to music. Interactive media has only been around in a widespread form since the advent of video games in the 1970s. But by that time, after many years of being passive receivers of information, we had become accustomed to absorbing just about everything that came our way. Today, children continue to absorb what is presented in their digital environments, but are also involved in the process to a degree unimaginable even a generation ago.
Information: Then to Now
Communication has been growing and changing since the dawn of human history, but two turning points in the advent of mass media stand out. The first, the Guttenberg printing press (1455), heralded the widespread distribution of text in a way simply impossible when books were hand-lettered. This distribution allowed for greater access to the study of faith, the exchange of ideas, and educational opportunities more broadly. The second turning point, Morse’s electrical telegraph (1844), opened up the possibility of almost instantaneous transmission of messages across large distances. From that point on, information could be removed from its original context and shared with persons not intimately connected with its development. This is important as data, facts, and information that do not have direct significance on the life of the individual, sudden are treated with the same importance as the events that legitimately have great significance. Henry David Thoreau, reacting to this new technological development, suggested that just because Texas and Maine now had the ability to talk to each other instantaneously, it didn’t mean that they actually had anything important to talk about. Thoreau recognized that just having a flow of information without context might not be that useful, and might actually serve to lower the standards of communication generally, transmitting primarily the mundane minutia of daily life rather than thoughtful discourse or deep reflection (Facebook, anyone?). Roughly a century and a half later, the flow of information Thoreau knew has gone from a small trickle to Niagara Falls.
Twenty years ago, if we wanted to learn about culture in France, we’d drive to the library and look at books and magazines. Ten years ago, we could go to our computers to read websites and maybe look at a message board or two. Today we can get all that information on our phones. We also can find and stream the three most popular Jerry Lewis movies in France, download whatever song is played most frequently among Parisian teenagers, and even get highlights of recent soccer games. Out of curiosity, I just typed “French Culture” into my web browser. It spit back 324,000,000 hits — over a quarter of a billion websites, pictures, and videos. I just got 741,000 results for “Tap Dancing Cats,” and 22,900 results for “Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota.” I think it’s pretty safe to say searching the internet is like drinking from a fire hose.
So why am I mentioning this? We tend to take for granted the sheer ruckus of background noise, the incredible glut of information that is now available to us all the time. Having a smartphone in your pocket is the equivalent of having a pipeline to everything, everywhere, and everyone all the time. This is the world in which we’re trying to raise our kids.
This sense of being connected to and surrounded by data and information is constantly with us, and usually we do not even notice it. When returning from a rare, brief stint of being unplugged — a significant illness, perhaps a vacation, or (horrors) a broken phone — we more easily recognize the pervasive presence of digital technology in almost every hour of our day. This is before we even consider the impact all this technology has on the way we relate to others.
More than just persistent background noise, digital technology mediates almost all of our communication. We talk on the phone, we email, we text, we chat, we IM, we post on each other’s Facebook pages, we tweet, we Instagram, we FaceTime, we play in virtual worlds and MMORPGs, we Foursquare, we Yelp. If you don’t know what these things are, your kids likely do. The point is that technology is growing at a tremendous rate, and it changes our expectations of the world and our relationships. We can see this in what our kids pick up (think banana camera-phone), what they accept as normal (broadcasting what they had for lunch, for example), and how even their (and our) closest relationships are mediated by the digital revolution.
Technology Shapes Our Lives
Think of how many kids (including your own children) have an astounding amount of information packed in their little heads. I’ve met four-year-olds who have a base of factual knowledge about dinosaurs that I’m convinced rivals the expertise of many paleontologists. I’ve actually heard a four-year-old explain to an adult what “paleontologist” means, then go on to explain that the name “Brontosaurus” is no longer current and that the correct name for that kind of dinosaur is actually an “Apatosaurus.” I’m sure you’ve also run into kids who can rattle off the names of one hundred different Pokémon in the time it would take us to list fifty saints.
Kids assume that whatever is presented to them is normal. In fact, it’s amazing what kids will accept as absolute truth. One of my brothers recently told me about a guy he met who believed that cookies would only bake properly in the oven if you were quiet during the baking time. Apparently the guy’s mother told him this when he was young as a way to encourage him to have some quiet time. My brother concluded that his friend’s family must have made cookies a lot. Similarly, we cannot assume children have the ability to discern truth from falsehood online, or that their decisions regarding technology are based on a good understanding of how it may impact them. More likely, their choices are guided by what they see and hear around them, what they perceive as “normal.” Without our input, these perceptions will be dictated by society at large rather than the values of your family and your faith.
I’ll reference my family often in this book. I grew up in London in the early 1980s. My dad worked for an oil company, so we’d moved from New Orleans to England when I was six. This had two major effects on my personality. First, spending ten of the most formative years of my life in the UK has warped my sense of humor. Second, and much more importantly, it gave me and my siblings a unique childhood in that most of our friends at the American school only lived in London for an average of two years, and most went home for the summers. So if my brothers and I wanted to have someone to play with between June and August, we needed to work out any problems and conflicts between us quickly. While we never knew which of our friends would be around year to year, we always had each other. Our parents did a fantastic job of strengthening those relationships and giving us opportunities to spend time together as a family. My folks also have the same weird sense of humor that I do. A great example of this: According to my father, Queen Victoria’s most famous quote was, “One should never miss an opportunity to use the bathroom.” While this is blatantly untrue, it did ensure that my brothers and I were always good to go before starting long car trips. I, as children do, accepted everything at face value so, since my dad said it, it was absolutely true.
If we and our children simply accept the world as it appears to us, without reference to a deeply held values system, many questions about the nature of self and relationship quickly arise. How do societal values, mediated by technology, cause us to think about themselves and their worth? If the environment dictates that we need to be “connected” at all times, what does that do to our sense of privacy, our level of comfort with solitude, and our life of prayer? When children are raised in a world in which the word “friends” includes people they have never met, how does that change their perception of relationship? And if we are shown that a fun way to pass the time is to reduce aliens or zombies to gory puddles of various sizes, how does this affect us? In all of these cases, the obvious answer is that the technology shapes us.
The more we do something, the more we form a habit, and the more we repeat that habit, the more ingrained it becomes. If constant connectivity is the norm, our expectations of response time changes. My teenage clients talk about how rejected they feel when their friends do not respond to texts within a few minutes, even though there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for why they did not. If “friendship” requires a constant stream of witty comments or glammed up photos, our belief about our worth may be reduced to the opinions or “likes” of others. (We will discuss this in greater detail in
