Safeguarding the family from the digital juggernaut

The digitally distracted family. Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

One way to break free from a psychically cancerous society is to be online less. People are increasingly seeing the need to undertake detoxification from technologies that create tension and other forms of distress in their life.

Robyn Ferrell's description of our predicament is so true. She writes:

The smart phone has become like a valet, arranging your life in terms that make it liveable. The smart phone is an object that does your thinking for you. You use its calculator to do what you used to do as mental arithmetic. You use its camera as a repository, and perhaps a substitute, for memory. The calendar is your social secretary, nudging you to your “two o’clock”. You keep track of time with it. You keep track of money with it. In fact, you even use it as money with a cashless payment app. You use it to find out where you are, and to navigate, with the map app.

When waiting anywhere, it is an indispensable amusement, with its podcasts and news apps. It’s the library in your pocket, the encyclopaedia, research assistant and broker of disputes at the dinner table. “Who was that guy in …?” You can even talk to it, and “Siri” will answer you and perform things for you. It makes you feel powerful, with a surge of attachment for this shiny and incredibly useful object.

And yet. Are you really sure who is master and who slave? Now you can’t add up to save your life; you’re lost without the calendar to tell you where to be when; you no longer remember the phone numbers of your friends and relations (or even your own). You need the phone to move funds or record your steps or summon an Uber. And that’s before you even make a call on this (uncannily) smart phone.

This was your instrument, but now you are beholden to it and dependent on it. And meanwhile, it is reporting on you behind your back. Like a jealous lover, it has you under surveillance wherever in the wide world you are roaming, discoverable by mobile phone towers and revealed by your purchases and searches. Or perhaps more like a handler, relaying your information faithfully to the powers that be, the marketers and advertisers who pay well for it. 

Ferrell links this view with that of Martin Heidegger, who died in 1976 and who had the insight that with technology all of nature had become a "standing reserve" - on call, as if it were a part of industrial inventory. For example, soil has no longer an essence in itself, but is seen as part of the food production sector of the economy. Everything has a means or end instrumentality. Ferrell goes on:

In this sense, Heidegger saw the danger of technology as a spiritual one, not only infecting others who become a standing reserve but a habit of thought in which even the self becomes trapped. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this dystopia has arrived, in the form of the internetted world bound in all its fibres to the instrumental-mercantile. 

Therefore, technology generates "consumer logic", central to which is "a prefabricated idea — a shorthand for thinking that forestalls thinking".  With the adoption of instrumental thinking and automated thought, "no other thinking makes sense anymore".

Drawing on other social observers, Ferrell leaves us with the view that "habits of mind associated with a market economy and its related technology ... became inflated in the modern world" and that "this remains a suggestive point of departure for diagnoses of our time".

You may recall the meme: "That moment you've lost your phone but feel like you're the one that's lost." That state must be part of the diagnosis of our time. As well, there is the resulting distress caused by the way tech companies tap addiction psychology in the design of the smartphone, to take one device.

Dr Anastasia Hronis, clinical psychologist and honorary associate at the University of Technology, Sydney, says a smartphone notification gives a dopamine rush similar to a hit of cocaine or a win at the slot machines:

I specialise in addictions — yet clients don't say 'I have a problem with my phone' — they present with anxiety-depression, and often phone addiction is a cause.

I foresee a push towards cafes and theatres introducing phone-free policies in the future, but for now the self-regulation is down to us.

A working mother reports how self-regulation in deliberately trying a digital detox proved a boon for she and her husband and their two sons:

I thought that anxiety, distraction and stress was the inevitable price I needed to paid for being a working mother.

But it was my own decision to not be fully present [within the family], and it was a habitual thing that could only be broken through a total detox.

Research findings on the digital environment coming out of Australia shed light on the worries parents have about their children:

Parents were significantly concerned about the negative impacts of digital media and technologies on their child’s physical activity levels (73%), attention span (62%), and time for, and interest in, playing (62%). 

Parenting and teaching are harder than they used to be:

• Most (73%) parents and grandparents think it is harder to control their child’s digital habits since they have got their own screen-based device.
• 83% of parents, carers and grandparents felt that their child was negatively distracted by digital technologies. 13% of these respondents felt that this distraction was experienced to ‘a great extent’.
• 84% of educators in Australia believe that digital technologiesare a growing distraction in the learning environment.
• 59% of respondents observed a decline in students' overall readiness to learn in the last 3-5 years.

This Growing Up Digital report I have been quoting from has this as part of its conclusion: 

Overwhelmingly, parents, carers and grandparents recognise that they are a critical influence on their child’s use of digital media and technology – in good and bad. 72% of parents recognise that their own technology habits influence those of their children. 90% of participants agreed with the statement, “I need to be a responsible user of digital technology for my child to learn from”. 

A comment that reflected a common view was: “As a parent I need to know how to work the programs and sites the kids access to be able to protect them. I do not assume they are safe”. Indeed, it is unrealistic to expect that children will improve their digital media habits unless they see their parents at home behaving accordingly.

It's not only the addictive nature of the technology and the learned ettiquette, or lack of it, of social media that consign adult and child alike to a toxic psychic state, but there is also the fact that digital media and technologies are mostly offered to young people for consumption rather than content creation. The Growing Up Digital report states:

Parents grapple with confusing messages about whether educational or learning uses of digital media and devices and recreational and entertainment use need to be treated in the same way. The time recommendation increases with a child’s age and are based on the idea of media as a ‘digital babysitter’ and a source of entertainment, rather than recognising the educational, active and engaging purposes that digital media can provide. Clarifying the key point that there are better uses of screens than others, and the need for balance in a young person’s day, is critical to seeing change in parental decision making [My emphasis -BS]. 

Passively consuming digital content poses other risks, too. The content that young people absorb and consume from the digital world around them is filled with ideas and examples that shape their views of the world around them and how they fit into it. Some of these are inappropriate and unsafe and without sharing what they are seeking and experiencing online, parents have little leverage to intervene. For parents, it is far better to engage in a conversation with young people about their habits and share the digital world with them.

Here's the report's punchline:

Ultimately, it has become abundantly clear that we all have a problem, and we all must take responsibility for helping young people grow up healthily, happily and responsibly.

The challenge must be accepted especially by those of us with a religious worldview. First, the technology itself - as I have tried to make plain for parents in this post - has an impact on the way we think, and parents must be ready to counterattack. Secondly, parents must be confident in their God-given role of caring for young ones. Third, parents must decide on practical steps to break the addiction, even simple practices such as putting smartphones in a drawer around meal time.

Based on the arguments and information of the type I have presented here, I am among the growing number convinced that a response in our personal lives is urgent as we wait to see if governments will be courageous enough to take a stand against the economic power and cultural influence of "Big Tech".

An important part of that response must be more time devoted to prayer and the reading of our scriptures. These in particular can provide some spiritual balance to the agitation that purposeless digital use generates. 

SOMETHING EXTRA: "Remembering is a subversive communal activity in an age that coaxes us to drift in the constantly streaming, twittering present, forgetful of history, forgetful of the past." - Richard B. Hays, drawing on his Biblical scholarship

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