In a nod to the changing nature of digital media and technology, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced this month that it is starting the process of revising its ironclad guidelines for children and screens. For more than 15 years it has advised parents to avoid screen time completely for children under the age of 2, and to limit screen time to no more than two hours a day for children older than 2.
Ari Brown, lead author of the article and chair of the AAP committee that’s been investigating children’s media use, noted that the 2011 statement on media use for children under age 2 was being written and published at about the same time as the first generation iPad came out. “It literally felt outdated before we even released it,” Dr. Brown said.
So you think that something is harmful – but then everybody starts doing it, so it's not harmful anymore.
I feel so sorry for logic. It's truly appalling to watch people torture it all the time.
First some simpletons started buying their kids iPhones and iPads. Then other parents thought that well, this doesn't seem like a good idea, but if we don't buy our kids iPhones and iPads, the kids who already have those will bully them.
So bullies set the rules.
One of the strangest aspects of the whole thing is that the people who are the most responsible for this – the people behind smartphones and tablets and the powerful marketing – tend to see their products as harmful, and refuse to let their own kids use them.
Steve Jobs was an example of this. When a New York Times reporter asked him whether his kids loved the iPad, Jobs responded: "They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home."
In fact, the author of Jobs' biography described Jobs' family life like this: "Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things. No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices."
It seems that a large percentage of technology innovators are like this. Many parents in Silicon Valley send their kids to schools that don't use computers at all. They are terrified of the idea of their kids growing up with an iPad – so they simply don't let their kids use iPads. They want them to grow up playing in the real world, focusing on things, reading books, running, talking, thinking, using their imaginations. They want their children to enjoy the same developmental and intellectual advantages they themselves did.
How is this possible?
How is it possible that Steve Jobs thought that iPads were harmful to kids, and yet he was apparently perfectly willing to expose everybody else's kids to iPads?
I can think of two possible explanations:
1) Steve Jobs was a person with a very “effective” brain. He was capable of focusing on the things that mattered to him, and controlling his behaviour consciously in a way that stopped him from wasting his time or becoming addicted to inane crap. And like many people with that kind of brain, he was unaware of the unfortunate fact that 99% of people are not like that. Most people become addicted to inane crap very easily. Most people are not very good at consciously controlling their behaviour. So it's possible that Steve Jobs genuinely, sincerely thought that in the end, he was doing a good thing by introducing the world to iPhones and iPads – people would use them wisely, be smart enough not to spend too much time looking at them, and certainly wouldn't let their kids grow up with these screens. And then, surprise! People are ignoring their minds, friends are ignoring their friends, and kids are forgetting how to play because dopamine fools everybody into believing that looking at pointless crap on the screen from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep is important. "Okay, so far it's been pointless crap, but if I just keep looking... if I just keep looking... if I just keep looking…"
2) Steve Jobs was a morally bankrupt bastard.
Ultimately, the explanation is probably a combination of 1 and 2.
...
The most dangerous ideologies tend to be invisible, and so is this one. It looks something like this: who really needs a mind? Even schools are adopting this ideology. If the only thing a human being really needs to be is an “effective worker” in the “workplaces of the future”, and those workplaces are mostly going to be about sitting in front of screens, then why wouldn’t we throw everything else away? Compared to success in an office, aren’t imagination and contemplation, and stuff like that, just romantic nonsense?
But what if this person would have wanted to have a mind? What if this human being would have actually done amazing things with that mind?
Wouldn't it be decent to at least give them the opportunity to choose?
The world around you is not boring. The world inside you is even less boring. Playing is not boring. Thinking is not boring. Daydreaming is not boring. And believe it or not, if you just learn to listen, the worlds inside other people can be quite interesting too. I don't know if it's too late, but I'm going to stand up for these things, and I hope that others will join me.
I’m keeping in mind we don’t see eye-to-eye on this subject, and also that this was written some time ago; your thinking may or may not have changed. But I seem to recall something similar you wrote much more recently, so I suspect you feel much the same.
ReplyDeleteTwo points:
There is a world of difference between parents limiting their kids’ use of devices like iPhones when we’re talking about 7-year-olds versus 15-year-olds. It’s so impractical now in the case of the latter that I just don’t believe that the Silicon Valley elite have much influence at all over their kids’ use. Kids are just good at circumventing the rules; parents give up. Even sending kids to schools without computers…wasn’t part of the reason of sending kids to Catholic schools to avert vices? Admittedly, their vices occur when they’re wearing ties. The demand is there—they will get their hands on the devices.
The second point is this: Even if every parent were a “Silicon Valley parent,” what about the legions of adults who were here well before the ubiquitousness of cell phones and iPads who can’t put them down? If that’s any harbinger, I’m not sure keeping them away from kids would mean anything in terms of mitigation longer term.
I genuinely appreciate your concerns on the matter. I loathe the narcissistic cell phone culture that’s accelerated the ruin of basic manners. But I’m not sure that the use of devices is inconsistent with creativity. In this world where just about everything is predicated upon whose ox is gored—isn’t the application what’s important?
Yeah, this was written a long time ago. My thinking is more nuanced now. However, I continue to think that humanity's relationship to these technologies is one of the deepest and most urgent existential questions in the world.
DeleteI could say so much about this that it's better if I just keep it minimalistic:
1) I continue to believe that slower thinking skills (like the ability to read and write longer texts and contemplate), the ability to spend time with one's own thoughts, and the ability to focus and do one thing at a time matter. For a million reasons, actually. Losing these abilities as a species means "human downgrading", to quote Tristan Harris.
2) Due to brain plasticity, the best time to develop skills like these is childhood and the teenage years. Schools could - and definitely should - be places where people really learn to do these things. (Meaningfully and with joy, of course.) This doesn't mean that kids shouldn't learn to use computers, too, but the role of digital devices should be considered carefully. They can't be used all the time.
3) Changing schools is just one thing among many things that need to happen. The single most powerful thing that needs to happen is changing the technology industry. So far, the business model has been based on creating addiction and distraction, but the whole thing could also function according to a totally different logic. Instead of working hard to make a person waste their time, the apps and the phone itself could work hard to help a person consciously choose what kind of role they want technology to play in their life, and then help them live in a way that is consistent with those values. A fact worth paying attention to is that the technology industry won't change in this way unless legislators and "normal people" start demanding it.
Lawmakers react to their constituents; not the other way around. People have to want the changes your advocating. So far they don’t—at least on any meaningful scale. Though I encouraged to see the report of Facebook’s user numbers decline for the first time ever a few days ago, plunging the firm’s worth.
ReplyDelete“Supply creates its own demand” is an economic fallacy that was disproven hundreds of years ago.
There's a relatively recent documentary called "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix, which talks about these things. According to Wikipedia, it was "viewed in 38,000,000 homes within the first 28 days of release." I haven't seen it yet, but it seems like it's been a big deal and scared a lot of people. Which is good, of course. And even before that, Worrying and Complaining about Smartphone Addiction and Social Media seems to have been a relatively commonplace thing to do. It's a bit like the problem of plastic pollution: it's something that everybody contributes to, and yet almost everybody knows it's bad.
DeleteSo I actually don't think that people are thoughtless and indifferent in relation to this stuff. The only problem is that people are confused. What's lacking is a shared vision for how the problem could be fixed.
So I have a very rational reason for going on about the possibility of designing the technology differently: if people knew that was _an option_, many people would probably get on board with it.
And here's the thing: even if people didn't care about these things - well, more often than not, activism is about fighting apathy. That's the point, you know!