A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

I suspect we will learn a lot from evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately it has a long history of "just so" stories, and being used to justify all sorts of racist and misogynist beliefs. It's hard to get rid of that kind of baggage once you've acquired it.

Whenever I see someone saying something like "just a tool" with regard to technology, I always want to recommend a thorough read of Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media" ("The Medium is the Message" and other adages).

I think you've got it precisely the wrong way round: it is not the morality of the times that is reflected by the use of technology, but morality that reflects current technology.

The French and American revolutions that began the current age of modern democracy are, for example, unthinkable without the printing press. No newspaper, no democracy. It needed the equalising force of mass-copied text to abolish the sacred order of monarchy in people's heads. Similarly, it is hard to imagine fascism without the preceding inventions of radio and cinema. Or J.F.K. without television.

Culture, society, customs, morality - everything that has to do with what we call 'evil' or 'good' - is fundamentally a reflection of their surrounding media. Morals under the conditions of television will be different from morals under the condition of the world wide web.

One can see that we are currently struggling to adapt our morality to a new media reality by the invention of new words ("fake news", "filter bubble", "clickbait", "post-truth") to describe it; the old ones are insufficient.

I propose that rules and guidelines that emerged under the conditions of offline media will leave us vulnerable to the dark and dangerous sides of online media. We should develop new ones.

It's not Luddism, because the "tech" in question here isn't technology but consumerism via consumer technology. When everything is abstracted how it is nowadays, the technological aspects are hidden from the end user. Teaching your kids to tap on a touchscreen doesn't constitute technology. Neither does knowing how to use an online search engine, or resource like, say, wikipedia. All of that an abstracted package that just happens to utilize technology on its backend, which the end user doesn't require to know or understand. All that is required is memorization, to familiarize oneself, mostly of UI elements and how all this abstraction links and works together. To be against the growing societal trend that fosters a dependency on these resources and the habits that form with them isn't to be against technological advancement.

And how are you supposed to teach kids about privacy when most consumer technology from the get-go is privacy harming? If you buy a child their first smartphone, do you tell them to not use SMS because it's plaintext, to not use any of the popular communications apps because they're owned by FB or whoever else, or to not use their phone at all because of cellular location tracking? How to you explain to them they can't watch Netflix on the TV, because the TV isn't allowed to connect to the internet to prevent it phoning home? No, convenience trumps all, and we all know the current state of things is that even if people are made aware of privacy issues, they'll disregard them if even slightly inconvenient.

There is no responsible way to "teach" consumer technology, at least not the way you mention. I mean, how exactly is the generalization "too much tech isn't good" relevant to technology? This is just common sense, it applies to everything. If kids are staying up late reading comic books and subsequently performing poorly in school, this is no different than the habit of staying up late on your phone. And, I reiterate, the latter has nothing to do with technology but with consumption. You either foster a (ever-growing) dependency in them, or you don't. And as you write, the former is inevitable, but then so is a lack of privacy, and so are the bad habits that are inherent to consumer technology.

To be fair, for most people, a smartphone may be their only 'personal computer' - sure, they may or may not work a desk job where they use something with a keyboard, but most of the computing they do on their own time will be on that small (if not getting any smaller...) screen. Does that appeal to me? No, not really, I appreciate having a browser in my pocket sometimes, but I don't watch much in the way of videos or even game on my phone. But we're (mostly) technologists here, and I would think that we tend to feel that using computers is generally good / interesting / empowering. Can it also be pathological? Clearly yes. We have some evidence, accident rates increasing[1] as people can't stop checking their feeds for example. So that's a concrete social problem. But I am less sure about the impact on children - we've had several generations which grew up staring at TVs for hours a day, which may not have done us any favors, but it didn't cause the end of civilization either...

1: https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/distracted-dri...

Not that long ago screen time meant a TV in the living room. Gaming meant a hardwired console on that same TV, or a computer in the computer room. When you weren't at home, there was not a screen. In today's World, the screen is in your pocket wherever you go. Children know this and the temptation is hard to resist when screen time is so accessible.

Children see a large majority of adults engaged with their screens and think, if they can do it, why can't I? Next time you're on the bus or subway look around and try to find the other person doing the same. Practically everyone is looking down unaware of their surroundings. It's the World we live in today and our children are following our lead. Parents need to do their best to set an example.