For Better and Worse

"Teachers often notice the cracks before the data does. Right now, many teachers are seeing a sharp drop in focus during reading and writing (thanks to cell phones) and a growing dependence on AI to think and write. We're not heading for a learning crisis. We are already in one."

"Too much screen time in elementary school is delaying reading and writing skills, weakening focus, and hurting social development."

"Children will not be able to read the founding documents if they can't read cursive."

Over the past year I've made the conscious decision to cut way back on my social media consumption. Specifically, it's the endless scrolling. I still jump on to communicate with old high school friends and to interact with Teacher Tom readers, of course, but the endless parade of posts and messages that populate my feed are a monumental waste of time. 

I have better things to do, like watching the clouds and listening to birds.

When I joined Facebook almost 20 years ago, my feed was almost exclusively messages and posts from people I knew, but now it's mostly just whatever the algorithms have decided I should see. And lately, it's been memes about how things like smartphones, AI, social media, and the death of cursive are ruining our children and threatening humanity's future.

We obviously didn't have smartphones or social media when I was a boy, and we all learned cursive, painstakingly. Back then, the technology that was going to ruin or lives, turn our eyes square, make us soulless, flabby zombies, was the "boob tube," broadcast television. The adults were always going on about it. I remember our first TV set, a black and white Zenith that, if we adjusted our antenna properly, gave us three, maybe four, channels. Looking back it seems quaint. Even after we got a color set, we probably only watched for a few hours a week, but nevertheless, TV was going to be the ruin an entire generation.

Then along came cable with its 57 channels (and nothing on). That was really going to ruin us, but for a television-native like me, it didn't change my viewing habits at all . . . That is, until MTV came along when I was 18. That's where all the cool stuff was. It was the soundtrack for party time and we particularly enjoyed that the adults were worried that Madonna or Adam Ant or even Tina Turner (for crying out loud) were going to definitely ruin us. But for us kids, it was all just TV, the milieu in which we had lived our entire lives. We knew how to swim in it. By then, our parents might have gotten sucked into the TV-all-day habit, but we had figured out how to turn it off and on, and change the channels, to suit our lives.

By the time smartphones and social media came around, however, people of my generation were people of our parents' age. We dipped our toes into this new technology and found ourselves completely sucked in. We made and continue to make all the mistakes: compulsively checking our phones, endless scrolling, engaging with the trolls, not reading anything longer than a paragraph, and embarrassing ourselves when we forget that in this new world, every place is a public one.

Our children, however, have never known anything else. Like TV was for me, this is the water in which they've always lived. I worry more about myself than my kid.

At the turn of the last century, composer John Philip Sousa, amongst others, predicted calamity due to the advent of recorded music. "There are more pianos, violins, guitars, mandolins, and banjoes among the working classes of America than in all the rest of the world . . . But once machine music arrived, children, understandably, turned on the machine and sat at home to 'listen to the machine's performance' rather than engaging in study to learn how to play the piano, violin, or harp themselves." 

He wasn't wrong, but would any of us today give up our "machine music"?

A century earlier, the older people were panicked over locomotives. Humans, they said, were not made to move at such high speeds. It would, they worried, ruin us.

There was a similar concern during the Victorian era over the mind-rotting habit of reading novels.

Centuries earlier, the concern was over the printing press and how mass literacy would be the downfall of humanity.

This fear of technological change goes back as far as humans. Socrates was famously opposed to the introduction of the phonetic alphabet, fearing it would mean that the young would lose the ability to remember, to recite (it was common in his day for even every-day-Joes to be able to recite Homer from memory), to think and  to know. We know about this because Socrates' student Plato was using new the technology of the phonetic alphabet to write it all down. If the ancient Greeks had had social media, I can imagine Socrates might have posted his own meme: "Too much reading is delaying memory and oral storytelling skills, weakening focus, and hurting social development." 

And, like Sousa, he wasn't wrong. I imagine there were those who predicted that the wheel or fire or stone tools were going to be the ruin of our species.

Here's the thing: people who worry about the latest technologies or the loss of old ones aren't wrong. Indeed, every technology I've mentioned here has dramatically altered what it means to live as a human even if our babies are still being born with the same basic biology as they did in Socrates' time. Smartphones have changed us. Social media has changed us. AI is already shaping our brains in ways we can't yet imagine. Just as literacy, the printing press, and high speed travel have made us into a different animal. Every technology changes us, it upsets the status quo. Things that we once considered central to cognition and essential for being "educated" have faded, while alternative ways of being and doing have risen.

For better and worse.

I have no doubt that today's new-ish technologies will cause a decline in literacy, in a traditional sense, in future generations. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan predicted as much during the early days of television. He figured that we were entering a new age with a new type of literacy that went beyond the confines of 26 letters. He is also not wrong.

"Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body. The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and the fist and ends with the atom bomb. Clothes and houses are extensions of man’s biological temperature-control mechanisms. Furniture takes the place of squatting and sitting on the ground. Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which carry the voice across both time and space are examples of material extensions. Money is a way of extending and storing labor. Our transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and backs. In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body."

That's what technology is.

Each one of these extensions causes us to lose something that once defined our species. We may wish to go back to using our teeth and fists, relying on our own "fur" for warmth, and living in a world of barter, but we've "evolved" beyond that. Perhaps it's the curse of our species, but we have learned to steer the evolutionary process through our technologies. And our technologies, in turn, steer us.

We may rant and rail against these things -- I sure do -- but our young children are simply living in the world in which they find themselves, not pining over a lost past, but rather making the most of getting there needs met in the present. Fifty years from now, they may well bemoan the death of the screen (like we do with the decline of cursive) or fret that their own children never even pick up their phones (like we do about reading books), but right now they're simply doing what children have always done: seeking connection and meaning in the world they find before them, the world we have created for them. We worry because their experience isn't our experience. They'll never have to adjust an antenna, get to slam a telephone receiver, or lose a bar bet because they can't remember how many home runs Hank Aaron hit.

And you know what? The advent of audio books and electronic reading devices, technology, have contributed to increased book sales over the past couple decades, after years of decline. But what is leading the charge are actual printed books. And "young adult" books are leading the charge. It's actually us older people who don't read as much any more. We're too busy scrolling through our social media feeds.

This doesn't mean that I don't worry. I worry specifically that our young people are losing the ability to connect with one another. I worry that our very young children are spending too much of their childhoods attending to screens rather than watching clouds and listening to birds. I worry that our older children are shopping for dates on apps. I worry about all of this because I am a product of my own experience, my own technologies . . . And I'm not wrong.

In the meantime, I strive to introduce the children in my life to the world as I know it and to discourage those things that I think are harmful. But my influence as a teacher, or even a parent, is limited. I worry, but I also have faith that this incredible generation, like every other incredible generation, will learn how to thrive, in their way, in the milieu in which they find themselves. All I can do is give them my best while I can, then cheer them on as they go about the project of creating themselves in a world they didn't create.

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