A few weeks ago, I was out with 3 friends and the conversation turned to the increasing prevalence of technology especially with smartphones being so common. I believe that all three of them agreed that this was a definite negative. People would turn increasingly socially dysfunctional but there wasn’t much anyone could do. As one friend put it, thanks to her smartphone she now checks her email first thing in the morning (possibly while still in bed) and though she wishes she was less switched on, she can’t help it. The other main problems that were brought up were that people will no longer know how to talk to each other (since ‘kids these days’ often already spend half their time playing with phones even when out with friends) and that it will be easy to ostracise people (if a kid sees that all of their friends are going to a party they have been excluded from).
Given the title of this post, it’s pretty clear where I stand. I don’t know when there wasn’t a panic that children are doomed because of some new trend (whether technological or not). It’s true that many of the specific concerns are legitimate. I just don’t see any reason that the overall attitude of doom and gloom is anything but the ongoing “thinkofthechildren!1!” panic and is therefore probably a function of general human psychology rather than some actual trend.
I think the best response to this has been made by Amanda Marcotte in this post, which echoes my sentiments but puts it better than I can:
Being a Luddite isn’t about rejecting or being hostile to technology. It’s about being hostile to new technology, for no other reason than it happened to be invented after you were born and/or became a Luddite. That makes it a completely illogical position, since it’s based on the premise that the existence of you on the planet is a great historical event that represents the divide between old-fashioned, useful technology and the era when technology supposedly seemed to mean nothing but decay and despair. The fear of technology is almost always a fear of technology that’s developed in your lifetime. I pretty much never hear Luddites gripe about having to use the stove, for instance, leading into rants into how all this indoor cooking is making us soft and weak, because we’ve abandoned the good, old-fashioned art of buliding a fire in order to cook our food.
This applies just as much to the panic of “Facebook is killing the social skillz of OUR CHILDREN”. It’s true that in the last 5 years, socialising has undergone a major transformation for everyone (if by everyone you mean the 35% of the world population who are internet users). However, arguments that things have gone downhill appear to fall into two groups. The first is bringing up some specific harm (like the above example of the kid finding out just how unpopular he/she is by seeing everyone going to a party on Facebook). The second is a nebulous “it’s just the vibe” thing (for instance saying that kids never pay attention to people when they’re with them because they’re always on their phones). But the first is simply anecdotes that without actual studies are subject to the same confirmation biases that anything else is. The second is even more slippery. In at least one case when I’ve probed about specific reasons a technology is bad it eventually boiled down to “because I don’t like it, that’s why”. Ultimately, both seem to be a reaction to technology changing some major thing (in this case socialisation) during our lifetime. This naturally brings fear and uncertainty because of the above fallacy that “socialising in MY childhood was fine, good and normal [because it was my baseline] therefore any change from that is a downturn”.
It’s also interesting to note that a moral panic about social skills of teenagers can go hand in hand with a moral panic about hyper-sexualisation of teenagers and how much they’re hooking up. If you hold both of those in your head, I invite you to consider that finding someone to fuck is a very social activity, in fact one of the core evolutionary reasons for a complex brain with lots of modules for socialisation. It’s like people think that we will all become these hyper-lonely people who are all home alone and just online all the time — but without (FSM forbid!) consulting some actual data.
The worst kinds of kidsthesedaysism is the idea that the internet is REWIRING OUR BRAAAAINS. This nonsense has been particularly pushed by Baroness Greenfield. If you find such an argument seductive, the best remedy would be to read three excellent takedowns of this particularly evidence-free kind of technopanic by Ben Goldacre, Martin Robbins and Carl Zimmer.
It seems that some of the claims of kidsthesedaysism are simply made up, littered by unreferenced factlets that fall apart on closer examination. This LanguageLog post provides an example paragraph: “Forty percent did not know whom the U.S. fought in World War II…Sixty percent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. Only 6 percent now read even one book a year. According to a very familiar statistic that nonetheless cannot be repeated too often, the average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books…and four hours watching television.” According to actual statistics, people in the US watch 2.17 hours of TV a day (which includes 20% who did not watch TV) and 78% of people say they’ve read a book in the last 12 months.
It’s clear that there are both benefits and drawbacks to wide-reaching technologies. The bottom line is with something like social network, we just don’t know how the balance of those two will end up working out. The only way out of this is data, not cherry-picking negatives (or positives).
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