I have written before in this column about how the use of information technology by children affects their psychology and socialisation, but I have not given much thought to the way the use of that same technology by their parents can also have an effect.
Now a study in the Journal of Child Development suggests that “technology-based interruptions in parent–child interactions” — a phenomenon known as “technoference” — can also have a negative effect on children. This amounts to parents having their attention drawn away from their offspring by constantly accessing their phones and other devices. I have often seen this outside the school gates — parents, tapping at their phones while their children try to talk to them.
At this point, I might be expected to muster my customary distress at the way technology is robbing us of more and more human interactions. However, on reading this report, some kind of watershed in my mind was crossed. You could call it giving up. Or you could call it coming to terms with the new reality.
Last week, with my two youngest daughters, I visited the ever-uplifting Hay festival. I went to see Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information at the University of Oxford whose book The Fourth Revolution anatomises the effects of the new technology. When questioned by the audience about the many fears people have about the rise of the internet, Floridi, while answering knowledgeably and sympathetically, quietly insisted that none of us should forget that the internet was a fundamentally good thing. The downsides, he asserted, were like “a drop of vinegar” in a wonderful bottle of beverage. And, he said, we should never forget how good that beverage was.
To my own surprise, I found myself agreeing with him. After all, my own children, at 10 and 14, are products of the fourth revolution. If the experience was turning them into unthinking low-attention-span vegetables, what were they doing at Hay, hungrily eating up the talks, ideas and intelligence on offer?
I could not help but bring Floridi’s optimism to this study. OK, parents are sometimes drawn away from their children by technology. But so what? Half the time, their calls and texts will be to organise events and necessities for the very children they are supposedly ignoring.
How much attention are we meant to give our children, anyway? Lovable though their relentless ego-centredness is, they can afford to be ignored occasionally, or at least not get the 100 per cent focus we seem to have come to believe they need from parents. Such a level of attention would probably be unwelcome — rather like living in a pre-glasnost surveillance state. Think of all the things they wouldn’t be able to get away with if they had all our attention all the time. It was Floridi who coined the term “the infosphere” for the liminal place we now inhabit. He emphasises connection, not disconnection. Perhaps sentient creatures are just another aspect of interactive experience. Even in the past, before the internet, humans had to interact with machinery, or with scythes and fields of wheat. There was no time when humans constituted the whole of the interactive world.
Parents, it’s time to stop feeling guilty if you occasionally privilege your screens over your children. They certainly don’t feel guilt when they privilege their screens over you. There is a wider world in those pixels. It shouldn’t efface human interaction. But neither should we resist the infosphere. Because now that the ‘fourth revolution’ has arrived, we are all citizens of that place. And, for all its flaws it is a rich, fascinating and ever evolving world.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Tim Lott is a journalist and author. His latest book is Under the Same Stars.