Digital Kids

I was at Chiang Mai airport last April with my family, waiting to board a flight. I observed a child no older than one year of age sitting on the ground tapping anxiously on digital tablet. What shocked me wasn’t the fact that he had an expensive gadget in his hands and was manipulating it as if it were a robust toy truck. I simply wondered if I were to hand him over an actual book with pages, would he flip the pages or would he start to tap the book as well. The action of tapping, swiping or pressing your fingers over such gadgets has become an innate pattern of actions in most children who are exposed to the digital era of iEverything.

I shared this anecdote with a close friend and to my surprise she sent me a video from Youtube.com where a child was actually given a magazine and in the video one could observe how this child kept tapping and pressing the pages of the the magazine, with the expectation that a 3D image may appear or a sound would be heard. No doubt, it was very amusing to watch but one cannot escape from the harsh reality of digital invasion that is entering the lives of children so young. I am not against technology in fact I support the use of tablets and other such devices in schools, which are preparing our children for what awaits them. However, there are some serious repercussions of the premature introduction of such devices and this is the issue that I would like to address.

Are you one of those parents who struggles with trying to keep your iPad away from your children and often cannot even use it without the constant interruption of your child wanting to play games or watch videos on it? How do you remedy this problem? I know of homes where every child has their own iPad and we are talking about average two to three children per family. Shocking isn’t it? I’m not sure if my parents would have ever bought me a gift worth $500, only to later buy my brother one as well. These are extreme cases of course, but they do exist.

One of the most important areas affected by the use of digital gadgets and machines is the attention span of a human being. Let’s take the example of us looking for information online, the alluring world of Google. Google seems to have the answer to everything and sometimes a little too much I feel. When you make a search there are pages and pages of information that appear before us and it is true that we have mastered the art of scanning information rapidly and efficiently, but at the same time what we are receiving is information overload. The latter has a direct impact on our attention span and more importantly on our memory.

For a growing child it is extremely important to train the brain to focus at an early age, this enables them to memorise, be creative, solve problems and make sound decisions throughout their lives. However, the environment we grow up in has a strong influence on our attention span.

In earlier generations, children grew up reading a lot and this continues to be the encouraged activity proposed by schools even today, as it offers few distractions whilst you are doing it, and your channel of thoughts is entirely focused on the book. As technology has entered our lives, first with television and now with the Internet, our brains have slowly started to get wired differently. Television has offered visual stimuli that in turn has fragmented our attention and left little room for our imagination to work. The Internet offers only a world of distraction, ranging from pop ups, sponsored ads, page uploads, the possibility to open as many tabs as you like, interactive communication and last but not least the actual information one had decided to search in the first place!

Therefore, technology conditions our brains to pay attention to information very differently than reading. If we see toddlers, who cannot even read yet manipulating an iPad for distraction, how is a book going to offer them any attraction after a few years?

In the same way, if a student reads uninterrupted text, rather than one filled with hyperlinks and ads, he has better chances of quicker completion and understanding of what he was instructed to learn in the first place.

Nicholas Carr a technology writer uses a metaphor that describes the way in which technology conditions our brain differently than traditional reading. He offered the difference between scuba diving and jet skiing. Book reading is like scuba diving in which the diver is submerged in a quiet, visually restricted, slow-paced setting with few distractions and, as a result, is required to focus narrowly and think deeply on the limited information that is available to them. In contrast, using the Internet is like jet skiing, in which the jet skier is skimming along the surface of the water at high speed, exposed to a broad vista, surrounded by many distractions, and only able to focus fleetingly on any one thing.

My son often tells me that if I don’t understand something, I should ask Google. It’s interesting how right and wrong he is at the same time. What worries me is the fact that our kids will be experts at knowing where to retrieve the answers from, but not as smart to retain all the information gained. Let’s go one step further and address the tangibility of this information gained. If they do retain it and we are being positive about this, given that they will have to already filter so much in this process of accessing it in the first place, they will more than likely not be concerned about contemplating, thinking critically and being imaginative. These finer skills of the brain are what technology is suppressing, thanks to the information overload it provides us with.

Coming back to the toddler with the iPad, he can press, swipe and tap on it. The material an iPad is made of has no textures to feel or smell. Can you rip an iPad apart? I should hope not!

With a traditional book you can touch each page, smell the ink and the paper if it’s new or the musky smell after a book has become old, bend it and see the creases forming and even write in it. Furthermore, with a book you can even tear the pages, not that you would encourage this on a child. However, each page he tears will leave an impression on him and remind him of why he had that book in the first place. It offers a “higher-order” experience to the child, appropriate to the age of the child. An iPad will offer you an equally if not a more gratifying experience but only after you’ve experienced a traditional book first. Do you see my point here?

When your child learns how to write and you see them write their name for the first time, I’m pretty sure this has melted you down. Now imagine if your child had learnt to write using a touch-screen tablet to practice letter formations with his finger and shown you his name on a screen for the first time? Well it’s pretty cool but it’s not as cool as old school is it? 

My argument is the same again, it is important traditional methods such as handwriting lessons be instilled vigorously and these can be complemented with keyboarding classes. What should not be done is replace the traditional for the technological entirely. There is not enough history in technology to determine the effects it will or has already had on our children, so why are we playing with their brains and “wiring” them to a fashion we don’t know the tomorrow of?

I will personally treasure my little “I love you” post it notes from my son and daughter, because in a short blink I will see them holding a smartphone and sending the same message to their girl / boy friend! Call me old fashioned but I still write on paper everyday and there is a sense of self-expression that cannot be recreated using the best fonts or styles on any computer. The geeks will probably tell me there is some sort of App that allows you to match your own handwriting and create a personalized font. That would be incredibly incredible no doubt. In order to reach that stage of incredibleness you need to actually know what your font is and this is only done using pencil and paper.