined body does to the real body; a teenager who watches their own gesture again, commented on kindly by the group, works on their body and their self-image in one and the same movement. Entrusting young people with the tournament’s reporting: those who are not playing film, edit, broadcast, and nobody is a spectator. Walking in order to photograph, photographing in order to walk. In all these devices, the screen becomes the instrument of the gaze on the body, and the body the material of the images. That, in my view, is what a “sport and screens” project can aim for: not pushing back one continent for the benefit of the other, but building the crossings.
