The toddler is intently watching something on the screen. Perhaps a movie or simple game the parent started for them.
I’ve personally seen very young kids, not very much older playing games on tablets. All it requires is a few hand movements to play a simple preschool game on a tablet.
Sure. I have a two year old who plays some games on her iPhone. I could take a photo of it and you might go “oh my GOD! What is happening to her BRAIN!” But what the photo doesn’t show is that she spends the vast majority of her time playing with things, reading books, wanting to have books read to her, doing gardening, riding her bike, etc. A photo captures a moment in time and nothing more. It conveys no information about habits.
This made me laugh so hard.
That is my absolute favorite meme on the entire Internet 
And so what? They’re growing up in a world where they’re going to interact with technology. Nothing wrong with getting fluent with it early, I think. I’m amazed at how quickly my toddlers figured out how to swipe, pinch, select apps, etc., without me showing them how. And they go to preschool and daycare and interact with children and play. They love the snow, the outside, etc. I don’t believe this crap about iPads ruining children’s brains or any some such horseshit. I want them to know how to use these devices from an early age. That’s their future. Of course, there needs to be balance. But this OMG technology is the devil! crap pisses me off.
I think part of it is that we’re in a transitory period right now. Part and parcel of that is that new developments are vetted against old values and standards, and come up short; but one needs to make an argument that these values and standards are the right ones to judge these developments by, which does not merely reduce to tradition (‘that’s how it’s always been’).
There are tons of capacities we have lost, in comparison to earlier times. For instance, before writing, people likely were much better with oral history, and they’d probably be appalled by the way we need to rely on funny marks on paper to remember what to bring home from the store. But the simple reality is, we have no need for those skills anymore; having a good memory is not an inherent good, it’s only good if there’s a purpose it serves—and that purpose has died out.
It may be the same with shortened attention spans and the like. Growing up in a world where information is difficult to obtain, it’s a good thing to focus on singular topics for extended periods at a time. But in an information-rich world like we have now, it may be more valuable to be able to quickly integrate large amounts of information.
That’s not to say that all change is good. It’s quite clear that there are risks and challenges we must find a way to meet—such as placing value on factual accuracy of the information we consume, rather than simply on how well it aligns with our pre-conceived views. But that’s the case with every new technological or social development, with every new tool that we add to our toolbox.
So I think we must better differentiate between when we judge a development simply because it’s not the old way to do things, and the old way is the right way (having a long attention span is an inherent good, as opposed to it simply being useful in a certain environment), or because that development may be inherently dangerous.
Mental health has been put forward as an example of the latter. And, to a certain extent, I take that point. But there’s also, I think, an element of dissonance: does the exposure to large amounts of social media impact mental health as such, or does the strain between failing to meet the old values and wanting to participate in the new developments cause this impact? IOW, if we weren’t judging our children because of their short attention spans, would then spending time on facebook still be as significant a factor in mental health issues?
The answer to that isn’t clear to me, and I’m not aware of any research having been done in that direction; and more likely than not, there is no simple answer. I think that in all probability, human life is just going to go on, eventually shedding one paradigm for another, taking the bad and the good of the old and exchanging it for the bad and the good of the new; and those who cannot let go of the old will always condemn the new, because from the point of view of the old, the new just is bad, simply because it introduces new values that won’t match with the old ones.
But that’s just how it goes.
(If you’ve read all this in one go, you may now pat yourself on the back for your long attention span, and reward yourself with a couple of cat videos. :p)
I’ve reread the articles that I linked. None of the people that helped develop Facebook are suggesting it should end.
Imho we’ve gone through an incredibly fast development arc with web since the late 90’s. There was never a blueprint. It just grew and grew in all different directions. The technology’s capabilities were always improving and adapted for new uses.
It’s a bit like a large boomtown city that sprang up very quickly. It’s time to stop, look around, and take stock of what we have. Decide what we don’t need and what can be improved.
Now take that paragraph and substitute the word “book” for PC.
Are two year olds with IPhones a common thing nowadays?
In my experience, yes. My one-and-a-half year-old is fairly proficient with the iPhone/iPad already (and the three-and-a-half-year-old was in a similar place developmentally two years ago). I, personally, don’t think this is a bad thing.
I don’t know. It stops her wanting to use our phones though, and when you get a new phone every couple of years you end up with old ones lying around. It doesn’t have a SIM card or anything, but she can watch Barney the Dinosaur on YouTube and check the stock market etc.
I do temper any claims about Facebook with the fact that kids increasingly don’t like it, and only the adults really seem to use it. I do see problems with the adults: the whole “fake news” thing is a Facebook phenomenon. But I think kids are resilient enough to just keep trying new things.
