So you’ve never used any form of navigation app, ebook reader, camera, weather forecast?
All of those are used on an almost daily basis, some every day, like satnav, TomTom is my main satnav on my phone when driving, which is my job, roughly 1500 miles a week, plus specific apps for locating particular filling stations I can use my fuel card at.
Then there’s all the books I carry in a number of ebook readers for those down-times, music for same, or for playing in a car I happen to be driving.
WeatherProHD is used daily for checking weather, in case I need wet weather gear.
Fb and Twitter just never get used, however.
I also need to have access to text and email during the day as well as the phone function.
Oh! I thought this was about the scares over smartphone security and surveillance, and how they were just another imaginary satanic-panic rather than something real to fear.
Fuck.
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Other things being equal, people who spend five or more hours a day doing an activity that they could do during time they might otherwise sleep (versus less than one) are less likely to get sleep. Replace electronic devices with novels and you get the same problem. I know more than one person who stayed up late reading novels, and more than one parent struggling with how to get their kids to stop staying up late reading novels. Part of the problem is that we now regard reading books as an enriching activity so parents don’t want to tell their kids not to do it. Move the reading to a phone screen and instead it’s seen as negative.
If your kid is staying up until 3am to use their phones, read books, build lego castles, or do origami, you’ve got a problem. It’s important to focus on the actual problem, though, and that’s the tired-as-hell kid, not the lego. Work with the human being rather than blaming the object of their attention. (Not that I’m saying you might not have to, at some point, rip the novel from their hands, depending on their age)
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A bar not that high to clear, though.
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I’m still deliberating whether there actually is a problem here. If there is, I doubt it’s “the kids” as such.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates (469–399 B.C.)
In other news: area man tells kids to get off his lawn, won’t give them their ball back.
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I use my phone for multiple things, but except for WhatsApp, nothing is very essential for me. A couple times I ended up without a phone because of moving and didn’t end up getting one for a while. It wasn’t hard to adjust at all. In my experience, a smart phone feels essential when you have it, but after a week without one it doesn’t feel essential at all.
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But this isn’t about manners or respect for authority or anything like that. It’s about a profoundly new and different method that kids have of interacting (or not!) with the world around them, and what it might mean for their development.
Is it really that far-fetched that being caught in a feedback loop with an electronic screen a few inches from you face for hours a day instead of talking or looking or interacting at all with the things around you may have some effects on your cognitive development?
I’m not worried about the kids so much as their parents who are driving while fumbling with their phones, and modeling this behavior for kids who will be doing the same at 16.
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