THERE may have been a time when people complained that the family was fragmenting because dad sat in the corner reading his newspaper, mum was always distracted with the darning and the children had their noses in their comics.

Back then, people may have feared children were spending so much time reading books, their social skills development would be hampered.

Today, however, we depict those days as a golden age before TVs in children's bedrooms destroyed the idyll of mum, dad and the kids gathered cosily around the box. And according to communications watchdog Ofcom, the 1950s living room is making a comeback. New research into viewing habits shows that once again, families are clustering around the main television set. The twist is that they are doing so with their smartphones and tablets switched on in their laps.

There were two reactions to the Ofcom report. One said: hallelujah, the nuclear family is back together in the heart of the home and whatever they are doing there, we should celebrate. The other bemoaned the dearth of family communication, the fact that we are no longer watching the same show or sharing the same mental space, even as we all squeeze like sardines on to the same sofa. Both contain a whiff of Luddite alarmism.

The Ofcom report clearly plays on a nostalgia for old times, for a Mad Men-era notion of the family that has little connection to how we live now. By evoking the 1950s, it creates a fear of the now: a time when multiple screens vie for our attention. Remember when there was just the one telly and one adult in charge of what was on, probably dad, who got to watch what he wanted after a hard day's work? How we all laughed together. How we roared out our collective anger at the state of the world. How we argued. Of course, the report doesn't actually say all this. It just tells us how it is now: a bit like the 1950s, but with an added muddle of distracting screens.

There is good reason to celebrate the return to the living room. It's nice to cosy up in a shared space together. In my own childhood, our family did gather around the television, and I have fond memories of falling asleep on my dad's warm shoulder. The television may have been the superficial reason I was there, but really it was about the comfort of sharing space.

These days, my husband and I sometimes talk about huddling up on the sofa together to watch a box set, but we never pull it off. There never seems to be the time. So for me, the most shocking statistic from the Ofcom survey is the average amount of time people spend watching television: four hours a day. This figure came as a blow, rather like being told that most people out there are managing to fit in an hour-long run before breakfast.

We are a screen culture. Screens are how we communicate, organise, consume, are entertained and informed. We may worry that too much "screen time" is bad for us, physically and psychologically. But there's a lot of pressure to be always at a screen. Several decades ago the actress Lily Tomlin said: "If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed." These days, people are expected to be not only well-viewed, but also well-facebooked, well-tweeted, and well "liked" in the social media sense. It is no longer enough just to watch TV. It's certainly not enough to read a few books.

A common concern of recent years is that the family is fragmenting, spending less time together, never sharing a meal at a table, kids being dumped in front of that cheap babysitter, the television, working mothers never there. Sometimes we blame screens for this. But research has shown that actually, over the past 25 years, both mothers and fathers have spent more quality time with their kids. Family bike rides, cultural activities and bedtime stories dominate middle-class family life. We parents may always be twitching for our smartphone or reaching to Google a fact, but there is a commitment to the idea of time spent together. We may blame online connectivity for social isolation, but research suggests that social media has widened people's sense of community.

There could be several reasons for the mass migration back to the living room. With the digitisation of television, a lot of bedroom tellies, with their analogue aerials, got dumped. Then there's the allure of the big flatscreen. And perhaps people wanted to get back to sharing a space with each other, even if not always a mental space. Televisions still, in many homes, function like the fires that we gather round. And that is no bad thing. Technology may have allowed our screens to grow to almost cinematic proportions, but perhaps the main reason we have bought them is still, simply, because we want a reason to sit together.