My grandsons during beach summer vacation: they would come into my living room to use my devices. How early does addiction begin?
A recent Columbia Journalism Review piece titled A compulsive audience and a complicit news media does not pull any punches. It profiles the likes of Ariana Huffington, the soon-to-be-former head of the addictive The Huffington Post, and it mentions how The Washington Post has written a profile about a teenager who was inseparable from her smartphones (A WaPo Tweet: This is what it's like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing.)
In a nutshell, the CJR piece makes us ponder the question:
“How does a respected news organization write a profile of a teen’s compulsive overuse of social apps, report on the research indicating that such behavior risks harming people’s brains, and then aggressively promote its content on those very apps and form publishing partnerships with them?”
While this question has been on my mind often for the past two years, it was this summer, during our family beach vacation in Florida that it hit home. Some of my grandchildren were taking turns on my iPad Pro, or my iPhone every minute of the day, so that they could get into those devices and chat with friends, engage with games, or simply do something that kept them indoors and away from the fun that is the Gulf of Mexico, or any other beach in the middle of July, for that matter.
As I began to limit the time they could spend with my devices, I was also lecturing these boys (no, the granddaughters were wiser and sunbathed and went swimming, thank you) ages 8-10-12 that there was more to life than being connected.
Because I was lecturing them, I found myself hiding my iPhone and restricting my contact with it too, which not a bad idea.
I urge you to read this CJR piece and think, along with the writer, about what is happening today with the advance of technology on the one hand, the proliferation of content coming our way 24/7 and, especially with the very young, the inability to break away from the indispensable new devices in our lives.
I keep thinking about this statement in the piece:
“ALL NEW FORMS OF MEDIA, from the first printed book to the latest virtual reality headset, have provoked debate over whether their popularity signals progress.”
And I am sure that we will have newer, faster and more interesting devices seducing us into addiction in the years ahead.
As for my grandsons, I have decided that perhaps it is time to make them addicted to the old pleasures of throwing footballs in the backyard, or just playing hide and seek. Today, when they hide, it is behind an iPad or iPhone. I know where to find them.