I don’t have children old enough yet to worry that they’re going to be addicted to a device, but I have family members, the children of cousins and in-laws, that spend their waking free time watching a screen, if only to give their parents a momentary piece of sanity, quiet, and calm.
This I understand; my child is fussy and insists on only falling asleep against me. If it were not just my husband and myself—had I regular help from the village of extended family members that I might call upon to love, cuddle, and rock my child while gathering food and tending to wood fires as our primal ancestors did, I would perhaps not understand the inclination for moments of sanity and peace, for there would always be someone there to help with the baby.
wrote an excellent reflective piece for After Babel titled “We Live in Imaginary Worlds”, on the idea that we’ve become more reliant on technology to combat our loneliness, in part largely due to the atomization of modern society in the breakdown of social relationships, now replaced by parasocial ones.I want to touch on the idea that she introduced that our children are growing up in increasingly online, virtual worlds.
, archivist for internet culture, has noted numerous times on her Substack that we Americans (for that seems to be the core group, though other industrialized countries seem to be on the uptick for it) have had the most exposure and consequences to the devil’s blackbox. As a consequence to replacing relationship with technology as an antidote to loneliness (and avoidance of the risk of hurt), our children are robbed of their imagination because algorithms and programs generate worlds of creativity enough to distract them from making their own imaginary worlds in the first place. Children learn to create, primarily through boredom and opportunity. The insidious overreach of companies for their attention work to hook them as consumers, much the way product marketing for cigarettes of old did sixty years ago.The picture she paints is bleak; it is a reality for many, but not all:
Now we are raising children in imaginary worlds and at the same time killing their imagination. That’s the real cruelty about this. Kids today have their imaginary worlds generated for them. Instead of writing their own stories, they can put prompts into ChatGPT. Instead of creating their own fantasy worlds, they can generate them with a few clicks. I remember me and my friends spending hours after school writing our own songs, coming up with lyrics and drawing album covers—now we would just generate it all with an AI song maker. Children are playing together less, replacing free play with screen time, and creativity scores among American children have been dropping since the 1990s. Part of that may be because children now depend on companies to be creative for them. Their imaginary worlds are designed by software engineers. Their imaginary friends are trying to sell them something.
India notes the shift in adults too, also addicted, with a buffet of options to combat their own loneliness and difficulty in finding or forming relationships.
There are the imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends, of course. There are imaginary therapists, a “mental health ally” or “happiness buddy” we can chat with about our problems. And imaginary friends, like that AI necklace who is “always listening”, announced with the tagline: “introducing friend. not imaginary.”
There are even entirely imaginary worlds now. Metaverse platforms might “solve the loneliness epidemic”, apparently. VR headsets could end loneliness for seniors. But by far the most depressing invention I’ve seen lately is a new app called SocialAI, a “private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.” In other words, your own imaginary ‘X’, with infinite “simulated fictional characters”. You, alone, in a vast social network of AI bots.
But as all issues seem to stem, the problem lies within the home.
The commentary of screen addiction and the fantasy worlds we see on our virtual windows isn’t new.
Terry Gilliam’s fantastical film “Time Bandits” from the early 80s featured a little boy, our hero, patently ignored and neglected by his tv-addicted parents. Were such a film to be made today, it would need to consist of a combination of the boredom and ennui of Milo from Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth”, with all the addiction India noted, and the neglect and fantasizing of the boy’s parents from “Time Bandits”. There has been a regular, steady commentary in film and literature regarding a population addicted to the various forms of new media technology and consumed by, so much as to resemble the furniture they live on; even Ray Bradbury spotted and commented on it in “Fahrenheit 451”, with a wife addicted to the wall screens—her, the rest of their superficial friends, and society.
