To tell you the truth, my biological clock exploded a long time ago, and I have no desire to reproduce. But after the explosion of weddings in the last couple of years, most of my friends are becoming parents. Inevitably, our conversations turn toward child-rearing, and linger around the host of anxieties that accompany the prospect of bringing new life into the world. From my small sample size, pedophiles are the biggest threats, followed by contracting obscure diseases and random accidents that involve being squashed, drowned, eaten, suffocated or electrocuted. Other terrors include the potential for getting lost and being sold into modern-day slavery, drugs, passing on parental neuroses, autism, and hating math. I am absolutely sympathetic to my friends, because I have not so dissimilar worries for my animals.
But one thing that came up in various subtle ways was the perceived incursion of technology into raising children. Bring on the video baby monitors, automated baby swings and baby formula, but keep everything else at bay. Most of my friends are late adopters like myself (my free i-Pod is still in its case) and have shared their valiant efforts and strategies for staving off technologically mediated “bad influences.” Many of them have said that even though they refuse to buy toys that beep, whir or glow, they still are gifted those things from friends. Others say that they will never buy their 10-year-old (who is currently an infant) a cell phone, even in the face of tantrums. Still others will not buy video-games for their children—ever—and will force their children to play outside (like in the “good old days”) instead of watching TV. Parental controls would monitor internet usage, and some parents promised to Facebook-friend their kids. Such structural surveillance is not new. But despite these well-intended efforts, you still have social ills like electronic voyeurism and cyber-bullying to contend with. Sure, peeping toms and bullies have been around since time immemorial, but mediated through the Internet, are inflected with a unique cruelty.
Here are more mundane examples of how information technology (IT) has changed our behavior. Now, I can hardly have a conversation with someone with a Blackberry or i-Phone who is not constantly fondling their phone. Talk about public masturbation. There’s even a word for it, “phondling,” (I thought I coined it, but it was already taken). And I think I have become a worse scholar because of my laptop and blindlingly fast Internet. I sometimes work with my laptop while lying down in bed, and super-fast internet is only matched by how super-fast I find things to distract me, like searching for sparkly branches to place atop my window when I should be searching for news articles. I now have to mentally and physically restrain myself in order to be productive.
Parents want to understandably block the outside world for their children, but parents themselves are Trojan horses, smuggling in the outside with their mannerisms, language and attitudes all of which are picked up by attentive, sponge-like children. This also makes the mistake of situating the unit of family in a vacuum, where morals, approaches to life and values are cultivated in an unadulterated, sacred space. In my conversations with friends about babies and baby-futures, it seems that new parents are terrified about successfully navigating their children through these novel, and sometimes treacherous, “forms of life.” Foresight and visioning are always partially obscured, perhaps to the most painful of emerging realities. And our collective imagination and language to talk about these kinds of things is cowed and weak in the face of multiple possibilities.
It’s fantastic that Rutgers (the alma mater of Tyler Clementi) launched a program to talk about new technology and its impact on civility. But, the language on the website is still ambivalent in that it treats IT as a passive and neutral tool, subject to use and abuse, (think “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”), and lends itself to the binaries of technological determinism and technological neutrality.
So, it would be really relevant and interesting if CSPO and CNS could add our voices to these discussions to help families and schools talk about how they live their lives with and through different technologies (beyond Science Cafes), to become aware of our own technological somnambulism. But given the tools we have at our disposal (and although we are constantly building on them), could we have envisioned cyber-bullying as one of the unintended consequences of social networking, when it’s ever hardly made explicit what the intended consequences are? And whose intentions? It can't be just Mark Zuckerberg's or Blackberry’s. Things may have been different for Tyler if his roommate’s parents and grade school had discussions early on about how the internet is a mixed bag, and not a passive, neutral tool, but part of a volatile combination that, together with callow youth, can lead to tragic consequences.
About the Author: Monamie Bhadra is a graduate research associate at CSPO and a doctoral student in ASU’s Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program.
What I'm more concerned about is that young people seem not to be getting the message that it isn't ok to do sadistic things to one another! And that they should at least try to understand people who are different from them. That's not all about technology-- personal technologies are merely one factor in that. Walter- while I see your point about graduate students- I would be cautious here. I don't desire a world in which people- including grad students- read for 8 hours at a time. I don't think it fosters social skills. I think sometimes we blame technology too much. As a kid, I had ZERO training in how to balance email and concentration, how to respect people's privacy online and on facebook, when not to use a cellphone (I didn't have one until college) etc. But I did learn self-discipline from choir/ orchestra and my parents taught me about tolerance, volunteerism, respect, and kindness. And I transfer those lessons to technology-- when I trip up (on a daily/hourly basis), it isn't because the email distracted me, it's because I distracted myself-- just as I distract myself by sitting outside and watching the hummingbirds.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
Your thoughts bring up a couple issues to mind, the first being more structural: (1) often in class, the reading load is such that students cut corners and %u201Cskim%u201D (and indeed are encouraged to do so by professors!) I, myself, am a little too democratic in my reading style and am still learning the fine art of reading selectively. I am unsure how this pattern is affected by texting and e-mails. (2) But say we have to read for our comprehensive exams. Descent of Icarus happens to be on my reading list. Regardless of distractions, technological or otherwise, there is (I think) a level of proficiency we all have to attain in our respective fields that will be tested against high standards. At some point, we all have to shut out the world and concentrate on the reading at hand. Self-discipline is key. Perhaps I am being too nave and optimistic, but I think many of the graduate students I know are an extremely self-disciplines bunch, and can resist technological temptations.
It is true, I have trouble quieting my mind and reading something systematically. Sometimes it%u2019s because I want to waste time and troll the internet. Other times, it%u2019s because I am so engaged with the literature that I constantly want to read related things and explore ideas that pop into my mind as I am reading. Often, with Google Scholar, I have 11 PDFs open to other articles, all through the course of reading one book. But I have to exercise self-restraint--save those articles for later, or close the browser for buying curtain rods. I wish I didn%u2019t have to, and instead could just give my full attention to work because it came %u201Cnaturally%u201D. Self-discipline is the only way I%u2019ll achieve some modicum of proficiency in my literature. And now I%u2019m not going to be distracted by Soapbox any more and return to my reading!
Anyway, thanks for adding "phondling" to my lexicon, tho of course given my advanced age, were I to use it in a conversation it would probably induce nothing but cringes.
For instance, checking emails/texts regularly makes it impossible to achieve the sustained concentration necessary to get through a dense argument, spoken or written. In reading, that kind of concentration is not learned overnight. How often today's graduate students can read for 8 hours continuously without checking texts/emails? 4 hours? 2 hours? Whatever is the answer to that question today, it surely is much less than 10 years ago, and it will be even lesser 10 years from now.
A field like STS, characterized by iconoclasm, has plenty of reading that demands sustained concentration. I cannot imagine anyone who has read say, The Descent of Icarus, with a phone or laptop over the desk, and is satisfied with his/her understanding of the book.
I wonder what kind of democratic society we will have when the intellectual elite (i.e. PhDs) has a short attention span and when its own critics (including STS scholars) have given, at best, cursory reading to the classics in their own thought traditions. Will it be perhaps a society whose commanding ideas can be conveyed in 160 characters?