"We should teach our children about technology, not allow them to be taught _by_ technology."
The solution is to - like your maxim implies - reverse the paradigm, by treating technology like it was initially designed: a tool for us to use with intent.
Even the apps and websites which have been optimised for engagement can be valuable. The value is what we make of it, just like how the websites make value out of us.
Advocating for quitting technology unfortunately becomes more and more of an impractical advice, as technology is further ingrained into our lifestyle.
What matters the most is being mindful and honest with ourselves. The moment we lose sight of how we use something, it starts using us.
It seems like your book focuses on a similar mindset. I've stumbled upon it before, but now I'll definitely be giving it a read! :)
I agree strongly on logical, emotional, & spiritual levels with this assessment. Ursala Franklin's lectures on Holistic enabling technologies versus Prescriptive directing technologies[1], or her Work versus Control technologies distinctions, is a good perspective to assess by, to view tech by. They define this struggle for what lets us work with intent, versus what molds it's intent upon us very strongly, very sharply, & very smartly, & are essential readings for socio-technology today in my view.
It is all very complicated right now. Technologies like Instagram or Tiktok are both highly creative & enabling, presenting a rich ability to craft, but extremely limiting & process/control oriented in terms of distribution/viewing/engagement, as fixed as can be. Understanding how walled & limited we are on some fronts while enabled on other fronts presents a serious challenge of understanding, and this challenge is far heightened by the severely limited alternatives and options we have in the world today. Even if someone can set up or gain access to a good PeerTube instance, they'll have less creative tools available & face a myriad of other distribution/engagement challenges. The tech may be less limiting, especially if they run their own instance, but at other great costs.
Genuinely trying to create a technology which can be engaged in & learned of requires not just good teaching intent, but a software ecosystem which is learnable & explorable. We need technology which is capable of being engaged in. The web, here, is remarkably strong & powerful, with userscripts being a powerful demonstration of how some small tidbits of common knowledge can give us wideranging power over most every corporate/institutional property on the planet. There's nothing like it! It's purely incidental though- few web sites are specifically implemented to enhance understanding of how the site itself functions. There's a big-ball-of-mud/complexity under the covers, in a variety of different programming languages/libraries as we travel about, & almost none of it is designed for external use. I like to imagine a web where components could more clearly state their intent, be poked & prodded & understood by outsiders using common devtools. To me, this is one of the latent & most inspiring hopes of could-be web platform systems like WebComponents, that they could help make the web more broadly understandable & explorable for everyone, that it could make the hypermedium itself rich not just in what it expresses, but internally as well. This idea of making the technology open & exposed & engageable is a precondition for a society capable of growing a healthy, non-poisonous, non-treacherous, resillient relationship with technology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
> They define this struggle for what lets us work with intent, versus what molds it's intent upon us very strongly
I often couch this struggle as the relation between IA (intelligence amplification) and AI (artificial intelligence). I am not the first to draw the lines that way, and I don't literally mean AI (machine learning) in the sense that most of us techies would understand. But I think it's a good demarcation to show the way computing is splitting/polarising along socio-political lines. For BigTech, it's a means of control, not discovery.
> Ursala Franklin's lectures
Thanks for this. I've heard of her I think, but obviously have some more reading to do.
> Work versus Control technologies distinctions, is a good perspective
In Digital Vegan I talk some about the transformation of digital technologies from enabling tools to instruments of enforcement.
> The web, here, is remarkably strong powerful, with userscripts being a powerful demonstration of how some small tidbits of common knowledge can give us wideranging power over most every corporate/institutional property on the planet. There's nothing like it! It's purely incidental though- few web sites are specifically implemented to enhance understanding of how the site itself functions.
Ted Nelson (and some of the other WWW pioneers) had similar visions of a "lisp machine-like" queryable distributed structure.
> imagine a web where components could more clearly state their intent, be poked & prodded & understood by outsiders using common devtools. To me, this is one of the latent & most inspiring hopes of could-be web platform systems like WebComponents, that they could help make the web more broadly understandable & explorable for everyone, that it could make the hypermedium itself rich not just in what it expresses, but internally as well.
