Let’s Rag On The Latest Technology

by Paul Grimsley

Sometimes it seems like psychologists forget the difference between their supposed subjects and the technology they are using, and it’s nothing new. When radios came along there was a panic, and when TV came along there was a panic, and when video games came along there was a panic; the latest version of this is all the white-coated Cassandras running around telling us that the end of the world is heralded by the over-engagement with social media and other examples of mind-destroying technology available via the internet.

Chicken Little you really are the Boy Who Cried Wolf. The world is still there, and if you go out and actually meet some children a lot of them seem perfectly well adjusted, and going through fairly similar growing pains as those individuals who came of age when the culture destroying phenomenon of the novel was in vogue.

Just imagine the first caveman who witnessed his child rolling a wheel-shaped thing through the street and believing that the world was about to end.

These things are tools, and to believe that people are so easily influenced by their tools to the detriment of their ability to think and act rationally really isn’t to put much stock in the resilience of human beings at all. It makes us all into Pavlov’s Dogs — push button automatons that can be manipulated.

And what is the solution often proffered by these doom-mongers? Well, it’s often something a little more harmful to someone’s ability to concentrate than a game might be.

If your industry is hinged on marketing a solution to a problem where the answer needs kids to have a certain kind of problem, then you are going to have to work overtime to make sure that people see that problem as being right there in your face.

I often wonder at how in the film Bowling For Columbine only Marilyn Manson suggested listening to the kids to discover what the problem was. Everyone else had their ideas and their solutions, but who had sat down and offered an ear to the children? Is there even a problem there in the first place?

They are violating the first rule of providing any solution — first find out what the problem is by asking questions.