Social Media: Not the First to Own Kids’ Minds; Alison Gopnik on a much older technology that Socrates complained about

The Kid Who Wouldn’t Let Go Of ‘The Device’
March 21, 2014 7:03 p.m. ET
How does technology reshape our children’s minds and brains? Here is a disturbing story from the near future.
They gave her The Device when she was only 2. It worked through a powerful and sophisticated optic nerve brain-mind interface, injecting its content into her cortex. By the time she was 5, she had been utterly swept away into the alternate universe that The Device created.In its grip, she would become oblivious to her surroundings for hours at a time. She would surreptitiously hide The Device under her desk at school and reach for it the moment she got home. By adolescence, the images implanted by The Device–a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on a battlefield–were more vivid to her than her own memories.
As a grown woman, her addiction to The Device continued. It dominated every room of her house, even the bathroom. Its images filled her head, even when she made love. When she traveled, her first thought was to be sure that she had access to The Device, and she was filled with panic at the thought that she might have to spend a day without it. When her child broke his arm, she paused to make sure that The Device would be with her in the emergency room. Even sadder, as soon as her children were old enough, she did her very best to connect them to The Device too.
The psychologists and neuroscientists showed just how powerful The Device had become. Studies showed that its users literally couldn’t avoid being drawn into its world; the second they made contact, their brains automatically and involuntarily engaged with it. Moreover, large portions of their brains that had originally been designed for other purposes had been hijacked to the exclusive service of The Device.
Well, anyway, I hope that this is a story of the near future.
It certainly is a story of the near past. The Device, you see, is the printed book, and the story is my autobiography.
Socrates may have been the first to raise the alarm about this powerful new technology: Plato reports his prescient arguments that the rise of reading would destroy the old arts of memory and discussion.
The latest such Device to interface with my retina is “It’s Complicated: The Social Networked Life of Teens” by Danah Boyd of New York University and Microsoft Research. Digital social network technologies play as large a role in the lives of today’s children as books once did for me. Dr. Boyd spent thousands of hours with teenagers from many different backgrounds, observing the way they use technology and talking to them about what technology meant to them.
Her conclusion is that young people use social media to do what they have always done—establish communities of friends and peers, distance themselves from their parents, flirt and gossip, bully, experiment, rebel. At the same time, she argues that the technology does make a difference, just as the book, the printing press and the telegraph did. An ugly taunt that once dissolved into the fetid locker-room air can travel across the world in a moment and linger forever. Teenagers must learn to navigate those new aspects of our current technologies, and for the most part, that is just what they do.
Dr. Boyd thoughtfully makes the case against both the alarmists and the techno-utopians. The kids are all right, or at least as all right as kids have ever been.
So why all the worry? Perhaps it is because of the inevitable difference between looking forward toward generational changes or looking back at them. As the parable of The Device illustrates, we always look at our children’s futures with equal parts unjustified hope and unjustified alarm–both utopia and dystopia. We look at our own past with wistful nostalgia. It may be hard to believe, but Dr. Boyd’s book suggests that someday evenFacebook FB +0.40% will be an elegiac memory.