As many of you know, I’m in the middle of a multi-part summary of William Powers’ book Hamlet’s BlackBerry. My summary of Hamlet’s BlackBerry is designed to highlight the analog–digital divide. I thought I would slide this post in here because I think it speaks to the topic of the analog–digital divide. In this post I’d like to comment on the following Associated Press article:
The article starts by talking about how 11-year-old Park Jung-in (who lives in South Korea) “sleeps with her Android smartphone instead of a teddy bear” (quoting the article). In my opinion, this is a powerful image marking the shift from the analog world to the digital world: a young girl sleeping with her digital smartphone as opposed to the traditional analog teddy bear. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “This is high-tech South Korea and not the US.” Alas, sadly, kids here in the US are also forming intimate (dare I say attachment) relationships with their smartphones and tablets. This trend is talked about in great detail in Sherry Turkle’s 2012 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
The AP article goes on to talk about how young Park Jung-in is never away from her smartphone. She’s with it at home, at school, in the restroom, on the street, etc. She even uses her smartphone to feed her digital hamster (a behavioral pattern that Turkle also talks about in Alone Together). Here’s what I find interesting from a Bowlbian attachment theory standpoint: Park experiences a form of separation anxiety over the thought of being separated from her smartphone. And separation can take place as the result of one of three possible scenarios:
Being physically separated from the smartphone if the smartphone is lost or stolen.
Being separated from a wireless hotspot that creates separation from function.
Being separated from a power source.
Quoting the AP article we hear Park tell us that she gets “nervous when the battery [on her smartphone] falls below 20 percent.” In his book Last Child in the Woods (which I have mentioned in earlier posts), Richard Louv observes that one of the main reasons children give for being afraid of the outdoors is actually quite easy to understand: there are no electrical outlets in the outdoors. Simply, for these kids being in the outdoors would potentially trigger “fear of being separated from a power source.” Traditionally teddy bears have been viewed by psychology types as being the de facto transitional object—marking the transition from actual mother to conceptual mother. Is it possible that smartphones, hotspots, and power sources are the new transitional objects? Where are the object relation theorists when we need them (transitional objects a concept contained within object relations theory). Allow me to tell a personal story that provides an example of what is being talked about above.
A few months ago at around 10:00PM my doorbell rings. I was expecting my neighbor from down the street, so I opened my door. It was a woman in her late 20s or early 30s. She simply asked me, “Can you help me … I need a charge.” I immediately thought, “This woman needs a jump for her car.” I began looking around but I could not see a car. I asked, “Where’s your car?” She looked at me blankly. She blurted out, “Car … what car … I need a charge!” Getting a bit frustrated I said, “OK, a charge for what?” She fumed, “My iPhone!” OK, now I thought that she had walked to my door while talking on her iPhone trying to get help and her iPhone battery died, and she needed it charged back up so she could continue calling for help. Thinking I had a handle on what was going on, I asked, “OK, OK … are you in trouble, are you hurt? How far did you walk to get here?” She shot me a look that could kill. “What are you talking about … I’m fine. I live just down the way from you! I walked maybe 50 steps to get here.” We both stared at each other for about five seconds as if we were from different planets. She then blurted out, “I was talking on my iPhone and it went dead and I can’t find the charger and I need to get it charged back up … can you help me or not?” I was completely blown away. I simply informed the young lady, “I don’t have an iPhone, I don’t think I can help you.” She whipped around and shuffled off yelling, “Whatever!”
I was shocked that this young woman thought that getting a charge for her iPhone was an emergency that warranted ringing the doorbell of a stranger at 10PM at night. However, if you stop and view a smartphone as an attachment figure, I guess it could be an emergency to some. Not having a power source created an emergency for this woman, and she lives here in the US. I would suggest that fear of digital separation is more widespread and universal than we may think. The world is dividing in two, a form of speciation you might say: natchies—people who live in the real world; and virties—people who live in virtual or digital worlds. What happened at my door was the natchie world colliding with the virtie world, the analog world colliding with the digital world. In an earlier post I mentioned the following article:
The storm hit Ms. Davis’s neighborhood hard but spared her home, which became a charging station for friends of her daughter, Lucy Reynal, 13. The last Sunday, electricity was shut off while fallen trees were cleared from the road, and within minutes the house emptied out, no longer useful to the teenage power vultures.
As the Hurricane Sandy article points out, what’s happening in South Korea is also happening here. Back to the South Korea article.
