- In 2007, Donald Mutti and his colleagues at the Ohio State University College of Optometry in Columbus reported the results of a study that tracked more than 500 eight- and nine-year-olds in California who started out with healthy vision6. The team examined how the children spent their days, and “sort of as an afterthought at the time, we asked about sports and outdoorsy stuff”, says Mutti.
It was a good thing they did. After five years, one in five of the children had developed myopia, and the only environmental factor that was strongly associated with risk was time spent outdoors6.
I have spent years staring at a CRT screen as a kid only a few inches from my face and not going outside much. Always had a hunch that my short-sightedness was related to that.
One of the reasons that telescopes were invented in the late 1500's was due to the Gutenberg Press. Books went from costing a year's salary to a month's, in some cases a weeks' pay; the wiki page says that 20 million books were in circulation by 1500. Now that more and more people were able to read, and afford the books to do so, the need for eyeglasses increased. The rise of the Dutch glass-works industry and the optical glass they made lead to the first spyglasses; rumors of the leaking of said information leading to death are exaggerated. It is not really a shock that a Dutchman filed the first patents for a telescopes. Note that although the patent was filed in 1608, spyglasses were in use on ships for at least a decade prior. My hope is that all the new reading and looking at screens will produce a similar jump in optical aids, and I can hopefully live long enough to get robotic eyes to replace the shitty under-performing units I was born with.
I thought that this was an article about politics, based on the title. Pleasantly surprised to learn that they meant it literally. I have a very young son, and it has been my plan to try to keep him away from screens, but I have to confess that I don't really know how. We run so much of our house through our phones (lights, stereo, shopping, etc) that it's inevitable that I pull out my phone pretty often while I'm with him. I'm sure I'm inadvertently desensitizing him. I could do a better job, but it feels sort of inevitable that kids are going to be screen exposed way sooner than we'd all like.