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garoteThis level of outcry around me, about children interacting with digital devices, was confusing for a while. Then I remembered how old I am. The modern smartphone has been around for close to 15 years, which is enough time for the people who were pre-teens when they got their first smartphones to grow up into adults and have their own children.
So, almost all the new parents I encounter are people who have no concept of life before everyone in the universe was anchored to a smartphone like a limpet to a rock. Their concern is not "should we even consider the remote possibility of getting our children internet-connected devices", their concern is "how do we get adequate control over these internet-connected devices that we are definitely putting into our kid's hands?" And amazingly, the solution they are running with is to put the device into their kid's hands, and then wring their hands about the inadequate controls for filtering how they use it.
A smartphone can conjure explicitly pornographic or violent videos with very little effort. Barring that, it can conjure up people who broadcast weirdly compelling but dangerously backward political and moral ideas. The device will then crunch its own usage history and steer the user towards more of the same garbage that caught their eye before. And a kid can go off to some far corner of the Galton board, without their parents having any clue what's going on in their head.
Parents have clear reasons to be concerned. The current tools for strictly filtering the operation of these devices are absurdly, hilariously underdeveloped. But while we wave our consumer fists and demand these things, hopefully before our children's brains turn into cesspools, let's also consider another angle:
There are people out in the country, with very different political views from mine and yours I suspect, who spend time teaching their young children how to handle firearms. Do they lament the lack of adequate device-usage-monitoring apps for hunting rifles? No, because that would be missing the point. The point, and the most important relative difference between what they do with guns and what young parents do with smartphones, is that the young parents intend to leave their children alone with the smartphone, using it all the time in various situations, while the parents go about their business. They are not using it as a tool in a family context, they are using it as a pacifier or a substitute parent, to get some of their own time back. Or barring that, they just do not believe - in a stubbornly optimistic way - that their own children could possibly want to use the device for anything they do not implicitly approve of, or at the very least would never figure out how. Out in the midwest there are situations where a child, alone at home, might fetch the rifle and use it to drive away some creature or person intent on violence, and situations like that are acceptable and what the training is partly for. A suburban kid with a smartphone might post a picture of their art project to Instagram and be deluged with excruciating abuse from mean-spirited anonymous trolls - young or old - and take a poisonous hit to their self-esteem. That's not what the smartphone is for; but that's what can happen when you use it -- and as a parent, would you even know it happened?
You wouldn't just hand your kid a rifle. Why would you hand your kid a smartphone?
Some more perspective:
The young minds of homo sapiens have been thriving for 50 thousand years, with 99.8% of that time in a world lit only by fire. Whether or not a 7-year-old can play Sock Puppets, Motion Math, or Little Solver is not actually going to make the difference between a happy, well-adjusted adult and a miserable drug-addled man-child. Same with following the crap that some of their peers stick on Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook. What makes the difference? How much time we spend interacting with and tending to them as parents. And I obviously don't mean "bulldozering" or "tiger-parenting", I mean simply paying attention. It's perfectly acceptable to deny our kids use of these things until well into teenagerhood and feel fine with that choice.
So what about parents who are so busy working that parenting isn't an option? If spending time with their kids is not an option, handing them semi-nerfed tablets probably seems like the only choice. It's either that or hire some kind of nanny or send them to daycare, both of which cost money and just lock them further into the work cycle. At least the tablet is cheap.
I have no idea how much the stereotype of the one-worker household from the 1950's is really accurate. But it seems to be a great thing to strive for, in some form. One breadwinner and one homemaker, of whatever genders, and ideally they can swap the role, pausing one career and resuming the other, so both can be full-time parents. I fear for the economic standard we live with now, and what it's doing - what it's already done - to parenting. Yeah it doesn't make any money or raise any crops, but parenting is a core human experience. No matter how throughly we nerf the smartphone and no matter how good of a substitute parent or teacher or pacifier we turn it into - so we can get back to work - I fear that parenting will continue to erode, until it seems like some archaic dead tradition that we learn about on a tablet, during scheduled downtime at the corporate sponsored trade school dormitory where we grow up.
That's one of the worst-case scenarios I think of, when I consider kids and the smartphone. Those brilliant engineers and content providers will create an AI-driven substitute teacher, then a substitute parent, and then since it's cheaper than paying a real teacher or parent, it will drown out everything else. All it takes is the willingness of humanity to accept work that pays too little, and takes up too much time, for parenting to happen.
And if that's all the market will offer, then ... well, there you go.
So, almost all the new parents I encounter are people who have no concept of life before everyone in the universe was anchored to a smartphone like a limpet to a rock. Their concern is not "should we even consider the remote possibility of getting our children internet-connected devices", their concern is "how do we get adequate control over these internet-connected devices that we are definitely putting into our kid's hands?" And amazingly, the solution they are running with is to put the device into their kid's hands, and then wring their hands about the inadequate controls for filtering how they use it.
