Hailey Cloutier
Professor Jesse Miller
4/19/24
English Composition
Navigating a Digital Divide
We are currently living in a digital age, where the internet is a sea of vast information spread far and wide. It has transformed to become the gateway to our knowledge, connections, and entertainment; but is this sea becoming a Bermuda Triangle of fear, anxiety, and insecurity? Kevin Kelley, the author of “Technophilia,” believes that while technology has many benefits and costs, the benefits can outweigh the costs leading to human progress. Liv Arvidson, a student at the University of New England, and the author of “Title,” believes that we should limit the amount of time used on technology since we rely on it so much. Lastly, Finley Morrison, a student at the University of New England and author of “Draft 3,” highlights their beliefs on technology and how it can be so good and yet have a dark side. The modern age of digital technology is creating a whirlpool of opinions and thoughts on just how technology is affecting us. While our technology has become the basis for most of our lives— we use it for work, school, and our personal lives— we can also see dependency, a collapse of personal conversation, and a breakdown of personal morals. While I agree that the internet and technology have multiple benefits, it is also creating legitimate social and emotional issues with the upbringings of our younger generation.
Children today are growing up in a world that is built upon technology, and they have never known anything otherwise. While technology has become a boon for life on Earth, we can start to see the mental effects it is having on our younger generations. Children have become sucked into a world of information, videos, movies, and shows. There is so much mental stimulation that the internet provides, that it is creating almost addiction-like responses in our youth. Both Kevin Kelley and Liv Arvidson argue that children today are becoming ever so dependent on technology that they go through withdrawal-like symptoms when it is taken away. Addiction is characterized usually as a chronic dependency and persistent engagement with a drug or behavior. If we can see this type of reaction in our children, what does that say about the technology or the parents that should be limiting the kids? In Liv Arvidson’s personal view, “I have a cousin who is 8 years old, and he cannot go very long without his tablet, because his parents have always allowed him to have it whenever he wanted. Now, when they say no, he throws tantrums and acts out because he does not know life without it.” (Arvidson 1) Arvidson saw personally what happens to children when parents don’t have the needed control to limit their children with technology, so the child builds a dependency on it. Once the technology is taken away, the child acts like a drug addict going through withdrawals. I can even see it in my niece, she shies away from human interaction to be on her iPad, and when she has too much time with it, it gets put away, and the tantrum starts. In addition, Kevin Kelley recounts a story of an acquaintance’s daughter who acted the same when her parents took away her cellphone, “Immediately the girl became physically sick. Faint, nauseous, and so ill she couldn’t get out of bed. It was if her parents had amputated a limb. And in a way they had. Our creations are now inseparable from us. Our identity with technology runs deep, to our core.”(Kelley 1) Kelley talks about how we have become so deeply intertwined with our technology that it has become another limb. I sometimes feel it too, especially when we use technology for work, school, and personal activities. I always feel pressure to use technology, whether it is to talk to somebody, avoid strangers, or even just a cure for boredom.
While I share the belief with Arvidson and Kelley that as a people we are becoming so deeply intertwined with technology that it is becoming another limb, I also believe that we should then advocate for more parental involvement in monitoring and regulating children’s screen time to form a healthy boundary with the internet and technology. The daily recommended screen time for children other than for noneducational purposes is 1 hour a weekday and 3 on the weekend days, children shouldn’t be spending more than that because then it can cause not only attachment problems but developmental issues. Especially in cases like Arvidson’s when a child is so young they need to be taught by a parent to form a healthy boundary away from technology. We should be fostering an open environment by talking about concerns related to technology use between parents, educators, and adolescents.
Not only is internet addiction heavily affecting younger generations, but comparison culture through AI and social media is causing children and adolescents to have more negatively impacted personal worth and self-images. Online personas and AI are creating a hostile environment for children and teens to grow cognitively and emotionally when all they come across is judgment and self-deprecation. Kids today are being dealt unrealistic and impossible expectations about a person and once they try to fix themselves they find that there are feelings of inadequacy because they cannot do the impossible. Finley Morrison discusses a story of a friend who was impacted by AI with comparison culture, “A close friend of mine has been struggling with motivation to continue his art degree because of the backlash he receives, comparing his soulful works to lifeless drawings thrown together based on a sentence or two.” (Morrison 2) The story Morrison gives us shows how comparison culture leads to motivation and self-worth issues all because of being compared to an electronic machine made to create and spit out work, but not put any beauty or poise into it. Even my friend who went into animation is struggling with AI-produced work and it is causing a huge drift in cinematography. Her work gets compared to AI’s and then her work gets overshadowed by generated images that took seconds to make. She and many others are finding themselves compared and judged by others for unrealistic expectations set upon by comparison culture, and then find themselves stuck in a whirlpool of doubt, insecurity, and fear. Even though the internet and AI can provide so much, such as help in the cinematography, automotive, educational, and financing world, we can see a dependency on them being more prevalent. Even kids in schools depend on chatbots and math scanners to get their work done, and they aren’t learning from it. “As computer scientist Jaron Lanier, another worrier of technophilia, puts it: “We make ourselves stupid in order to make computers seem smart. I don’t worry about computers getting intelligent, I worry about humans getting dumber.”(Kelley 9) Kevin Kelley discusses how with the dependency on AI we may be making ourselves dumber in the process of humanizing AI for information grabbing. When working as a tutor in high school I could see that the underclassmen students who used these chatbots and math scanners, couldn’t grasp the concepts because they were just given out from their phones. There was no reason for them to learn the concepts when in a few clicks they had the answer. These kids then turn to me for help and feel, like they are worthless or stupid because they can’t understand the concepts when in reality they depend too much on AI to focus on their concept knowledge. Comparison culture through the internet and AI has created a vortex of self-doubt, depreciation, and fear. There needs to be more regulations put in place for the use of AI and chatbots in schools, than just document scanners. There should be programs placed on school computers that block these sites, and cell phone usage shouldn’t be allowed in academic settings unless for emergencies or accessibility. Social media posts should be monitored for hateful language and actions, so our children don’t have to go through the pain of feeling that they aren’t good enough, that they are being overshadowed, or even just bullied.
Even with all the benefits the internet can provide, there are genuine concerns that should be brought to light for future generations. Unlike Kevin Kelley, who believes that all the good can outweigh the bad, I believe just like Arvidson and Morrison, that the problems the internet is causing may be bigger than what anyone could’ve imagined. We as a people have to look past the shiny surface that technology gives and see the hidden creatures that cause fear and anxiety. If we are to ever move ahead, we must right the wrongs done by technology and fight for our future generation’s health and safety.
Works Cited:
Kelly, Kevin. “Technophilia.” The Best Technology Writing 2010, 31 Dec. 2017, pp. 289–301, https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300165654-021.
Arvidson, Liv. “Title.” UNEportfolio, https://miller-eng110-1.uneportfolio.org/2024/03/31/journal-20/. Accessed 09 April 2024
Morrison, Finley. “Draft 3.” UNEportfolio, https://miller-eng110-1.uneportfolio.org/2024/03/31/journal-20/. Accessed 09 April 2024
