I was walking on the treadmill at home one day, when my 8-year-old son called out from his bedroom.
"Daddy, how do you spell Christmas?"
My family waits until I'm breathless to interrogate me. I turned down the volume on my iPhone, which was replaying a 2-year-old episode of "The Big Bang Theory."
"C-H-R," I said, shouting over the hum of the treadmill motor, "I-S-T." Pause. "M-A-S."
"OK," he said, pecking on his iPad Mini. "C ... Now, what's after that?"
"This is going to take forever," I thought.
And it did.
Turns out he was trying to Google "Christmas trees" because he wanted to buy one for his bedroom.
This illustrates a trend in our family. Tablet computers, smartphones and laptop computers have taken the place of televisions as our main diversions. The boys have a TV in their shared upstairs den, but I can't remember the last time it was tuned to an actual television show.
At any give moment, I'm reading news on my iPhone while my wife is watching videos shared by friends on Facebook. Meanwhile, our 8-year-old son is watching reruns of "Cupcake Wars" on YouTube, while my 12-year-old son is locked in on video replays of PlayStation games.
In the spirit of togetherness, we sometimes gather in the family room fully intending to watch a TV show. But, invariably, we peel off and return to our own screens.
According to the Nielsen Company, which measures television audiences, real-time TV viewing is dropping in every age group except for the over-65 demographic. Among younger Americans, the falloff of traditional TV viewing is precipitous. While young Americans ages 18-24 still watch about 17.5 hours of traditional TV a week, that's down about 19 percent from just a year ago, according to Nielsen. What's more, from 2011 to 2014, weekly viewing by the 18-24 demographic has fallen a full 27 percent, Nielsen reports.
Instead, young people are watching more digital programming streamed from the Internet.
Nielsen says: "We're seeing year-over-year overall growth in digital use of 16 percent among persons 18-34, with 53 percent growth in digital video viewing. Yet, it's not just a young versus older story. This impressive growth in digital is even more marked among 35- to 49-year-olds and among 50- to 64-year-olds."
Nielsen notes that smartphones are now in 70 percent of American homes and tablet computers are "inching toward the 50 percent mark."
We used to talk about two-TV families and fretted about spending too much time in front of the "boob tube." Now, video streams into our homes like water through a funnel.
Sometimes, we get so saturated by all this screen time at our house that we say "whoa," and call a media timeout. Usually this is when one of the kids gets behind on schoolwork and the only way we can regain focus is to shut down every screen in the house for a day or two.
Interestingly, this usually has a calming effect.
I heard on the radio the other day that two of America's richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, used the same word -- independently -- to describe the secret of their success. The word is "focus."
Focus is a form of mental discipline that takes practice. I worry that our tiny screens are stealing our free time and nibbling away at our brains, depriving us of the chance to think deeply. To focus.
Internet surfing and video streaming are not the same as thinking.
And they certainly don't cultivate clear, rational minds.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.