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Today I was listening to a Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast (paywalled on Substack, but available with ads on Apple Podcast), with Louise Perry interviewing John Daniel Davidson, and there were a lot of both dubious and interesting things there, but the one that caused an emotional reaction for me was the discussion of "screens," which I've been having with some in person friends, and seeing around Substack lately as well. I don't like the paradigms of the discussion, but have trouble articulating why. Especially when Davidson kept repeating "it rewires their brains" over and over again. My pop neuroscience model is built on a few fluffy books about neuroplasticity from a decade ago, but I thought basically everything required our brains?
There are indeed a lot of things on the internet, and especially social media, that are bad in the way casinos are bad, but calling this "screens" feels like calling slot machines "levers" or something. It's not like I could have accessed the podcast, other than by learning about it online, anyway. Was it more virtuous to listen to Davidson talk than to read him on Substack? Maybe! I was doing work with my hands while I listened.
Jonathan Haidt thinks that children shouldn't be able to post on social media or have smart phones (or internet enabled private devices more generally), and I think that may be reasonable, especially in regards to people posting photos of themselves, sure, everyone should think long and hard about doing that, and usually shouldn't. But at the same time, I don't really trust the enforcers, and do think that the rules wouldn't fall where I would hope.
Louise Perry didn't push back as much as I would have liked against the "demonic, insane, evil" rhetoric in regards to "screens" (by which I think Davidson meant something more like "the unfiltered internet"), but did mention something like that she thinks it's probably alright for her children to watch fairy tales sometimes, but that it's weird and a bit disturbing if they're watching another kid play on Youtube. And I agree that, yes, that's kind of weird, I wouldn't let my children watch that. I didn't let my child watch more than one episode of "Is it Cake," either, because that also seemed a bit weird.
Anyway, is there anyone out there who has an actually useful way of discussing "screens," especially in respect to children, but also in general? If I had more attention to devote to the topic, maybe I'd try reading Heidegger's Simulcrum and Simulation, since at least the title seems like it's heading in an interesting direction.
I remain amused that I've lived long enough to see the zeitgeist shift from "poor communities are disadvantaged because they don't have computers and Internet access" --- see One Laptop Per Child as an example that people put real money behind to "fix" this --- to "poor communities are disadvantaged because they don't keep their kids off screens and the Internet". It's quite the vibe shift. And it only took a decade or so.
That said, I don't think kids should be given unfettered Internet access. I know what can happen: I was there, and the Internet was in many ways a less scary place back then. Although it's also where I learned a lot about the tech industry and programming and such.
Some of it is a general problem of the double-edge sword of (knowledge is) power. The Screen puts it all at your finger tips, any time, anywhere. How do we empower people to use this power for constructive purposes? More Khan Academy videos, less porn. Big picture stuff like that is easy, but I often find myself wondering about details like if another WWII history podcast is really the best use of my time. "I'm not wasting time Motteposting, I'm sharpening my witty and persuasive debating skills!" (X to doubt).
Hmm, I'd argue the opposite. Sure, there's more bad stuff out there, but there's more ANY stuff out there, and the bad stuff is a much smaller percentage and guarded by things like "safe search" and browser/site warnings, so it's harder to stumble across inadvertently. In the old days it was trivial to just get trolled by somebody and end up at goatse or lemonparty or the Anarchist's Cookbook, and that was just the common stuff. I stumbled across hentai """porn""" that I'd shudder to even describe - I honestly don't think I would even know how to find stuff that fucked up, nowadays. It might not even exist outside of an Onion link.
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Has it shifted?
I personally see a lot more concerns about our communities, our kids. Maybe it’s metastasized, but the idea started out with parents.
I’m obviously biased: my cohort is old enough to have kids, but young enough that most of them aren’t in school. Peak iPad risk.
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