This is a very good interview. It is a substantive discussion on the impact of SM, phones, and iPads. It is worthwhile taking time to watch.
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A quick skim landed on the usual one-sided arguments. Given that I only listened to a combined 10 minutes, Iāll reserve judgment, but I could only sigh at some of the claims I heard.
As a parent of two kids, 12 and 7, Iām interested in help navigating these difficult waters, so my kids grow up as masters of modern tech, not slaves to it. Simplistic either/or arguments about tech are of little value to me.
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I read Haidtās book and I profoundly disagree with most of his arguments.
I lean more towards Mike Masnickās Daily Beast piece The Coddling of the American Parent. Itās a subscriber only review of the book but you can read discussions elsewhere:
See also Masnickās discussion on Tech Dirt:
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My gut feeling on this is that there is something deeper going on here, of which the phone and social media are symptoms or secondary phenomena rather than significant causes.
In the West at least, we are more fearful and more mistrustful of each other than we have been.
Disclaimer: I donāt have kids, and I donāt interact with children. On the other hand, I am a former child, raised by parents, and I live in the world.
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I think you covered the āsomething deeper going onā part by placing āand I live in the worldā in the disclaimer section. That alone rules you out of 70% of online/offline discussionsā¦
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Thank you, but I spend a great deal of time staring at screens, alone. I donāt want to make claims to wisdom or living a great life.
It occurs to me that Ezra Klein is probably far more out in the world than I am.
However, one advantage I have over Klein is my age. I have always been an introverted homebody, and that long predates my first Internet connection or phone.
For what its worth your brain had a chance to develop away from screens.
Agreed 10,000%
Screen-time is not causing harm. What is causing harm is when screen time is to extreme that normal personal interaction does not occur.
There is a video I saw at one point at a school social event where kids were texting to each other in the same room rahter than talking. Thatās taking it to an extreme.
and also the companies behind these phones create products using a team of psychologists to assure extreme screen time usage.
Something I think about sometimes: When I was a boy, we rode bikes all day, for miles at a time, sometimes on busy, dangerous roads with narrow shoulders. When the weather was nice on weekends, we left the house in the morning and did not come home until dinner time. My mother encouraged that ā sometimes she demanded it!
By the standards of when I was growing up, I was a sheltered, fat, bookish kid. And yet I think by the standards of the day I was nearly feral!
Even when we were staying at home, we played board games around a table. I have fond memories of long, summer RISK sessions at a card table in the backyard, fueled by buckets and buckets of iced tea.
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I donāt trust Haidtās work.
A story:
Years ago, my youngest daughter and her best friend grabbed a bunch of our rubbish bin bags and headed off to the beach.
They were on a mission to clean up the beach.
They were 12. Theyād been learning about all the rubbish thatās in the sea. The plastics in particular. Their teacher had shown them slides.
When they got there they wandered up and down the beach and there was no rubbish.
They were so disappointed - and confused - where had the teacher got her pictures from?
Hereās a picture of the beach.
I share this because there are a lot of scientifically minded folk who think Haidtās book is nonsense.
Heās cherrypicked his data to suit his narrative.
And his narrative appeals to us nice people because we can (a) easily remember how joyous our childhoods were compared to the modern day (they were sunnier too!), and (b) we all love a bit of doom and gloom, and, (c) we all worry about kids.
This is not to say that there arenāt piles of polluted beaches in the world, and kids with problems.
But, when journalists write articles about pollution, they always go find pictures of pollution, and they never share pictures like the one above (of Rabbit Island, btw, which ironically used to be polluted with hoards of rabbits).
And when people write books, some of them cherrypick their stories.
Iām cynical about the guy, if you canāt tell.
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Much deeper. I would suggest that everything about modern civilization, particularly what is now called the āGlobal Northā, is an experiment with unknown consequences. Homo sapiens, as a species existing for many tens of thousands of years in small hunter gatherer groups rather suddenly launched into larger civilizations and then today, nations with megacities and modern technology.
Everything from the nuclear family to intercontinental travel to industrialization and so onā¦ everything we are doing is rather sudden in the full context of our primate brains and most of our history.
I would argue itās the hyper individualism and de-emphasis of communal life in the societies of the Global North that are the larger background context of our problems. Even that is obviously a gross simplification of the complexity we find ourselves in.
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I would say that fundamentally the difference between now and way back when is that we actually have a fuller (though admittedly incomplete) picture of how the world actually is thanks to Technology.
Imagine getting a ding every day giving real time updates on the holocaust during World War II. Combined with Nazi Propaganda and the famine of India. The Greatest Generation would have lost their minds too.
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I can remember lots of media coverage in the 1970s about TV destroying childrenās minds. My mother was harrangued in the 1930s about reading too much. Plato saw writing as destroying our ability to remember.
See Neil Postmanās books; Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Technopoly about technology driving cognitive failure.
I think COVID, erratic education during the pandemic, and social isolation because of COVID have more to do with differences in kidsā and college studentsā current state than smart phones. Yes, over use at any age is not healthy. Doom scrolling is not healthy.
I didnāt stop students using phones during class, but I did make sure they knew I noticed, and it did affect their grades. I was perfectly willing to be passive aggressive about it. Writing special questions on the board that would be on a quiz or exam, for instance. People paying attention had an advantage.
I notice that when I was harrangued recently about how much time I used my iPad, the person did not ask what I used it for (reading books, .pdfs, and listening to music).
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