TWENTY YEARS AGO, when we talked about the “digital divide” we meant things like low-income people’s access to computers and the internet. But according to a recent study from Common Sense Media, that turn-of-the-century gap has largely closed. Seventy percent of families with an annual household income below $30,000 now have a computer at home, and 75 percent have high-speed internet access. In addition, low-income families are near the national average for access to mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets.
But another digital divide is emerging that could have more dangerous long-term consequences.
Researchers have discovered a lot about how brain development and personality formation happen, and their lessons keep coming back to the importance of real-world experiences and face-to-face human interactions, especially in the childhood years. To avoid passivity and mental laziness in their children, many high-income parents are starting to limit their children’s time on digital devices. Common Sense Media found that the children of upper-income families spent half as much time in front of screens as did children of low-income families.
Several private schools are even dialing back their reliance on digital technology. Meanwhile, in many public schools, students are being issued Chromebooks or iPads and shunted into online learning programs. According to Education Week, American schools spend $3 billion per year on digital content, as well as $8 billion-plus yearly on hardware and software, with little to show for it so far in the way of improved learning.
“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children,” former Facebook executive assistant Athena Chavarria told The New York Times.
Speaking of the effects of digital technology on his five kids, Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, said, “On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine.”
Even Bill Gates’ kids didn’t have cell phones until they were teenagers, and Steve Jobs’ kids never played on an iPad while growing up. One of the most popular schools among families linked to the tech industry is a Waldorf school that bans digital technology. Its students use paper workbooks and wooden pencils and look things up in encyclopedias. The kids learn fractions by cutting up food items into halves, quarters, etc.
But, of course, private schools like that are expensive. Keeping kids away from screens outside of school is, as anyone who’s raised children in this century knows, incredibly labor-intensive. And labor is never free. A family that keeps a parent at home must live on one full-time income, which is impossible for most folks in this era of stagnant and declining wages. The only alternative—one increasingly popular among the upper crust—is a full-time nanny with tech-avoidance in their contract.
In America, the legend goes, even if you’re poor, if you work hard enough you can become anything you want to be. But to live that dream, you must have the imagination to see new possibilities for yourself and the problem-solving skills to figure out how to achieve them. Those are precisely the traits that are stunted when kids are raised and educated by screens.
You don’t develop them by watching a YouTube video. You’re more likely to get them from playing made-up games with your friends, trying to build an improvised go-cart out of scrap wood, or wandering around a forest by yourself. The diminishment of human potential that comes with the loss of those childhood experiences is perhaps the greatest cost of our rush toward a virtual world.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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