screentime
Many of us scroll for hours, yet don’t remember what we watch. We experience places through a screen before we’ve had a chance to experience it ourselves. And if we do, we travel, and end up on the other side of the world to sit in a cafe, almost identical to the one in our home town. We have given up our messy, slow, ordinary lives for the screen, for content, for sameness.
We’ve lost our ability to be present and in the moment. We’ve lost our capability of noticing. To be somewhere and be actually present in that place. To notice the beauty in the mundane, the ordinary, the subtleties of culture and history and what shapes a place and its people. This show is about bringing that back, learning how to come off the screen and see again; screentime.
This show takes the modern- day phrase everyone knows: the metric on your phone that tells you how much of your life you've wasted, and turns it into something else entirely. Time on the street. Time in the world. Time spent actually seeing. screentime.
screentime is a walking observational documentary series about learning to see again. Each episode follows me, Ruth Guest. I’m a photographer and cyberpsychologist. I walk through a city or place, noticing what most people walk straight past. Part philosophy, part street photography, part cultural portrait. The show is an argument for presence over performance, for the real world over the curated life we strive for online, and for the idea that you don't have to go far to find something worth seeing.
I’ve lived on both sides of the screen and have spent years as a photographer and storyteller - documenting people, culture, nightlife, the streets of Dublin and other European cities - before going deep into the world I now question regularly. Armed with an MSC in Cyberpsychology, I built Sersha, a social media safety game for kids. I understand from the inside exactly how these platforms are designed to keep you looking at them. I am a part of the generation that this show speaks to - my peers who grew up like me, at the exact moment the accessible internet arrived, and we’ve spent years consuming more than we’ve lived. I know what was lost because I lost it myself. I recently found my way back through a 1984 Leica with no battery, no light meter, and 36 frames of black-and-white film. And that's where screentime begins.
screentime is actively exploring partnerships with people and organisations who care about place, story, and independent documentary work. Whether you're a tourism board, a hotel or hospitality brand, or have a travel opportunity in mind — I'd like to hear from you.
