Jingly Keys & Shiny Phones
How does ubiquity of smart technology impact a child?
Around you or on your person, you probably have three or more objects that are trying to get your attention. The phone, laptop, or maybe the smart watch wants to capture your gaze. They crave your interaction and information. Each one of those pieces of hardware have hundreds, if not thousands, of programs doing the same. They are begging you for attention.
Luckily, you’re probably a well adjusted individual with some self-control. When a message flashes on the screen, swiping it away is always an option. Occasionally, you may even get annoyed by some of your incessant gadgets and toss them away.
Now imagine you’re a child. Your mental capabilities are still developing and much of your action is led by impulse and a need for instant gratification. Your priorities are not many. Besides learning how to count and memorizing the alphabet, your only other obligations are playing with toys and infuriating your parents.
Children have little self control. The world is new to them and everything must be tested. Yet, part of raising a child is instilling self-restraint and discipline. The kid doesn’t have to become a robot, but avoiding food being flung across the table is preferable. The most tasking ability to train is focus. Focus doesn’t come naturally to a person, and why should it. There are so many wonderful shiny objects to stare at.
Retaining attention is a challenge for a young child in the current era. There is always something buzzing, beeping, flashing, or screaming for attention. A underdeveloped child assumes all of these devices are catered to them. As a youth it is difficult to seperate your belongings from others’. Someone’s phone vibrating with a message must involve the kid, right? The video playing on the laptop is a dedicated source of entertainment for the child. Of course, every application and button on the tablet must be clicked and played with!
One can argue that such sources of distraction danced in front of other generations as well. The television screen is as attention grabbing. Children shows are full of bright colors, quick jump cuts between scenes, and advertisements tugging on basic cravings. Certain studies state that the average child spends a little under three hours a day watching television. Yet, current adults that lived through the internet void era developed (arguably) just fine.
The television screen was isolated. Normally, the box was reserved to the living room in which the child was hawked over by a parent. This provided regulation for what the child could view. Today, the technology and gadgets are not isolated. The child doesn’t have to develop an understanding that movies and shows are dedicated to the household. They can watch their favorite show on Youtube while their adult drives them too school. Having to wait to get home to play video games or listen to music is no longer necessary. There is no need to develop self-restraint towards entertainment as a youth.
A concerning and ignored thought is how the data that children provide tech companies is being used. With television, marketing agencies were spit-balling advertisement designs. There was hope that some flashy toy or catchy jingle would leave a child begging their parent for the product. Besides change in product sales, there was little data to determine the result of an advertisement campaign. Now a website can classify a user as a child and show the innocent rascal exactly what they want them to see. Unlike individuals that existed predating the internet, children will not necessarily ignore the hyper-targeted ads and recommendations that they are presented.
A prototypical example is plaguing my five year old brother today. My brother began watching cartoons on Youtube. Youtube’s prediction algorithm quickly understood what cartoons he is watching and began recommending him similar cartoons. As the videos that my brother watched taught Youtube, the website likely classified him as a male child between the ages of four and eight. Once this guess was made, Youtube began recommending videos other people in his classification enjoy. My brother being the savvy individual he is, learned he can click on those recommendations and watch other videos.
These other videos deviated from cartoons significantly but played on his impulsive desires. Many of them consist of other children ‘un-boxing’ and playing with toys. Some involve ‘Let’s Play Videos’, a genre of videos where adults play video games while having a webcam record their reactions. Of course my brother would fall for these. He loves playing with Legos. The thumbnail of a building block game (Minecraft) lures him like Twitter lures politicians. Before I knew it, my brother had begun demonstrating a knowledge of internet pop-culture that exceeded my parents’.
If the current state doesn’t concern a parent or future parent, consider how far such technology can develop. Picture this nightmare scenario, a child is watching a video on a phone while their parent drives them home. The video has a child playing with a Happy Meal toy from McDonalds. The phone begins transmitting its GPS location, after all one needs Google Maps to get home, and begins telling the child that this shiny piece of plastic can be found less than two miles away from their location. Well the child is ecstatic and begins notifying their mom or pop of the good news. The parent doesn’t care, they’ve had a long day of getting yelled at by their boss and just want to go home. The kid gets shooed away, but the blinking light on the phone insists how easy it is to have as much fun as the twerp in the video. Now there is a kicking and screaming toddler in the back seat and the parent is trying to reach for the phone. The future is hectic.
Perhaps it’s too early to dread over such possibilities. The possibility of such inappropriate technology is not clear. Furthermore, not enough time has passed to understand how such technology will influence the next generation, let alone the current. While there are dependencies that people have grown on their gadgets, the world in which our gadgets depend on people is uncertain. Just like children the technology developed in the last decade wants attention. Children lacking the ability to resist the temptation of gadgets, it falls on the parents to monitor children’s involvement. However parents must also understand the full potential of current technology and not take these gadgets at face value.
There is an opportunity for education systems to get involved. Curriculums can be developed to train students to use smart technology responsibly. This entails describing to students that interaction with modern technology is a two way street, which, I must admit, is an abstract concept to describe.
Schools with the appropriate funding have already implemented technology, such as tablets and laptops into their lessons. Unfortunately, this technology is usually used to increase engagement. Again, the hope is that blinking lights are more attention grabbing than chalk on a black board. The argument can be made that these lessons are prerequisites for better understanding how technology works, similarly to how geometry is necessary to understand trigonometry. The counter argument is that using technology for engagement familiarizes a student with a specific graphic user interface (GUI) and not the technology itself. Such effort is risky as it is unclear what GUI trends will persist a decade from now. As education systems do tend to lag behind with current trends, such attempts are a good start.
I’m trying to make these opinion articles a monthly or bi-weekly post. I’d love to hear what you might think or if there are tech topics you’d be interested in reading about!
