Time spent in front of the screen

I think that what people are missing is the fact that a computer is essentially a multipurpose tool, not a single-use object like most, and in time its usefulness has grown up to a point where it can easily replace many of these mentioned "single-purpose" objects.

You can watch TV, a movie, read a book or the newspaper on a computer, but you can't, say, watch TV on a newspaper.

On top of that, computers can be used to perform a wide variety of other tasks that involve both creating stuff or just consuming:

- work;
- play games;
- write;
- create art;
- self-teaching a host of subjects (from history to programming);

Therefore, the perception of "always being in front of a screen" is somewhat distorted; What are you actually doing in front of the screen?

Personally, I do a lot of things both with a computer and without. At work, I am on the technical side of QA. At home, I research information, watch documentaries, create art (not very good at it, but I still enjoy it!), keep my programming skills up to date, develop a few simple games (haven't managed to make the next Angry Birds yet!) and play games; "Off the screen" activities include reading (I can get totally immersed in a good book), some DYI both in the apartment and on the car, go to the gym and build scale models.

However, should I say that most of the "off the computer" activities, I got into after reading and watching tutorials about them from the Internet - the gym being the obvious exception.

Therefore, I would say that computers are an excellent tools and an essential one at that - being 32 I did live quite a long time without the Internet, but right now it seems inconceivable to me, as the habit of being able to access information about just anything at the click of a button is quite spoiling.

As for the short attention span problem, I don't think it is strictly connected to computers and the Internet - I clearly remember when I was a child, if a game required a little bit of setting up or had a learning curve, most of the other kids would just lose interest within 30 seconds and decide to be messy and noisy instead. And I am talking the likes of 1988, no Internet nor iPads to blame for it - just the TV, perhaps...