Crisis Averted by Caitlin Rivers PhD

Author:Caitlin Rivers, PhD [Rivers, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

9

Technologies

I am a member of the first generation of so-called digital natives, a designation that now seems quaint but serves as a reminder of just how recently personal computers were adopted into our every waking moment. Growing up, I chatted with friends online, played games online, and generally spent an unprecedented degree of my leisure time online. This did not sit well with my mother, who encouraged me to develop hobbies and friendships in the “real world.” In other words, to follow a model closer to the one that every generation before mine has lived.

She was right, of course. Scientists now recognize that the near-complete overhaul of the way that teenagers learn and grow while “plugged in” to their devices has significant, negative consequences on adolescent development.[1] The mental health of young people has declined markedly over the last decade, a trend that many experts attribute to constant connectedness and the shallow intimacy afforded by those online relationships.[2]

But as a teenager, I would not hear of any concerns. Already the internet was changing the way people worked, played, and connected, and I saw no sense in clinging to the old ways. The irony is not lost on me when I now urge my own children to moderate their use of technology, particularly when the COVID-19 pandemic moved public education to Zoom. I became the one lamenting a life lived online. No longer did learning take place at a battered desk in a cinderblock classroom, as it had for generations. Pandemic kindergarten meant logging onto a laptop populated with a mosaic of black boxes with small children bobbing in and out. By the nine-month mark, having been out of the school building longer than she was ever in it, my oldest child was asking questions about dimly remembered notions like recess and the cafeteria. She noticed before I did that our lives were forever changed.

After the pandemic settled into familiarity, it became clear that we won’t be returning to the way things were. Our school district recently announced that during snowstorms and other inclement weather, class will continue virtually instead of being canceled. That too represents a truism: once a new technology becomes entrenched, it is a permanent fixture until it is also replaced by something else in this constant march we call progress. This is the leading genesis of discomfort around innovation. Once adopted, there’s no going back.

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