Screens

Tuesday

Philip Hensher

Will this century see the end of books?

Anyone proposing to publish a polemic between hard covers about the decline of literacy and reading will, of course, find themselves preaching to the choir. If you read books, you will agree with this one; if you don’t, your negligence will not be touched by its fervour. I won’t say that it is a useless object; merely how unhelpful it would be simply to agree with its main point. The decline of reading practices is quite convincingly demonstrated in surveys. Fewer and fewer people in the US and Britain read habitually, by their own admission. In one celebrated case, an entire cohort of English literature academics in America was unable to make anything at all of the first page of Bleak House.

Thursday

Sophie Winkleman and David James

Textbooks will always beat screens

From our UK edition

Is the page finally beginning to turn on children and screens? For the first time since the advent of social media, we are seeing a burgeoning alliance across all political divides to protect children from digital harm. In 2024 Jonathan Haidt delivered an urgent manifesto for change in The Anxious Generation, and at the beginning of this year Australia responded with a ban on social media for under-16s. Now even Britain is finally recognising the scale of the problem. Despite this week's decision by MPs to consult rather than enforce, the fight will rage on. Deliberation doesn’t work in the arena of addictive substances. However, the war on classroom screentime has yet to be properly waged, let alone won.

Tuesday

Ross Anderson

The tech I’m looking forward to in 2024

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the first and biggest tech convention of the year, took place earlier this month, where the strangest, newest products were shown off. As usual, there was a lot of fluff — pointless gizmos that work on a show floor but never make it to stores — but there were also core signs of the technology trends we’re going to see this year, and products I’m excited to try. Screens are always a strong point at CES, and this year proved no different, from pure quantum dot prototypes, translucent televisions and yet another laptop with a glasses-free 3D display; but it’s the arrival of great OLED screens to mainstream laptops that truly excites me.

tech