{"id":4047,"date":"2011-04-10T08:15:32","date_gmt":"2011-04-10T12:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4047"},"modified":"2011-04-10T13:51:36","modified_gmt":"2011-04-10T17:51:36","slug":"memo-to-parents-use-the-off-button","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/04\/10\/memo-to-parents-use-the-off-button\/","title":{"rendered":"Memo to Parents: Use the ‘off’ button"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, Krista Tippett — host of the show Being<\/a> — is talking with Sherry Turkle, head of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self.<\/p>\n

Turkle has written a new book called “Alone Together,” which wrestles with the idea that communications technology (Twitter, Facebook, texting, smartphones, etc.) are linking us more efficiently and isolating us at the same time.<\/p>\n

Go here to listen to their absolutely compelling conversation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is a subject I’ve been thinking about and wrestling with the last few years, not as a journalist but as a parent.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, the natural spaces of privateness and aloneness that protected us and our families from America’s hungry, churning popular culture, have collapsed.<\/p>\n

The car during a long drive.\u00a0 A walk in the woods.\u00a0 The bedroom.\u00a0 Dinner time.\u00a0 This essential terrain has more or less evaporated for many families.<\/p>\n

Think of it as the communications equivalent of urban sprawl.<\/p>\n

It’s challenging enough for grown-ups.\u00a0 I work in the profession where the term “crackberry” first came into widespread parlance.<\/p>\n

But in my experience, kids have almost no context, no frame of reference, for how and when this technology is necessary, helpful or appropriate.<\/p>\n

For a lot of people growing up now, the idea that there is such thing as an ‘off’ button seems foreign, alien, bizarre.<\/p>\n

Turkle and Tippett speak intelligently and with nuance about this massive social experiment that we’ve embarked upon.<\/p>\n

What is happening to a family that is effectively hard-wired into the cultural mass mind all the time?\u00a0 We don’t know really.<\/p>\n

They make a strong argument that we all — grown-ups and kids alike — need to be much more aggressive about turning it all off.<\/p>\n

If the natural spaces for family and privacy are gone, then we have to work harder to create deliberate space for these crucial, vital things.<\/p>\n

I’ve had good experience on this front.\u00a0 My son Nicholas is, false modesty aside, a really cool, interesting, thoughtful15-year-old.<\/p>\n

Occasionally, other parents will ask me about our approach, in the vein of How did you do it?<\/em><\/p>\n

And mostly, in all honesty, it’s all about Nicholas being Nicholas.\u00a0 He’s just a good egg.<\/p>\n

But I will take credit for the early decision to not have a television in our home, or a video-game console.<\/p>\n

I know.\u00a0 It sounds Luddite.\u00a0 It sounds like the stuff of hippy communes.\u00a0 But really, no.<\/p>\n

We’re a profoundly normal family.\u00a0 We go to movies, we like theme parks.\u00a0 We love pop music and, indeed, Popular Culture of all stripes.<\/p>\n

We just wanted all that stuff to not be so intimately, inexorably wired into our home, our heads, and our private lives.<\/p>\n

This year, we made a similar decision to turn off Nicholas’s texting account.\u00a0\u00a0 This doesn’t mean that he’s living out an episode of ‘Lost.’<\/p>\n

He still has plenty of ways to communicate with his wired-in friends and has adapted just fine.<\/p>\n

But this simple act — hitting the ‘off’ button — allowed us to claw back just a little space, throwing up one more fragile rampart around our terrain, our lives, our family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, Krista Tippett — host of the show Being — is talking with Sherry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[37],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4047"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4047"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4048,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4047\/revisions\/4048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}