I also think the toxicity of Facebook has a lot more to do with who you have as friends and who you follow. I got rid of the political BS on my Facebook long ago. Granted, this was easier for me since I am liberal and nearly all the political stuff isn’t, so I was much more easily able to see that they were just making me angry while leaving me powerless to fix the issue.
I do think there is a problem of people just removing people online rather than dealing with them. If someone is angry, the correct response is not to yell at them to calm down and then use the fact that you can block them as a threat. You need to actually deal with the underlying issue. There is a disposable nature to our online friends: they exist only to make you happy and should be removed if they don’t. That’s not good.
You may have noticed a conflict there. I block the political crap on Facebook, but also mourn the blocking of people who get angry without dealing with their issues. It’s not an easy world to navigate. Heck, it’s not clear if the unhappiness is actually unhealthy. Maybe we should be unhappy with the way things are and work to fix it.
What I do know is that humanity has dealt with changes before and will deal with them again. There is no reason to ever think that any one technology will be the ruin of humanity. We are one of the most adaptable species on the planet.
We always are, life’s change.
What’s different from time to time and place to place is the details. But there are always new ideas and new technologies floating about. And they always have consequences at levels we hadn’t though of; the industrial revolution involved as much of a change in farming methods and in the lives of rural people as in factories and the lives of urban folk.
At a smaller level, think about the last time there was a change in any process or procedure in your place of work. Ho-ly shit, some people can make neither heads nor tails of “invoices used to have our logo on the right and now it’s on the left!”, while others ask “why didn’t we put it in the middle? I think it would have looked better” and yet another group (usually the biggest) quietly adapt and three days later can’t tell you what the old invoices looked like.
You started a thread in the past few days about why do people mushrooms, describing, amongst other things, a sandwich you ate:
Mushrooms. Why mushrooms? Mushrooms yuck. Maybe poison. Mushrooms scary. Are mushrooms safe? Why people mushrooms? Taste good? I ate a sandwich. Was yum. I eat many sandwich. But, mushrooms. Seven mushrooms! Then I ate a mushroom! I am brave yay! Can I learn mushrooms? But why mushrooms?
You can bet anything on Social Media companies not only knowing about those things, but actively using them to further their business interests.
In a way they are the equivalent of the tobacco industry some decades earlier, they know that their product is addictive and can rot people from the inside, and none of that is going to be addressed from within the industry until they are forced to.
So?
I enjoy mindless and pleasant conversation as much as anyone. It’s a relief from the more stressful threads that always spiral down a rabbit hole.
No one is suggesting that the web or technology is bad for us or our culture. It does enrich our lives in many ways.
There are problems that need to be thoughtfully considered and corrected. Every person has to decide for themselves how much time they want to spend staring at a screen in their hand. Perhaps put it down occasionally and experience the real world. That’s a personal decision we all need to make for ourselves and our young children.
It’s time to reflect on how far we’ve come and where we’re going. What will society’s future be like with technology?
Interesting article on detoxing from the Web.
They aren’t suggesting you leave or stop using it.
It guides you on cleaning up all the data collection that’s been accumulated about you.
Overall a fine post and I agree with all of it. Ref the snip:
One thing to remember about removing vs. dealing. In the real world we’d probably not be dealing with these folks at all.
E.g. here at the Dope I have a hundred or more sorta-friends I recognize and interact with. If asked I could give you a capsule bio of each of them, their family, and their worldview. Plus I recognize a couple hundred more names when I see them although to me they’re more like the cashier at the grocery store: familiar, but not even an acquaintance, much less a friend.
IRL I have essentially zero opportunity to have ever met any of these people.
So if I choose to put PosterX on ignore, rather than deal with his/her shit, am I really making the world or my world worse? IMO no, I’m merely making my online world more like my real world.
Bottom line: My real world has fewer people, and they’re more homogenous in SES, age, and geographical location than is my online world. As we collectively learn how to have an online social world in which geography, age, and SES aren’t obstacles any more, we’ll find we lean more heavily on other factors to manage who’s in and who’s out with each of us.
In these early days we’ll also have a lot of social dislocation as the collective sloshes from one extreme to another before enough of us learn how to live sorta in the middle.
What is hugely different as said up-thread is the idea that all our interaction is now mediated by a for-profit entity that has the ability and incentive to manipulate that for their ends, not ours. That variable is new and potentially real harmful.
The last time western society had some all-powerful social middleman was probably the medieval Church in Europe. We all know how well that turned out.
Sure, but I don’t think that’s what dalej42 meant. There’s a difference between not using Facebook (or watching/owning a TV) and announcing that every single time someone brings up Facebook (or television).
The first is totally fine (and while I still have my account, I haven’t actually used it for several years, so I know where you’re coming from), but the second is obnoxious.*