Fifteen Eighty Four

It is rare that a television show becomes truly ubiquitous, but since its release, Adolescence has been talked of almost everywhere in the UK – even Parliament (March 22nd, 2025). Indeed, the series was eventually deemed so important that it was made free to view in all schools. Adolescence is chilling on many levels, but its depiction of the lure and dangers of screens is especially affecting. Jamie, the lead, is a teenager who becomes hooked on social media platforms which distort reality, spreading hate and misogyny in obsessive, addictive ways. The alluring nature of these platforms combined with the hyper-availability of ideas and information through AI lend screens extraordinary force and power. Importantly, though, the border between human and screen is neither solid nor linear. It is on this border which our book, The Comfort of Screens, is concentrated: the blurry, porous boundary which both separates and connects people with, on, at, and against screens. Focusing in on the lives of those living on one crescent in England, it is more research novel than scholarly book. Written by Jennifer, an aging academic, and Samuel, a Gen Zer, we have sought to capture a transgenerational perspective on modern screen life. Jennifer lived on the crescent and during Covid lockdown walks became intrigued by the sight of people on their screens, framed by living room and kitchen windows. Sam, meanwhile, is a young writer who shared his thoughts on the manuscript and steadily wove in crucial, lived insights about living and growing up digital. These take the form of reflections at the close of each chapter, grounding and contextualising the preceding analysis within the experiential reality to which it relates.

The Comfort of Screens is a book born out of pandemic life. It tells the story of seventeen people’s digital worlds, and the ways that their habits, repertoires, and predilections took hold during lockdowns when life moved online. This is not, then, a book about young people like Jamie in Adolescence. It is not about those who fall prey to the gravitational pull of online worlds, rhetoric, and movements. Neither is it a book about online learning. Indeed, while we hope valuable insights can be gleaned from the stories which unfold within, it is also not a book which boasts conclusive answers to the question of how we ought to rethink education on screens. Rather, The Comfort of Screens is a book which humanises digital life. Assimilating the lived experience of these seventeen fascinating ‘crescent voices’ with Jennifer and Sam’s own reflections, the book provides an intricately tapestried perspective on contemporary communication. In this way, even if it is not a part of the exact same conversation, our book is certainly engaged in the same project as Adolescence: that of emphasising the human faces behind screen life and encouraging readers to think about their relationships with screens.

Though perhaps a strikingly simple answer to an undeniably complex worry, cultivating an attitude of criticality around our ambivalent dance with screens will go a long way toward allowing technology to enrich our lives instead of harming them. In concrete terms, this means talking about screens and their content – actively teaching and learning both alongside them and, crucially, without them. J.R.R. Tolkien claimed that “not all those who wander are lost” and certainly, scrolling is not always a bad thing. For many, wandering online became a great comfort during the covid years. Even the most low-tech interviewee mentioned the comfort they derived from their screen life. In a time when we could not go outside, screens offered both a window to the outside world and a door through which to escape it.

So how does all this relate to Jamie, if at all? What Adolescence did best was it exposed the urgency of demystifying screens and equipping both young people and adults with a deeper understanding of the intricacy and volatility of modern communication. Despite what Adolescence has led many to feel, though, this does not necessarily entail the need for fear or paranoia. Rather, it demands of all of us a degree of awe and wonder – a kind of giddy excitement intermingled with caution. What a world of possibility and opportunity has opened up before us, we have a right to think; what a dizzying responsibility, we have a duty to remember. Indeed, for all its strengths, this is perhaps where Adolescence and the political response to it has fallen short. We do not stop the next Jamie from being radicalised by forcing him to watch a Netflix miniseries at school, or by permanently confiscating his phone, or teaching teachers the meanings of emojis. That a dynamite emoji means “red pill” is certainly not a trivial detail for a teacher, but neither is this tidbit the answer to our problems. No, we save a generation of Jamies and a generation of his victims by changing our attitudes to screens and platforms as a whole. Screens can serve both as tools and as weapons, and so they require us not only to defend against them, but also to wield them and understand them. As Marshall McLuhan (1964) warned us over six decades ago, “the medium is the message”, and if we are to avoid being consumed by the siren call of screens, we must heed this warning and interrogate the systems which mediate our lives, not just the words within them. We must ask questions of screens and not stop asking them. We must ask, for instance, why boys might act like Jamie, and find answers which include but also stretch beyond the particular surface details of the content they consumed, because while Andrew Tate constitutes the ugly mouthpiece through which misogynistic hate is most prominently voiced today, he is neither its origin and nor will these attitudes stop when he is stopped. The screens that give us comfort, that we check incessantly, and that obsess us, shape our perceptions and social structures far more than the content displayed.

References

McLuhan, M. (1967). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Bantam Books.

Tolkien, J.R.R., 1991. The Fellowship of the Rings. London: HarperCollins.