When you are with your child, put down your damned phone

The other day, we saw a three-year-old boy running excitedly on the bike path with a huge grin on his face.  His mother--we assume that was the relationship--was a few steps behind.

Nothing unnatural thus far, right?

Except that the mother was texting on her smartphone as she was walking.  And when she was done, she jogged to catch up with the boy.

If such a scene had been a rare occurrence, then I would not be worried.  But, it is not rare.  This has become the new normal, it seems.  Parents talking not to the kids but to somebody else on their smartphones.  Or texting. Or catching up on Facebook.

I suppose such highly distracted parenting will only worsen, which makes me all the more relieved that fertility rates have fallen to historic lows.  I would rather that people did not have children if they are going to be abandoning kids like this.

We have rapidly transitioned into a new world that runs against our own evolutionary mechanisms:

The new parental-interaction style can interrupt an ancient emotional cueing system, whose hallmark is responsive communication, the basis of most human learning. We’re in uncharted territory.

Unchartered, indeed!  There is decreasing levels of back-and-forth between children and adults.  I don't mean parents alone.  When I was growing up, it was not merely parents.  If they were not around, then I--like pretty much all children anywhere on this planet--was engaged in a back-and-forth with other adults or older children.  All these responsive communication helped all of us grow.

A problem therefore arises when the emotionally resonant adult–child cueing system so essential to early learning is interrupted—by a text, for example, or a quick check-in on Instagram. Anyone who’s been mowed down by a smartphone-impaired stroller operator can attest to the ubiquity of the phenomenon. ... “Toddlers cannot learn when we break the flow of conversations by picking up our cellphones or looking at the text that whizzes by our screens,” Hirsh-Pasek said.

It is all getting messed up!

Of course, parenting has always been associated with distractions.  A few days ago, a friend-couple recalled how when they were doing chores at home, their toddler daughter wandered into the yard--the door was accidentally open--and took a few sips of the lighter fluid.  Every parent has at least one awful story to tell.  But, that occasional distraction is different from the smartphone-distracted parenting of today:

A tuned-out parent may be quicker to anger than an engaged one, assuming that a child is trying to be manipulative when, in reality, she just wants attention. Short, deliberate separations can of course be harmless, even healthy, for parent and child alike (especially as children get older and require more independence). But that sort of separation is different from the inattention that occurs when a parent is with a child but communicating through his or her nonengagement that the child is less valuable than an email. A mother telling kids to go out and play, a father saying he needs to concentrate on a chore for the next half hour—these are entirely reasonable responses to the competing demands of adult life. What’s going on today, however, is the rise of unpredictable care, governed by the beeps and enticements of smartphones. We seem to have stumbled into the worst model of parenting imaginable—always present physically, thereby blocking children’s autonomy, yet only fitfully present emotionally.

All these don't add up well.  A brave new world!

Measuring your personal density

I read stuff.  Quality stuff, not the kind that the racist bully quotes from ;)

Even when the quality stuff is darn difficult to understand.  After all, if the world were easy to understand, then by now all of us would have known about everything there is to know, right?

One of the advantages in this approach of fumbling around in difficult essays is this: I find some wonderful ideas that make a whole lot of sense to me.  Makes the slogging worthwhile.

Like the following I came across in a lengthy essay in the NYRB:

When the smartphone brings messages, alerts, and notifications that invite instant responses—and induces anxiety if those messages fail to arrive—everyone’s sense of time changes, and attention that used to be focused more or less distantly on, say, tomorrow’s mail is concentrated in the present moment. In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), an engineer named Kurt Mondaugen enunciates a law of human existence: “Personal density…is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” The narrator explains:

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now…. The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

I like how the author makes me understand with "attention that used to be focused more or less distantly on, say, tomorrow’s mail is concentrated in the present moment."  The past and the future seem to be getting obliterated with the emphasis on now.  And this dramatic and rapid transformation of the "temporal bandwidth" is seriously messing up our personae.

It is not the technology that is at fault.  The fault lies in us.  We humans can choose to use technological advancements in the manner in which it could/will strengthen us, instead of making us more vulnerable than ever before.

Every technological change that seems to threaten the integrity of the self also offers new ways to strengthen it.