According to the article, the government of South Korea “provides counseling programs and psychological treatment for an estimated 2 million people who cannot wean themselves from playing online computer games.…” South Korea views digital addiction as a serious public health issue. So much so that the government of South Korea makes it “mandatory for children as young as 3 to be schooled in controlling their [screen] device and Internet use” (quoting the article). Sadly, there is no such effort here in the US. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure the US even recognizes or acknowledges that digital addiction is a big public health problem. Heck, digital addiction is good for business in that it sells a lot of smartphones. Witness the fact that the topic of digital addiction did not come up during the recent presidential campaign by either side. Whereas there is growing public concern in South Korea over the potential “effects that South Korea’s digital utopia is having on its children, part of the first generation to play online games on smartphones, tablets and other [screen] devices even before they can read or write” (quoting the article), there is very little concern being expressed here in the US. Consider this scary quote from the South Korea article:
New mobile devices that instantly respond to a touch of a finger seem to make children more restless than before and lack empathy, said Kim Jun-hee, a kindergarten teacher who conducted an eight-month study on Internet safety and addiction for pre-school children.
OK, I’m going to be a broken record here. From the above it would appear that extensive mobile device use impedes development of the skills of:
delaying gratification
empathy
self control
All of the above are skills that are a part of upper brain, Executive Function Skills. Other EF skills are: mental modeling, time travel, planning, running “what if” scenarios, and perspective taking. I’m being a broken record here because I (and others like Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows) have said many times that extensive screen device use has the potential to impede the development of Executive Function Skills. Personally, I think that warning flags should be going off all over the place here in the US, but they are not. At least they are going off in a place like South Korea. “I’ve been teaching at kindergartens for more than 10 years now,” quoting Kim Jun-hee from the South Korea article, “but compared to the past, kids these days are unable to control their impulses.” Teachers here in the US are reporting the same but the stories are not getting out, at least not to a mass audience. There is some hope as the following quote from the South Korea article suggests:
Though Internet addiction is not recognized as a mental illness, there is a growing call from medical practitioners and health officials worldwide to treat it as an illness rather than a social problem.
As the article points out, in South Korea the “Ministry of Public Administration and Security is revising laws so that teaching the danger of Internet [and digital] addiction becomes mandatory from pre-school institutions to high schools.” I hope such an idea catches on here in the US, and, yes, philanthropists could play a role in popularizing such an idea. These educational programs in South Korea promote the idea that digital devices can be used for good, that is to say, in a way that serves analog purposes. I’ll end with a few suggestions from the article:
Listening to music
Running exercise apps that encourage singing songs, sitting quietly, stretching, moving around, etc.
Listening to stories where “a character falls prey to Internet addiction” (quoting the article)
Learning analog games that can be played without using computers or the Internet (or power sources)
OK, one more poignant quote from the South Korea article:
[Kim Jun-hee, the kindergarten teacher] said that parents have to be involved in [digital] education. One of the pledge cards written by a 5-year-old girl reads: “I promise to play Nintendo for 30 minutes only. Daddy promises to play less cellphone games and play more with me.”
COMMENT: South Korea’s Digital Addiction—Is the US Next?
As many of you know, I’m in the middle of a multi-part summary of William Powers’ book Hamlet’s BlackBerry. My summary of Hamlet’s BlackBerry is designed to highlight the analog–digital divide. I thought I would slide this post in here because I think it speaks to the topic of the analog–digital divide. In this post I’d like to comment on the following Associated Press article:
Wired SKorea to Stem Digital Addiction from Age 3
The article starts by talking about how 11-year-old Park Jung-in (who lives in South Korea) “sleeps with her Android smartphone instead of a teddy bear” (quoting the article). In my opinion, this is a powerful image marking the shift from the analog world to the digital world: a young girl sleeping with her digital smartphone as opposed to the traditional analog teddy bear. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “This is high-tech South Korea and not the US.” Alas, sadly, kids here in the US are also forming intimate (dare I say attachment) relationships with their smartphones and tablets. This trend is talked about in great detail in Sherry Turkle’s 2012 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
The AP article goes on to talk about how young Park Jung-in is never away from her smartphone. She’s with it at home, at school, in the restroom, on the street, etc. She even uses her smartphone to feed her digital hamster (a behavioral pattern that Turkle also talks about in Alone Together). Here’s what I find interesting from a Bowlbian attachment theory standpoint: Park experiences a form of separation anxiety over the thought of being separated from her smartphone. And separation can take place as the result of one of three possible scenarios:
Quoting the AP article we hear Park tell us that she gets “nervous when the battery [on her smartphone] falls below 20 percent.” In his book Last Child in the Woods (which I have mentioned in earlier posts), Richard Louv observes that one of the main reasons children give for being afraid of the outdoors is actually quite easy to understand: there are no electrical outlets in the outdoors. Simply, for these kids being in the outdoors would potentially trigger “fear of being separated from a power source.” Traditionally teddy bears have been viewed by psychology types as being the de facto transitional object—marking the transition from actual mother to conceptual mother. Is it possible that smartphones, hotspots, and power sources are the new transitional objects? Where are the object relation theorists when we need them (transitional objects a concept contained within object relations theory). Allow me to tell a personal story that provides an example of what is being talked about above.
