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For Love of a Childhood with Technology

andromeda-collides:

I don’t remember much of being a toddler, but I remember being an older child.

I remember how, when I would ask my parents questions about things I was interested in, the answer was “Go look it up in the Encyclopedias” until I generally knew to just go to there first.  We had a set of World Book Encyclopedias printed in the 80’s, and they were my treasure trove.  I read entire volumes.  

This led to some amusing things in my childhood, like when I was in elementary school and read the entire section on religion, something I knew nothing about before that, and then came and told my parents “Mom and Dad, I’m an agnostic.  Or maybe an atheist.  None of the rest of those made ANY sense. They are super weird.”  

When I read books, I drug around a (very heavy) dictionary.  I would write the words I didn’t know in the front cover of my paperbacks, and look them up, often interrupting my reading and getting sniped into reading more of the dictionary instead.  

I was always terrible at parsing the pronunciation guide, and am to this day. Often I learned to associate the word’s visual spelling with the definition in my head, bypassing a verbal memory altogether, and so I had a larger disconnect than most people between words I could speak and understand in conversation, and the words I could write and understand written.

Thousands of questions and interests in my childhood were lost opportunities.  They weren’t in the encyclopedias, or I couldn’t figure out how to look them up.  I wanted to know if there were words for concepts, but didn’t have a reverse dictionary to google.  My encyclopedia set didn’t have pictures of every animal in it, or indeed, every animal in it at all.  It did not update with sources of news, and even though I also obsessively read my parents’ subscription to Newsweek, it felt like the world was going on around me in a way that I had no way to follow.  And of course, as a child in the 90’s, if I found something current in Newsweek that I didn’t know about, I could not just look it up in the encyclopedias I had, printed in the 80’s.

Fastfoward to my daughter’s childhood. 

When she’s older, and asks me questions, I can pull out my phone and search wikipedia, or she can do it herself.  We can pull up youtube, khan academy, wolframalpha, or a thousand other things.  When she’s reading her books on a tablet or kindle or phone or any other device, she doesn’t have to drag around a dictionary, she can double tap the word and be given not just the definition, but also hear the pronunciation, without ever interrupting her reading.

But that’s a few years from now.  Let’s talk about technology in Andromeda’s life now, age 1.

She sees a firetruck and is super excited, we can go home and watch hours of youtube videos on firetrucks, if she wants.  She sees firetrucks are always red, sometimes make a siren noise, can stop and go, carry humans.  She sees firetrucks in the sun, rain, and snow.  She sees firetrucks putting out fires.  It may be too early for her to infer purpose yet, but it will not be long. Later she plays with an app on her tablet about firemen, and I hear her going “woo woo!” to herself as she deftly scrolls through the scene.

She wants to see pictures of kittens, I can pull up a google image search and endlessly scroll through pictures of kittens, from every possible angle. I can pull up another tab to switch between, this one covered in adult cats.  We discuss the difference.  And she sees the differences, 500 or 1000 times over, in just a few minutes.

It’s not without reason that I’m sometimes reminded of the similarity of teaching my daughter with technology as a tool, and a machine learning algorithm, blitzing through its input of focus, to sort the noise from the data.  Andromeda is doing that.  She is capable of that.  Up until now as a civilization, we just have not been capable of providing her the raw input to do that.  Now, in many cases, we can.

She’s pointing to a twirly rooster on top of a building, asking “Dah? Dah?!  Dah?!” (Translation:  what is that?) and I can’t remember, for the life of me, what the word for that is.  I pull out my phone, search, and seconds later I can tell her the word she wants is “Weathervane” and what it does.  Even show her close up videos of it if I want.  It opens up the opportunity to talk about wind and weather and chickens and a million other things.  Curiosity, indulged, encouraged, grown.  She learns that the world is a place where she can ask questions, and get answers.  Later she will learn that the world is a place where she can ask questions and find her own answers.  She sees the world’s knowledge is there, at her fingertips, and here for everyone, to digest and understand.

I’m not even sure what happens in that situation without instant technology, if I were in my mom’s position, in the 90’s.   I ask every adult I meet what it is until I find one who knows?  I go home and flip through the encyclopedia with the vague idea that it should be there somewhere?  And if I miraculously find it, the moment is already lost, and Andromeda probably doesn’t even remember what I’m talking about.  Or, the more likely thing, that I say, “sorry babe, I don’t know what the twirly rooster is, forget about it for now.”

What lessons does that hypothetical Andromeda learn?  That there are some known things that mom (and later, she) can’t know.  That knowledge is hard to find.  That the world is confusing, bewildering, and disconnected.  That curiosity is sometimes nice, but often just annoying, because you never know when it’s an itch that can be scratched, vs. when it can’t.  Maybe then it’s better to not have that itch at all, let it seep out of awareness and into the background chatter of the human experience.

There was a tongue in check post, I think on SSC, about, “Do you have a modafinil deficiency?”  In a similar vein, I wonder if children before ours had a technology deficiency.  What if generations upon generations of children who could have risen to greater heights had their curiosity and love of learning driven out of them by the sheer inaccessibility of knowledge?  

There will always be those among us who fight any odds, any circumstances, in order to learn and create.  I don’t mean them, though we’ve made the world easier for them too.  Not the Ramanujans of the world, but other, more ordinary people.  Other people who could have been more, but weren’t quite as resilient.  A child of family without the internet, and maybe one without any encyclopedias, enough times of asking “Why?” and getting shut down.  And so they responded by shutting down their curiosity and the power of their intellect, rather than struggle on.  Those are children that maybe now, we can give more to, and who may one day give us more in return.  And it’s easy.  It’s easy to give them more now.  It’s as easy as the smartphone in your pocket, a google search away.

Too old to have enjoyed technology right from the beginning, but incredibly privileged to never have that unending curiosity properly excised and thus not excessively jealous of the kids these days. I’m already wondering how the hell people ever managed to survive without the superhuman powers of omnipresent access to almost all information ever (with just a slight rounding error) and connection to almost everyone interesting, even though my own habit of always carrying doubly redundant internet access if possible is only single-digits years old.

Also, I’m betting that eventually we’ll look at people squelching a child’s curiosity, instead of letting them indulge in it freely, with the same kind of horror and revulsion we look at physically violent parents now.

(via rusalkii)

4 months ago · 157 notes · source: andromeda-collides · .permalink

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