Back when I was at university (around 400BC), there was something of a running joke among my flatmates—who were laughing with me, not at me, thank you very much—that I was addicted to screens. While most people had at least a laptop, as the resident tech nerd I was an early adopter of the likes of the smartphone, the tablet and the e-reader. So the fact that I'm feeling screened-out here and now in 2024 is saying something.
It's clear that the tech world is at an inflection point. The domination of the smartphone has been total – we're all now well used to spending far longer than we'd like staring at the tiny rectangle in our hands. Then we go to work at stare at the larger rectangle on our desks. Then we go outside to exercise, but not without logging it all via the tiny rectangle on our wrists. I generalise, of course – but it's felt for the last decade or so that every possible frontier of our lives has at last been assigned a screen. But that isn't stopping tech brands from inventing new screens – and perhaps also inventing our reasons for needing them.