A few months ago at around 10:00PM my doorbell rings. I was expecting my neighbor from down the street, so I opened my door. It was a woman in her late 20s or early 30s. She simply asked me, “Can you help me … I need a charge.” I immediately thought, “This woman needs a jump for her car.” I began looking around but I could not see a car. I asked, “Where’s your car?” She looked at me blankly. She blurted out, “Car … what car … I need a charge!” Getting a bit frustrated I said, “OK, a charge for what?” She fumed, “My iPhone!” OK, now I thought that she had walked to my door while talking on her iPhone trying to get help and her iPhone battery died, and she needed it charged back up so she could continue calling for help. Thinking I had a handle on what was going on, I asked, “OK, OK … are you in trouble, are you hurt? How far did you walk to get here?” She shot me a look that could kill. “What are you talking about … I’m fine. I live just down the way from you! I walked maybe 50 steps to get here.” We both stared at each other for about five seconds as if we were from different planets. She then blurted out, “I was talking on my iPhone and it went dead and I can’t find the charger and I need to get it charged back up … can you help me or not?” I was completely blown away. I simply informed the young lady, “I don’t have an iPhone, I don’t think I can help you.” She whipped around and shuffled off yelling, “Whatever!”
I was shocked that this young woman thought that getting a charge for her iPhone was an emergency that warranted ringing the doorbell of a stranger at 10PM at night. However, if you stop and view a smartphone as an attachment figure, I guess it could be an emergency to some. Not having a power source created an emergency for this woman, and she lives here in the US. I would suggest that fear of digital separation is more widespread and universal than we may think. The world is dividing in two, a form of speciation you might say: natchies—people who live in the real world; and virties—people who live in virtual or digital worlds. What happened at my door was the natchie world colliding with the virtie world, the analog world colliding with the digital world. In an earlier post I mentioned the following article:
“Hurricane Sandy Reveals a Life Unplugged”
Consider this quote from the article:
As the Hurricane Sandy article points out, what’s happening in South Korea is also happening here. Back to the South Korea article.
According to the article, the government of South Korea “provides counseling programs and psychological treatment for an estimated 2 million people who cannot wean themselves from playing online computer games.…” South Korea views digital addiction as a serious public health issue. So much so that the government of South Korea makes it “mandatory for children as young as 3 to be schooled in controlling their [screen] device and Internet use” (quoting the article). Sadly, there is no such effort here in the US. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure the US even recognizes or acknowledges that digital addiction is a big public health problem. Heck, digital addiction is good for business in that it sells a lot of smartphones. Witness the fact that the topic of digital addiction did not come up during the recent presidential campaign by either side. Whereas there is growing public concern in South Korea over the potential “effects that South Korea’s digital utopia is having on its children, part of the first generation to play online games on smartphones, tablets and other [screen] devices even before they can read or write” (quoting the article), there is very little concern being expressed here in the US. Consider this scary quote from the South Korea article:
OK, I’m going to be a broken record here. From the above it would appear that extensive mobile device use impedes development of the skills of:
All of the above are skills that are a part of upper brain, Executive Function Skills. Other EF skills are: mental modeling, time travel, planning, running “what if” scenarios, and perspective taking. I’m being a broken record here because I (and others like Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows) have said many times that extensive screen device use has the potential to impede the development of Executive Function Skills. Personally, I think that warning flags should be going off all over the place here in the US, but they are not. At least they are going off in a place like South Korea. “I’ve been teaching at kindergartens for more than 10 years now,” quoting Kim Jun-hee from the South Korea article, “but compared to the past, kids these days are unable to control their impulses.” Teachers here in the US are reporting the same but the stories are not getting out, at least not to a mass audience. There is some hope as the following quote from the South Korea article suggests:
As the article points out, in South Korea the “Ministry of Public Administration and Security is revising laws so that teaching the danger of Internet [and digital] addiction becomes mandatory from pre-school institutions to high schools.” I hope such an idea catches on here in the US, and, yes, philanthropists could play a role in popularizing such an idea. These educational programs in South Korea promote the idea that digital devices can be used for good, that is to say, in a way that serves analog purposes. I’ll end with a few suggestions from the article:
OK, one more poignant quote from the South Korea article:
Out of the mouths of babes….