The phenomena is nothing new; however, the ubiquity and widespread consumption that overwhelms us is ever more difficult to ignore, and so prevalent, that it appears most adults fail to recognize the addiction within themselves. One can no longer say that it is isolated to basement dwellers surfing the net and ticking off more years as they head into adulthood without having had real adult romantic relationships, the type of cave dweller that once drew snickers. It now resembles so many people like ourselves that we don’t want to admit it or wish to continue to ignore it. Nay, it has even become a lifestyle for some who would rather exist in the digital realm than engage in reality.
Though India is concerned that children will stop dreaming entirely, there will always be a small subset of people who either exist outside what the rest of the norm does, or eventually wakes up from their proverbial “stupor” to be creative as she calls it. Creative people will always find outlets and new ways to engage in something, and there will always be those people who look around them, are aghast and disgusted at what they see, and will purposefully pull away from what the rest of the herd does by going against the grain. The best teacher often is the example of what not to do. Yet still, there will always be those who use the technology the misanthropic luddites protest against, and find a way to marry the tech with their creative passions in such a way as to utilize it in creative ways not considered before.
Invention is born often of frustration, boredom, and a heavy dose of problem solving. Some little thing, the inkling of an idea, crops up in one’s mind, and the conscious and subconscious work to reconcile whatever “discrepancy” is working its way from the core to the surface. India isn’t wrong; there is much to be concerned about. In a previous job, I worked with a child by asking them to choose figurines to represent their family members for a project. The child, on being asked twice, suggested I pick for them. This doesn’t represent a lack of imagination; this represents, more likely, a kid from a family dynamic where everything is probably done for them, their options chosen for them.
The response would be, overall, to give kids less time on a screen, sure. But ultimately, give them space to solve problems themselves. When living on my own in an apartment, I broke the blinds hanging over my kitchen window—a combination of yanking too hard and the deterioration over many years of the plastic in a sunny window. Unable to purchase new blinds because I didn’t have the extra cash, I rigged a pair of chopsticks to hold the cracked housing together with some leftover yarn. Was it pretty? No. The blinds no longer went up and down, but the slats could be opened, and they were serviceable enough for the next few weeks until I had enough money to budget for a new, cheap set of blinds. Set with the situation of being unable to purchase new ones but needing the privacy they still afforded, I had to use my “problem solving” skills to come up with a passable solution. Being forced into a situation is what forces us to creatively figure it out, whatever the it is, be it a broken toy, a wrong turn, or the necessity of a fix to continue on in the journey. Life is a million million problem solving situations, each building on the last to strengthen the muscles to carry us to the next problem. Over time, it becomes less arduous, for we’ve learned to rely on our own quick-thinking and developed skills to surpass the obstacle.
We don’t give people enough credit to be creative and to be fixers; if we don’t teach kids or give them the opportunities to solve their own problems, they will struggle with the handicap, until, as always, they are forced into a situation that requires them to figure it out for themselves. Creativity has not died, and certainly is not going out the way of the dinosaur. My response to people who say what should I do is often, “Well, what do you think you could do? Where could you start, or what could you start with?”
If we wish to empower generations of children and turn the tide for adults, we cannot come to their rescue by offering them our own solutions or ideas. Painfully, we have to watch them figure it out for themselves. Such is life.
To be the bulwark against the creative loss of a generation or more of children, each individual parent is going to have to decide to change not just screen time for their kids, but also for themselves. Addictions are hard to break, for they serve as part of an emotional mechanism; in India’s point, we turn to these technologies to combat our loneliness. To combat it, we have to give up the fear of being hurt, or shying away from the hard work of relationships to form connections. It can be easy to say it’s just convenience, fear, or loneliness, but it is a combination of all three. To be that better angel, we also have to recognize the larger impact tech has, and put our selfishness and the succumbing to the temptation of our vices down, in service to others.
The great question is, can we as a society pick up that mantle once again to do so consitently? Can we recognize with honesty our failings, rather than point the finger and say, no, I’m not the problem, it’s someone else?
Only time will reveal if there will be a societal reversal.
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