When our elementary school acquired its first digital cameras back in the 2000s, I got in line to use them for my fourth graders. They wrote stories and then they arranged their classmates into scenes from their stories and photographed them to illustrate their stories. When our school acquired its first audio recorders I got in line to use them for my fourth graders to interview each other as literary characters from the books they were reading and then sent audio copies to their grandparents so they could get a taste of what their grandchildren were up to. I had high hopes for digital technology in education then, and I still do, but I have become more anxious and uneasy about digital technology in general.
My first job as a computer programmer set me up as an admirer of technology. When I left teaching elementary school to pursue a doctorate in education, I taught a college class about using technology in education, again a topic that excited me. For my doctorate, I included studying how parents use technology in homeschooling education.
I thought technology would find a good home in education. The possibilities seemed endless. An aspect of my dissertation and continuing research looked at technology use in education, and in my own head I was a strong proponent. I strived to be objective and not present any bias, but I held with those who weren’t afraid of technology, who let their kids play Minecraft, learn coding, and use Google for research. A favorite resource of mine was Gee’s What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy where he arrived at 36 very successful learning strategies that he found embedded in good, high-quality video games, the ones that sell well, that adolescents love to play. He argued that if players are playing in an active and critical way, that they are acquiring meaningful content. He claims that they learn to think creatively, and problem solve in areas that transfer to the real world, and that they are doing it in an extremely entertaining way, a method I thought schools should stop trying to compete with and get on board with.
But my own life has been teaching me a lesson. Netflix’s documentary A Social Dilemma (TSD) has illuminated for me “a gradual, slight, imperceptible change in my own behavior and perception.”
I am retired. I have a lot of time on my hands. I don’t drink coffee or alcohol or smoke anything. My addiction has always been chocolate: hot chocolate, chocolate candy, and I make a mean chocolate cake. People laughed when I said I was addicted to chocolate, and they also laughed when I said I was addicted to streaming movies. But there is no doubt in my mind that over the last couple of years I have slowly and gradually become very addicted to streaming movies. For a while it was watching TV in the evenings, even if I had taped evening dramas so I could watch them without ads. But I have discovered Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Showtime and HBOGO. I’ve even flirted with Apple TV, Disney this summer to see Hamilton, Acorn, and BritBox because I love British murder mysteries. I am self-aware enough to know that when my life seems to overwhelm me, I love to immerse myself in someone else’s life; it seems to chase away depression and anxiety. I also stream movies when I’m bored, and it is no longer only an evening activity.
So, I know that I have become addicted to screens for movie watching, and as disturbing as that is for me to realize, it is not nearly the monster that social media has become – the focus of Netflix’s The Social Dilemma. As I watched these mostly youngish, white men, who hail from Silicon Valley, the very creators of social media, describe the evolution of social media and their realizations of the problems that have unwittingly arisen, I have become very concerned.
At first I didn’t even notice ‘likes’ but now I do. I pride myself that I don’t care about them, but…who knows, I probably do. I have limited myself to Facebook and Gmail, so I can’t even speak to Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and that evil Twitter. I’m sure I’m unaware of many of the impacts social media has had on me, but it’s hard to miss the impact on politics.
I play bridge, a game where four people sit down around a table for a few hours, play cards and chat about a variety of topics. (Now with COVID, it’s a game played online, and I have discovered a number of negatives for me in that venue.) When my parents sat down to their bridge games I watched and learned; and I listened to them talk politics. In our little town, everyone discussed politics. But two or three years ago when I sat down with my friends to play bridge, some players made it very clear that politics was not to be discussed or they would not play. I wasn’t the one to make the pronouncement, but I understood and didn’t fight it, I didn’t really want to discuss politics either. What is different now than when my parents played bridge? It is so hard to figure out, but I have settled on two things. First, back then my parents and all their friends got their news, thus their facts, from channel 3, 6 or 10 on local TV. Walter Cronkite shared ‘the news’ and then everyone settled down to discuss it and interpret what it meant and how it might play out in life and politics. Now, however, everyone gets to choose their news stations. We pick what we like and there are so many choices. We slowly and gradually isolate ourselves into groups of those people we agree with and who make us feel good. It’s taken me a while to realize that we can’t really hold discussions anymore because we are all getting different news from different places. And I am not blaming the media or accuse them of lying. Events can be presented in so many different ways, the truth is hard to come by and we are choosing to watch or read or listen. But it has really polarized us. And the second factor is that it now all plays out on social media. People share what they like and find meaningful and if we engage, we just become more firmly fixed in attitudes and beliefs that we like but that are almost impossible to share with people from other groups…I believe this phenomenon is called tribalism. The creators of social media point out in TSD how AI or the algorithms they built have created a colossal creature behind the screen bent on getting and holding our attention and that it is only getting better and better at it.
Watch The Social Dilemma. These are experts on the topic, people who have found themselves succumbing to their own inventions and nervous and scared about what has evolved. Their best suggestions are to not engage, delete apps, don’t give screens to your children etc.
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