Screen Time
As a researcher invested in the examination of the social and ethical impacts of wearable computing on humanity here I am sitting in an airport terminal, observing humans in their everyday environment, watching children hardly old enough to even sit up in their pram interacting with screens, parents on screens and everyone else around them the same, all under the gaze of cameras, millions of them.
I’m sitting here in Melbourne domestic terminal 4 which has about 5 power points supplied for every human I see around me, very unlike terminal 3 circa 2005 which has the odd few scattered through the seating disarrangement. It is evident in this time that without power many of these customers in this airport would exhibit the same agitations, revolt and mayhem as I’ve seen unleash in places such as Dulles Airport, America at 2:30am April 2013
Sitting opposite me are two students who are taking selfie-after-selfie photos using a selfie stick, oblivious to the bemused responses from those around them avoiding being in frame. A cleaner takes litter off the table with a two way walkie talkie connected to an ear piece permanently fixed to their eardrum.
A TV over my shoulder blares out news of plane that has crashed into a billboard not far from here and the Deputy Prime Minister defends Australia’s use of overseas “processing” camps for “illegal” immigrants coming into Australia fleeing the very persecution that Australia contributes too, one bomb after another.
A mother pacifies a child by giving him an iPad tablet that barely fits inside the stroller. The child presses into the screen and vowel sounds from an app play out into the room. All around me adults and children I like bask in the blue glow of their screens, handheld, portable almost permanently in their grasp except to swig down a coffee or bite through a donut.
So why have our children developed such catastrophic OCDs that any mention of a cut in their screen time causes such dissent that threatens to implode a household? If we sit and observe as researchers, carefully listening, watching, we gain a far greater insight into our own inabilities to counteract the effect that corporations and governments are having on our own personal lives, through screens, wearable computers on a second by second basis.
In my own children I note an absence to instinct, to their otherwise natural “tuned” state as biological beings as a result of the increased exposure to screens connected to a greater network. If not the mobile phone, they are avidly captured by laptops, tablets, gaming consoles and any number of other network connected devices. As we drive to a nature setting to go for a swim in a river without any screens at all then I note our kids only capable of talking about avatar characters, upgrades, rewards and making their own digital sounds to accompany that soulless diction.
I note that their peers are no better in their ability to support what would have once been the very gel that held them to a group, to a support network. All I note is children left to their own devices, exposed, wilfully neglected and as a result many of them exhibiting pathological fears that transcend the deepest we have ever had as a collective humanity.
I raise these observations knowing that I too have been lost in that soup of supposed connection, a multitude of connections yet disconnected from all around me in a physical context. I have experienced first hand and know what it is to go psychotic with lack of sleep, disconnected from social connection blabbering out technologically focussed terminology without any due regard for the fact that the conversation was actually about agriculture, trees and drought.
Children are becoming more and more inert, obese, optometry maligned and so are their parents as they trade off convenience for time, connected mostly through large corporations and service providers avidly monitoring their whereabouts through their wearable computing technologies. If we are to honestly address these points as fact, then it may mean admitting there is a data and cultural genocide underway in our culture that threatens to implode society, community.
So who will lead the revolt? Will it be the kids that have now been doped out on a plethora of anti-depressants and tranquillisers that are choosing to abandon parental platitude and instead wave the corporate banner?
The salivating, toe tapping, leg twitching, flirting gaze of these children for me resemble the behaviours of the children I worked with in special education units in the 1990’s. I see children after hours of screen exposure presenting behaviours that are Asperger’s Syndrome or when screens removed by reprimand then children exhibiting extreme reactions such as punching, kicking and screaming.
They would be interned against their will had it not been for the privacy of their own padded cell surrounds of homes filled with looking goods indebted to the very corporations feeding them adware. I often observe children after long periods of times on these computer screens in varying forms as having traits of abject recalcitrance, their moods low, their attention needs at a catastrophic high.
That reminds me. I should really go watch that empathy studies series on YouTube, where first shooter games versus non first person shooter respond to violence with non violence. All I’m sure I’d pick up on is now little I know of the other world of the gaming addicted and the realm of the virtually connected dead.
