The child sits cross-legged, shoulders dappled with light, a look of glazed vacancy on her face like a renaissance cherub gazing in wonder at the Almighty. This child is not, I should add, my own, but a subject of photographer Sophie Harris-Taylor’s new series, Screen Time.
Screen Time comprises dozens of beautifully shot images of kids at their most composed and otherworldly, ie, while they’re watching TV. No screen is ever shown, and the focus is solely on the studied, even beatific, concentration of its square-eyed subjects.
With their vivid imagination,’ Harris-Taylor writes,’their bodies are left in a kind of unselfconscious tranquillity.’ This is the most enchanting description I’ve ever come across of that unwavering TV-trance that all parents can relate to. Moreover, browsing through the gallery uplifts my spirits about my children’s viewing habits, transforming their increasingly frequent episodes of screen-time into small acts of meditation and repose or perhaps, even, performance art. Needless to say, I’ve shared it with every parent I know.
It’s delightful to perceive my son’s deep and thought-provoking gaze as an act akin to religious contemplation. It’s a comparison that’s unmistakable as he watches, entranced, his current favorite show, Dr Binocs. In this show, the titular PhD – a floating beard with binoculars for eyes – presents short cartoons that answer intriguing questions like What If You Could Fly? Why Do We Fart? Could Loch Ness Monster Be Real?
The channel’s tone can sometimes be grating, but its content is impressively diverse for a children’s YouTube channel. At times, it’s puzzlingly so. It’s actually challenging to determine the target age range. Alongside the usual segments on dinosaur extinctions, planets, and bodily functions, you’ll find videos on phytoplankton, schizophrenia, and the life and times of Messi, Roger Federer, and Genghis Khan. One video, What Is Recession?, provides a dazzlingly detailed explanation of interest rates and investment yields, presented with the same flashy animation used for videos about the chemical makeup of farts. It’s impressively and almost bewilderingly thorough, albeit a bit jarring to witness the same characters who were just running away from a Yeti now portraying factory workers crying because they’ve been laid off.
My daughter’s favorite channel is, as expected for anyone with a pre-speech child, Ms Rachel, the kind and smiling educator who creates phenomenally popular content for early-years children. She speaks loudly and clearly, offering an encouraging “Good job” after every instruction, assuming that a million unseen babies are following her every word. My daughter is undoubtedly one of them. With a bit of embarrassment, I can confirm that some combination of Ms Rachel’s uncanny pleasantness and persistent tone have achieved speech and gesture milestones in our child that we have struggled with for weeks as parents. This simultaneously reassures and unsettles us regarding her growing addiction to Ms Rachel, but it’s not a feeling we dwell on for too long.
She points to her blocks and says ‘bahbah’ for the first time. Her brother quizzes me on supply and demand. Then they resume their attentive, open-mouthed watching, experiencing cherubic bliss, fixated on the face of the Almighty.
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