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Are the tools we live through reshaping us?
It’s bigger than all of us. It brings potential, pleasure and pain. It is gobbling up our lives and time, and altering our psyche.
It is technology. Marshall McLuhan summed it up best way back in 1962: "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us." Nowhere is this clearer than with the digital gadgets we own and cherish.
Are these tools serving us or is it the other way around?
That was one of many topics discussed at Promise and Peril: The Impact of Technology on Children, Schools and Communities, an invitational colloquium held April 25. That evening, the two keynote speakers spoke at a public event, which was broadcast provincewide by webcast.
The first speaker, Dr. Michael Rich, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, specializes in medicine and media. He calls himself a “mediatrician.”
Rich’s three major concerns with digital technology, or screen time, are how we sacrifice our personal interactions with others in favour of an online existence, how our children are losing time for creative play, and losing their ability to manipulate the physical environment. Young children who spend excessive time looking at screens will likely be “impoverished” in the above three areas and—given the rapid brain development in the first three years—are in fact “pruning away circuitry they may need in the future.”
Rich is adamant that children under the age of two should not be exposed to any screens and considers parents’ fears that their children will fall behind if they are not exposed to computers and smartphones as unfounded because technology changes so rapidly.
Rich acknowledges that “media are educational” but what warrants our attention is “what they teach and how well they teach it.” He singled out television as a medium that both educates and spawns fear and anxiety. “In an average evening of primetime television, you’ll see more violence than you’ll see in your entire life,” he says. This type of programming “inflates the prevalence” of violence in the world. As a result, “we see nightmares, bedwetting and even post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in children who have actually never witnessed violence.” Perhaps this explains why more children than ever are taking anti-anxiety drugs, he says. Of equal concern is the way violent TV and video games desensitize children. “If you put us in an environment that is soaked in violence, we will cease to care about others, we will cease to notice the suffering of others and, in fact, we will be entertained by it.”
“It’s really more about how you use technology than about the technology itself,” says Dr. Paul Howard-Jones, the evening’s second speaker.
Of interest to Howard-Jones, a neuroscientist from the University of Bristol, in the U.K., is sleep loss experienced by teenagers due to digital technology. “Sleep is not just about rest; it is also about learning,” he says. Sleep consolidates memories from the day, and because teens’ loss of sleep is linked to technology—especially cellphones emitting bright and intense light in a darkened room at night—one consequence is reduced melatonin, which regulates hormones and maintains the body’s circadian rhythm. Teens who text late at night in the dark are four times more likely to suffer from sleep deprivation during the day, he warns.
A good night’s sleep is also proving to be a victim of video games, which offer many opportunities to teach but also pose many risks, he says. “What rose to the top for me is excessive use, disrupted sleep and aggression from violent gaming.” Gaming stimulates parts of the brain in the same way as “psycho-stimulant drugs, such as amphetamines.” On the bright side, gaming is proving beneficial to people with Alzheimer’s because the games offer “exceptional enhancement of learning processes,” he says.
Should we lose sleep over Rich’s and Howard-Jones’s revelations? No. And we should not throw up our hands (and smartphones) in despair either. Instead we should capitalize on our children’s facility with technology by steering them in a positive direction. And we should also get our kids off their butts and out the front door and into the real world. Both specialists agree that media displaces other activities that children and youth (and likely all of us) could be involved in, especially activities that bring us close to nature, such as climbing trees. “I’d rather see a child’s arm broken than his spirit,” Rich says.
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