Web1.0 carried that hope but failed. Web2.0 tried (at least brought interactive participation) but was usurped by commerce. Is Web3.0 trying again? Is the arc of web history on the side of your vision? I hope so.
There's a picture of me outside as a boy wearing shorts, and my shins were bruised from ankle to knee. Obviously, I'd been out having fun :-)
For their health.
> If they become adult white collar workers they will be indoors most of the time, interacting with technology.
Which is bad enough. But if they've led an active life as children, their base health profile will be vastly better than if they'd been sedentary since they were toddlers, and many of them might even carry the habit of physical exercise with them into adulthood. This will vastly improve their quality of life from as early as their late twenties, and definitely by their forties.
(Source: I was a bookworm from [before?] first grade, never took an interest in sports, and obese from my teens... And I was still probably more active as a child than many children today. Basic military training was Hell, and the metabolic syndrome I was diagnosed with in my mid-late forties blossomed into full-on type II diabetes in my early fifties. Not super fun.)
> I loved being outside as a kid and teen, but is it really deleterious if the new generations don't get exposed to that?
Not for us perhaps, but for them.
see https://www.aao.org/editors-choice/sunlight-exposure-reduces...
I remember wanting badly to watch "Green Acres", but my parents put their foot down and said it was garbage and I couldn't watch it.
When Netflix rolled around, I finally had an opportunity to watch it. About 10 minutes in, I concluded my parents were right and that was the end of that.
I had a public school teacher who went way above & beyond, introduced us to technology & computing (bringing his own PC's into the class room, which we only used very occasionally) & ham radio (although the planned club never really materialized). This gave me a much stronger relationship to the world I'd face, & began a genuine interest in the world in me.
Kids are blank slates- tabula rasa- & they need models of engagement & things to grow interested in over time. Simply expecting play & fun time, without specific encouragement to go deeper, without examples of others about them who are interested & are going deep into things- is an extreme danger. It's been so hard seeing so many so adrift, wishing so badly these people had had more exposure to different things in the world where they might moor themselves.
Technology is fantastically difficult to root into in todays world, is oppressively technocratically nightmarishly resilient to exploration & playing with at any genuinely technical level. But it's still more accessible, a bigger open field, with so vastly much wider open potential (in part because this rotten technocratically driven core is so low-nutrient & exploitative & unwilling to do anything but suck down our life energies, not contributing value) than so so so much else in the world that I yearn so much to see some of the near breakthroughs that could happen anytime. I have deep reverence for biology, medicine, chemistry, material science, design, ux, for so music & culture & art, but wow, so many of these require so much more dedication & luck to break through in, to run the gauntlet of. Computers still seem so rife with potential as a place I'd want people to seek engagement, in spite of their sad hulky rebuffing outer shell of "user interface" that lies & betrays, that is Plato's Cave's Marionette scene, endlessly lying to us.
Kids have so much cognitive surplus. They have so much potential. Pretending that you know better, denying them mediums of thought they might explore & forcing them into simplicity, prolonging their childhood forcibly, is not something I am sympathetic to. Clay Shirky had a 2008 conference talk that electrified the world, on cognitive surplus, contrasting Watching Gilligan's Island versus Editing Wikipedia[1]. These words weren't used but it was a contrast of inert, useless, goes-no-where activity versus the chance to engage in something, in starting the ability to find your own meaning. This process should not be force-started upon kids, and there is a lot of inert, dead end uses of technology they'll hook themselves on & click endlessly. But to deny the whole project, to opt them out of exploring the deeper angles of the world- that's a bad mistake I'd wish on no one. Tech, in spite of all the bad I've said, still has the lions share of open & explorable angles. There's a huge question about how we open the real explorable, interesting angles, versus letting ourselves be sucked in to inert activities, but imo the risk of denial is worse than the risk of what is possible.
[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-gin-television...
in my fantasy world classes are setting up & adminhing their own clusters, are playing with userscripts & social web protocols, are creating nodebots.
im not really sure where to look, where the vanguard forces might be. huge respect to projects like the first robotics competiton but that still feels like a narrow course, one where the digital has some co-incident, but feels extra-curricular & dominated by other mechatronics concerns.