Exactly!  If I were to use the "temporal bandwidth" language, I suppose the technology has made it possible for me to appreciate the past, even as I worry about the future, and appropriately think about the now.  The here and the now are not in terms of the smartphone's ability to deliver instant gratification, but in ways that help me gain inner strength.

One of my go-to-experts on such matters, Nicholas Carr, has also responded to this essay; he writes:

The intensification of communication, and the attendant flow of information, aids in the development of personal density, of inner density, but only up to a point. Then the effect reverses. One is so overwhelmed by the necessity of communication — a necessity that may well be felt as a form of pleasure — that there is no longer any time for the synthesis or consolidation needed to build density. Little adheres, less coheres. Personal density at this point becomes inversely proportional to informational density. The only way to deal with the expansion of informational bandwidth is to constrict one’s temporal bandwidth — to narrow the “Now.” We are not unbounded; tradeoffs must be made.

Yes, tradeoffs must be made about the now.  I hope I am making the right calls, at least once in a while.

What we've got here is failure to communicate

If you have ever watched America's Funniest Home Videos, you know that towards the end the studio audience votes for the top three by using the clickers they have been handed.  Those clickers made their way into higher education, too.  Of course!  I did not ever want to use them in my classes.  It is a wonderful tool, no doubt, but it depended on the sincerity of students to use that in order to advance their own learning.  I was afraid that without that sincere interest in learning, well, the disaster that education is will become a catastrophe.

Clickers and bubble-in answer sheets are machine-friendly, unlike oral and written communication. Can you imagine the complexity if a machine has to read essays that students turn in, provide comments, and finally determine letter-grades?

Hey, what if we could do away with the complexity of communication itself?  Nicholas Carr writes that a few weeks ago "Mark Zuckerberg offered a peek into the future of interpersonal communication":

One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full, rich thoughts to each other directly using technology. You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like. This would be the ultimate communication technology.

This is where you need to pause and think whether Zuckerberg's future is what we really want.

Did you think about it?

Carr then provides this interpretation:

But there is another, less frequently articulated reason why Silicon Valley wants to replace speech. One characteristic of verbal languages is that nobody can own them. Meanwhile, emoji characters are copyrighted, and software can be patented. The machinic capacity to measure emotions via the face or tone of voice is in the possession of businesses, and currently being rapidly capitalized by private-equity investment. Industrial capitalism privatized the means of production. Digital capitalism seeks to privatize the means of communication.

Do you see where this argument is going?  You need to pause and think.

Did you think about it?

Let me bring in Carr:

The best solution, if you have a need to get computers to “understand” human communication, may to be avoid the problem altogether. Instead of figuring out how to get computers to understand natural language, you get people to speak artificial language, the language of computers. A good way to start is to encourage people to express themselves not through messy assemblages of fuzzily defined words but through neat, formal symbols — emoticons or emoji, for instance.

 Now do you see what the worry is?  No?  Come on, already!

When we speak with emoji, we’re speaking a language that machines can understand.
People like Mark Zuckerberg have always been uncomfortable with natural language. Now, they can do something about it.

Of course, using emojis today will not literally change the world tomorrow.  But, what we need to recognize here is this: we are slowly changing our daily behavior in order to make them increasingly computer-friendly.  We change our behaviors in ways that make it easier for algorithms to understand what we do, what we say, where we go, what we eat, ... Meanwhile, we willingly feed those machines continuous data on our walking, breathing, blood pressure, pulse, thumb-print, ... Remember this from a while ago:

 Apple is building a world in which there is a computer in your every interaction, waking and sleeping. A computer in your pocket. A computer on your body. A computer paying for all your purchases. A computer opening your hotel room door. A computer monitoring your movements as you walk though the mall. A computer watching you sleep. A computer controlling the devices in your home. A computer that tells you where you parked. A computer taking your pulse, telling you how many steps you took, how high you climbed and how many calories you burned—and sharing it all with your friends…. THIS IS THE NEW APPLE ECOSYSTEM. APPLE HAS TURNED OUR WORLD INTO ONE BIG UBIQUITOUS COMPUTER.

Have a good weekend ;)