What are the rules?

David Ruiz

01 Jan 2025 — 1 min read

"Screentime" is time spent strictly on my iPhone. My job puts me in front of a laptop every day and celebrating a count of eight hours instead of nine is unwarranted.

I'm also not obsessive about Apple's "Screen Time" feature, and a decrease in screentime is hardly the goal here. The goal is to spend time away from the anxiety device. Every stream, feed, and platform yanks us into smooth, contextless chasms, and we scrape for some hook or hoop or crag for familiarity. I would like to spend less time in that descent and more time anywhere else.

Further, Apple's "Screen Time" is prone to mistakes and it includes time spent using CarPlay, like when I have Spotify up on the dashboard. This sounds like it can't be true but it is because Apple hates me personally (and all my readers).

The Kindle Question

Does it count as "screentime" when using a Kindle? I'd argue no, but it's a question I can comfortably avoid as my reading, currently, is physical. I live near a library, I buy used books in my neighborhood, and our household gets a steady stream of magazines and news delivered in the mail.

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The Kindle Question

Read more

On Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose"

On Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

On Ben Shattuck's "The History of Sound"

On Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness"