A long time ago I noted the results of a study on computers and education, and somehow this connects with an article a friend pointed out a few weeks ago in The New York Times. The article concerns the practice of high level executives at places like Facebook in connection with … computers:
The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.
A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.
“Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. “If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”
Ms. Stecher, 37, and her husband, Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their house. Their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time “budget,” no regular hours they are allowed to be on screens. The only time a screen can be used is during the travel portion of a long car ride (the four-hour drive to Tahoe counts) or during a plane trip.
This is particularly entertaining, er, interesting:
Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook and is now at Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arm, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”
It’s a fascinating article, although I didn’t see much quantification of the potential damage to children.
When this article came out, I wonder how many alarm bells went off across America – both for parents, suddenly worried about the monster in their kids’ hands, and in corporate boardrooms, where the battle for the lifelong loyalty of wallets, credit cards, and souls of young consumers is in full war cry. The latter must be about as happy as were the tobacco companies when the evidence suggesting tobacco was detrimental to human health began to accumulate.
Will we see a deliberate smearing of the studies in question by Big Profits?
