Technically True

I grew up in an era when all the kids had handheld devices, greater exposure to mass media than ever before, and were becoming more reliant upon technology. The fact of the matter is that I was born in 1981, but if I were born in 1991, 2001, or 2011, I could write the same thing. Eventually, everyone worried about kids growing up with technology will die of old age and there will be nothing left but people who have grown up with technology themselves. Until that happens, we have a strange bias against technology that simply isn't there when the technology is removed. Talking on the phone with friends all the time is evidence of a healthy social life but texting those exact same friends and having the exact same conversations is seen as a sign of being disconnected from real life and real human interaction. Reading books all the time is considered a sign of an active mind but always scrolling down the screen of an e-reader of some description is considered a problem. A kid who reads the newspaper every day is considered civic-minded but a kid who reads articles all day on his phone is considered to be ignoring the real world. What is this magic that paper possesses to suddenly have credibility with parents? Should homes come with projectors and large white screens of paper to project all the texts and sites onto so that they may be properly cleansed with the healing power of paper? It is nakedly obvious that the only reason the various screens are vilified is because they are new.

There are corollary biases that I've seen. Many times, people will talk about kids not playing outside all the time anymore, usually in the context of total lack of adult supervision and with the only rule being that one has to be home before either dinner or when the streetlights come on. Other times people speak of how there was no easily accessible pornography, violent videogames, or music with explicit and violent lyrics when they were a kid, usually with the intent to explain what is wrong with the current generation. Again, all of these are concerns that will die when the last people who hold them die of old age. Why are so many people so afraid of new things? This Luddite tendency is distressingly common and it makes no manner of sense at all. Is it honestly a reasonable thing in an era where Moore's Law dictates that computing power will double every 18 months until it finally gives way to quantum computing, where fusion is 20 years away ready to provide infinite abundance, and where we'll be mining asteroids in the lifetime of children born today to resist a tide of technology so profound that one may as well try to hold back a literal tide with a broom? As an autistic, I do sympathize with a general dislike of and difficulty with change but autistics are also big fans of accepting cold hard reality over whatever fantasies one might prefer to believe. Suffering so much fear and doubt over things that are here to stay, with more and better versions on the way, is, at best, an act of well-meaning futility or, at worst, an act of unpardonable egotistical self-rightous indulgence.

-Frank