A smartphone can conjure explicitly pornographic or violent videos with very little effort. Barring that, it can conjure up people who broadcast weirdly compelling but dangerously backward political and moral ideas. The device will then crunch its own usage history and steer the user towards more of the same garbage that caught their eye before. And a kid can go off to some far corner of the Galton board, without their parents having any clue what's going on in their head.
Parents have clear reasons to be concerned. The current tools for strictly filtering the operation of these devices are absurdly, hilariously underdeveloped. But while we wave our consumer fists and demand these things, hopefully before our children's brains turn into cesspools, let's also consider another angle:
There are people out in the country, with very different political views from mine and yours I suspect, who spend time teaching their young children how to handle firearms. Do they lament the lack of adequate device-usage-monitoring apps for hunting rifles? No, because that would be missing the point. The point, and the most important relative difference between what they do with guns and what young parents do with smartphones, is that the young parents intend to leave their children alone with the smartphone, using it all the time in various situations, while the parents go about their business. They are not using it as a tool in a family context, they are using it as a pacifier or a substitute parent, to get some of their own time back. Or barring that, they just do not believe - in a stubbornly optimistic way - that their own children could possibly want to use the device for anything they do not implicitly approve of, or at the very least would never figure out how. Out in the midwest there are situations where a child, alone at home, might fetch the rifle and use it to drive away some creature or person intent on violence, and situations like that are acceptable and what the training is partly for. A suburban kid with a smartphone might post a picture of their art project to Instagram and be deluged with excruciating abuse from mean-spirited anonymous trolls - young or old - and take a poisonous hit to their self-esteem. That's not what the smartphone is for; but that's what can happen when you use it -- and as a parent, would you even know it happened?You wouldn't just hand your kid a rifle. Why would you hand your kid a smartphone?
Some more perspective:
The young minds of homo sapiens have been thriving for 50 thousand years, with 99.8% of that time in a world lit only by fire. Whether or not a 7-year-old can play Sock Puppets, Motion Math, or Little Solver is not actually going to make the difference between a happy, well-adjusted adult and a miserable drug-addled man-child. Same with following the crap that some of their peers stick on Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook. What makes the difference? How much time we spend interacting with and tending to them as parents. And I obviously don't mean "bulldozering" or "tiger-parenting", I mean simply paying attention. It's perfectly acceptable to deny our kids use of these things until well into teenagerhood and feel fine with that choice.
So what about parents who are so busy working that parenting isn't an option? If spending time with their kids is not an option, handing them semi-nerfed tablets probably seems like the only choice. It's either that or hire some kind of nanny or send them to daycare, both of which cost money and just lock them further into the work cycle. At least the tablet is cheap.
I have no idea how much the stereotype of the one-worker household from the 1950's is really accurate. But it seems to be a great thing to strive for, in some form. One breadwinner and one homemaker, of whatever genders, and ideally they can swap the role, pausing one career and resuming the other, so both can be full-time parents. I fear for the economic standard we live with now, and what it's doing - what it's already done - to parenting. Yeah it doesn't make any money or raise any crops, but parenting is a core human experience. No matter how throughly we nerf the smartphone and no matter how good of a substitute parent or teacher or pacifier we turn it into - so we can get back to work - I fear that parenting will continue to erode, until it seems like some archaic dead tradition that we learn about on a tablet, during scheduled downtime at the corporate sponsored trade school dormitory where we grow up.
That's one of the worst-case scenarios I think of, when I consider kids and the smartphone. Those brilliant engineers and content providers will create an AI-driven substitute teacher, then a substitute parent, and then since it's cheaper than paying a real teacher or parent, it will drown out everything else. All it takes is the willingness of humanity to accept work that pays too little, and takes up too much time, for parenting to happen.
And if that's all the market will offer, then ... well, there you go.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-18 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-18 05:31 pm (UTC)You wouldn't just hand your kid a rifle. Why would you hand your kid a smartphone?
Absolutely. Training is key. There is, though, one stumbling block to how effective that training can ever be: the capitalist imperative. You kinda mentioned it in passing:
Those brilliant engineers and content providers will create an AI-driven substitute teacher….
They already have, at the behest of their bosses. Well, maybe not a "teacher." Too many apps have been designed to literally addict many different kinds of minds to crave the bleeps and flashes screens provide, and often at a horrible cost.
My next episode will concern this story from Reveal about games designed to bamboozle, snooker, cheat, and steal money from people subject to such addictions.
Therefore, I would add that rifles cannot entice those that wield them into doing harmful things. Smartphones have been designed differently. If its profitable, an app can do its own enticing toward harm. Which makes the claim that sitting a kid down to just play them almost an invitation to accusations of child abuse (to me, at least).
Oh, and had to look up the Galton board. Nice! Francis Galton's ox is still famous, I guess.