It is popular to write about how the internet is changing the way we think. Education and parenting journalists like to speculate about what new technology is doing to our children.
People write both negative and positive versions. The negative versions complain that we are raising a generation of kids that are sucked into screens, disconnected from the corporeal world, wirelessly removed from anything that ties us to place. The positive versions celebrate the future network of connectedness, predicting a generation with an increased sense of sharing and community.
Of course, these two narratives have been around for a long time. They have nothing to do with the internet, technology, or video games. These stories have accompanied just about every era, each time with language specific to the dominant technology. In essence, the narrative remains the same. It is just the primary human dilemma: we are simultaneously instinctual individualistic predators and sophisticated intelligent creatures capable of civilization.
When automobiles were still the dominant technological innovation, Freud addressed this paradox using ‘drive’ theory. In Civilization And Its Discontents he writes, “A good part of the struggles of mankind centre around the single task of finding an expedient accommodation–one, that is, that will bring happiness–between this claim of the individual and the cultural claims of the group; and one of the problems that touches the fate of humanity is whether such an accommodation can be reached by means of some particular form of civilization or whether this conflict is irreconcilable.”
Freud was writing about humanity in general, but his observations have specific ramifications for today’s parents. Our kids are
more sophisticated than we think; they understand what’s going on in the adult world and they emulate it as they grow up. They will learn to deal with essential human conflicts in the same ways as their parents.
In the current world, the internet is one of the technologies we use to accommodate this conflict between individuality and community. We seek out algorithmic solutions.
For example, online retailers bombard us with targeted advertising: direct email, recommendations, and advertisements strategically inserted into our social media timelines. Living with us inside the ubiquitous temple of consumption, our children watch us satiate our desire for increasingly nuanced identity markers–the vestments and talismans of individuality–with shockingly precise personalization. Meanwhile, we’re comforted by the invisible and seemingly immortal hand of free market economics, which promises to continuously intervene in order to guarantee that our self interest also benefits culture and community. This is the new iteration of a faith-based narrative that we pass on to our children.
In fact, it is a fantastic solution to the primordial paradox that Freud so eloquently described. The internet mediates the conflict with ‘connected individualism.’ Each one of us imagines we are unique in the way we connect with others. On the web, everything public is personalized. All of the media one consumes is so well tailored to the individual that I’d have to work to see something that does not fuel my sense of self.
Many writers have observed the irony that despite the fact that we have more information available than ever before, we are exposed to much less diversity. We rarely see things we don’t want to see. Surely, we still read things we disagree with, but these things usually serve to fortify our opposing position.
What’s curious to me about the world of personalized algorithmic curation is how much faith we have in it. How many people have posted status updates expressing their confusion about the ads that appear beside their timelines? “What makes Facebook think I’m THAT kind of person?” When Pandora plays a song that we don’t like, we wonder why. We’re puzzled to discover certain categories that Netflix presumes we’ll enjoy.
It is bizarre to me that when the choice seems wrong, we still insist on an explanation, that we want to understand the logic of the predictive algorithm. I think it signifies a misplaced faith in the power of data. We doubt our own opinions, assuming automated curation must be more accurate. Does the almighty algorithm know more about one’s identity than the minuscule ego does? If there’s anything about new technology that worries me, it is that we are beginning to have more faith in quantified measures of our subjective aesthetic taste than we do in our capacity to feel and judge in the moment. This is a way of being in the world that I don’t want to pass on to my children.
Consider Minecraft. Like most kids these days, mine play it all the time. I’ve written about the good things my kids learn by playing. I love the free sandbox creativity. I think it strengthens a sense of systems thinking. But I’m also worried that so many kids develop an almost obsessive relationship to the game. They could be learning to privilege a quantified data metaphor through which to make sense of reality–one where everything is divided into blocks, pixels, and units of resources.
We know now, as we enter the post-industrial era, that adopting such an approach in isolation is ultimately unsustainable. We need to blend our capacity for ratio based thinking–ratio-nal thinking–with other modes of being. It is preferable sometimes to be emotional, introspective, spiritual, intuitive, irrationally passionate, etc.
Therefore, I spend a lot of time making sure my children don’t get too heavily absorbed in any one way of perceiving. I do this by paying enough attention to what games my kids are playing that I can ask them to switch games. That’s right, not all games are the same. Each one has unique narrative properties. Each one has particular mechanics that inadvertently teach a specific way of making meaning of the world. Gaming is not a singular way of being. Parenting gamer-kids is not just about monitoring the on/off switch.
In fact, I never limit my kids’ screen time. I do, however, require reading time, outdoor play time, and physical toy time. The difference between limiting screen time and requiring non-screen time is subtle, but substantial. It emphasizes the positive benefit of other activities rather than scolding the screen.
The screen is here to stay. We need to equip our kids with the capacity to use it as a meaningful way of mediating the essential paradoxes of the human experience. Hopefully, they do a better job of it than we currently do.
