Screen Time by Phillip Maciak review – why we’re hooked

There are people who sleep with their smartphones beneath their pillows. Out of convenience? Or through some vague hankering after a marriage of technology and dreaming, the creation of a more stretchy, psychedelic reality? There are people, too, who spend the night holding their phones just as they might once have held the hands of their lovers.

Phillip Maciak recognises this scenario very well. One of the premises of Screen Time is that screens should not be seen as discrete objects, things that in times past sat in the corner of a room or on a desk. Nowadays, the functions of TV sets and record players can be accessed on phones and iPads that are small, portable, designed to make life without them almost unimaginable. Screens have become less like devices and more like implants.

Maciak points out that some phones even have an application called “screen time”. The term once referred to the hours we spent watching; now the screen watches us, monitoring our usage. “What you see on your phone is just a visualization, a cute externalization, of a process that’s likely already going on and on inside your mind,” he writes. “It pays attention to what you’re doing when you hold it in your hand, and it judges you the way you might judge yourself. It’s an autofill for an anxiety that was born with the television in the 50s and caught fire at the end of the 20th century, creating a totalizing atmosphere for our lives.”

Screen Time is not a work of media critique or of political theory so much as it is a weather report, an ambient autobiography. It’s part of a series called Avidly Reads, an offshoot of the online magazine Avidly, in which various writers, mostly American academics, talk about how cultural forms and objects – among them opera and board games – make us feel. Is this a betrayal of scholarship? A shift away from sober analysis and professional expertise to a more blurry, personal discourse? Professors used to trade in facts; now, almost as often as their students, they begin sentences with “I feel like … ”

Maciak’s self-explorations don’t unearth anything too dramatic. In a sentence that presumes but fails to be revealing, he describes himself growing up as a “white, cisgender, heterosexual boy in a suburban household”. He refers often to Mad Men, knows many people who blog about their viewing habits, and takes it as self-evident that we’re living through a golden era of “prestige TV”. (Personally, I think there was more human drama and wisdom in a single episode of ITV’s Crown Court than the whole of The Sopranos.)

Many readers will recognise themselves in Maciak’s description of modern screen mores – late evenings spent on genealogy sites, researching expensive purchases, choosing to read summaries of horror movies they’re too scared to actually watch. He also cites the phenomenon of “revenge bedtime procrastination” – knackered workers scrolling or channel-surfing instead of going to sleep. It’s a gesture of defiance, an insistence on “me” time, a fuck-you to their bosses. Then again, as the critic Jonathan Crary wrote, it’s a defiance that only serves to boost the profits of Big Tech.

Here, Maciak mentions the “massive carbon footprint” of digital screens. He’s also aware that they play a role in propagating “radicalization, bullying, and hate”, and broods about their impact on his young children. But he strives – too hard, I think – to be an optimist. In his final chapter he recounts a family road trip that includes a weekend in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The patchy wifi there gives him the creeps. He wants his screens, worries that he wants them too much, is cheered by the existence of an astronomy app that keeps his daughter preoccupied. Is there a payoff? Not really. She looks at the screen, he looks at her looking at the screen, and – essentially – shrugs. “This is how it feels.” No! It feels worse, so very much worse than that.

• Screen Time by Phillip Maciak is published by NYU (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.