This weekend, I learned that technology is ruining just about everything. For starters, I learned that kids are more fragile and more prone to anxiety and even suicide because of technology. Do you think trigger warnings are silly? You can blame technology. Jon Haidt points to the advent of the iPhone in 2007 as a primary cause of fragile, anxious teens and college students. While always skeptical of any argument that points to a single cause, I found the article persuasive. I also saw Haidt the other night on a rerun Bill Maher's HBO show where he makes this same point amidst a broader conversation. This post on Medium offers a deeper look into his work.
The iPhone came out in 2007. Remember what happened in 2008? Might economic insecurity and the now broken implicit promise of a better future have anything to do with increasingly anxious teens?
Later, I read in the NYTimes that schools catering to the kids of the rich and powerful are REMOVING technology from their classrooms. Meanwhile poor kids in poor schools are even becoming addicted! to technology. Pointing out that ubiquitous technology is a huge experiment on children, Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine notes, “The digital divide was about access to technology, and now that everyone has access, the new digital divide is limiting access to technology.” The digital divide has reversed itself?
Okay, technology is hurting rich kids and now hurting poor kids. That's bad enough, right? Then I was reminded that social media has blown up the world. Facebook and other social media platforms made millions off of alt-right provacatours and Russian bots and allowing these reactionaries to poison politics around the world. This is true. Facebook in particular has much to answer for in Myanmar and the slaughter of the Rohingya people.
Look, all snark aside. These are real problems. Tech has helped make teens more stressed, the poor even more disadvantaged and the world less safe. True. True. True Yet there is enormous danger in any single narrative. Much as political theorist, Samuel Huntington's, Clash of Civilizations thesis has some salience but is an absurdly broad (and scary) generalization to describe a complicated world, I argue that our scapegoating of technology is overblown. There are many, many reasons why our young people are more anxious and why our planet is "falling apart" and why poorer kids struggle in school.
These challenges should humble and awe us. The broad scope of history also tells us that we've messed up mightily without technology. That too should humble and awe us and put things into much needed perspective. The Khmer Rouge, Nazis, Maoists and totalitarians of all stripes wreaked havoc in the 20th century. Want some good news? Let Nicholas Kristof tell you why 2017 was the best year in human history. He wrote:
A smaller share of the world’s people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before. The proportion disfigured by leprosy, blinded by diseases like trachoma or suffering from other ailments also fell. … Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data. Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water.
Might technology have anything to do with this? Let me add that I'm more than leary- and even a bit offended- when people talk about addictions to technology. There's no such thing. The science is inconclusive at best, but I'm clear where I stand. Addiction is a neurological phenomenon- the result of complex molecular changes that take place in the brain after repeated exposure to the addictive substance- drugs or alcohol. Sure, video games light up the same receptors, but at a factor of three hundred-fold less than do drugs and alcohol. Alcoholism and drug addiction kill. Alcoholism alone kills thousands upon thousands. The opioid crisis is devastating communities across the country. Truly, how many have died from video games? I'll wager the answer is zero. So let's be careful about throwing around the word "addiction." Is technology habit forming? Yes. Can it be damaging? Of course. Should we be careful? Absolutely. But let's stop the alarmism. We don't say a depressed person is "addicted to bed".
As my colleague Alex Pearson puts it, we are in an age of "darting attention". I know that I spend too much time looking at screens and have harder time staying with a book than I before. Global multinational corporations made billions and looked away as others used their platforms to manipulate us. Poor, overstretched schools have naively looked to tech as a panacea but have largely used it to replicate drill and rote learning- only now with screens.
I'm not blind to the problems technology poses. There have been many unforeseen consequences to the widespread adoption in the industrialized world of digital technology, smartphones and social media.
But be very careful of a single story. We have real problems to solve.
