Around 2016, “Night mode” or “night shift,” a screen display option that features a light-on-dark color scheme, started appearing on all of our devices. That year, Apple and Twitter released their own versions of the feature. Google and others soon followed, all of them promising to mitigate the damage of blue light exposure. Their goal was to address emerging concerns about the impact of screens on circadian rhythms and preempt a full-blown movement against late-night screen use. Eventually, the settings promised a much more vague set of benefits throughout the day, including better focus, energy savings, and reduced eyestrain. Consequently, “night mode” became “dark mode”.
There is no empirical explanation for the rise of dark mode. For most users, dark text on a light background is more difficult to read, presumably because the human eye has to a large extent evolved to detect dark figures against the bright background of the sky. Ironically, the reason the light-on-dark color scheme of traditional CRT monitors was dropped in the first place was because most people were used to reading ink on paper and therefore experienced a dark on light computer screen as more natural. there is little evidence that dark mode improves focus. Also, unless the mode is set to true black and people use certain types of screens, such as OLED, the amount of light emitted in light and dark mode is practically the samewhich means the promise of energy savings is also nil.
When it comes to sleep, there are very real signs that bright light at night is harmful, but the impact of screen light in particular is likely being overstated. According to Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience, the degree to which light exposure affects sleep depends on the wavelengths, duration and intensity of the light, and the person’s age and sensitivity, as well as the makeup of the body. need your eyes. He added that there is “virtually non-existent” evidence to support the efficacy of turning a blue-hued screen red in the hours before bed (as dusk-shift apps like F.lux do). It seems that what one is in reality doing with a screen late at night will affect the way one sleeps much more than the brightness or color of the light on the screen.
And yet, the bright light from the screen has been almost superstitiously linked to the ills of technology. When the science of the circadian rhythm began to enter popular discourse in the mid-2010s, it seemed to substantiate the fear that digital devices were somehow making our lives less natural, affecting sleep, mood and concentration. The strength of our attachment to dark mode lies in a deep conviction that our world is overlit and overstimulated, and that by approximating natural rhythms, darkness could help us reverse the influence of the digital age on our bodies and minds.
In Internet, the sun never rises and never sets. (It’s 11 p.m. in the southern hemisphere, where I’m now reading a tweet wishing New Yorkers good morning.) Like the inside of an airplane, it glows an unnatural blue and straddles time zones, throwing its inhabitants into a kind of perpetual digital jet lag. Its apparent timelessness was once framed as a source of liberation. “The Internet is as absent from night as it is from day,” MIT Media Lab co-founder (and former WIRED columnist) Nicholas Negroponte boasted in 1999. He was speaking at the launch of “Internet Time,” a new measurement of universal time that accompanied a variety of Swatch Beat Watches. Now, however, this departure from natural patterns is seen as a problem that needs to be fixed, perhaps with a new set of technical interventions.
Since our social interactions tend to shape our experience of time, it might make sense that devices interfere with our sense of rhythm and place. But experts who talk about night mode, SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) lamps, and the impact of technology use on the body tend to dwell more on biological factors than social or cultural ones. They typically invoke the relatively recent science of the biological clock, the idea that time is stored in our bodies at the cellular level. In doing so, they link the issue of digital light to an emerging body of ecological research on the effect of light pollution on animals: migratory birds that are drawn to their deaths by bright city lights, turtles driven away from the safety of the ocean by fake LED moonlight emanating from beachside resorts, flowers opening to a fake sun.
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