Saving Our Children From Smartphones
by Jean-Louis Gassée
We now see smartphones as dangerous for young minds. Can Apple do something about it?
More than 30 years ago, in the still early years of personal computing. MIT professor Sherry Turkle (who was once married to computer science pioneer Seymour Papert) published The Second Self, an engrossing look at how a computer isn’t just a simple “tool”. Computers sneak inside our minds and change our relationship with the world.
A decade later, in 1995, Turkle expanded the line of thought with Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, a work that begins with an epigraph from Walt Whitman:
“There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became.”
Turkle’s thesis, put succinctly and pithily in the introduction to Life on the Screen, is that…
“Computers don’t just do things for us, they do things to us, including to our ways we think about ourselves and other people.”
Computer scientists and psychologists have long voiced concerns that our inventions may have nefarious influence on our minds, especially during formative years. Late last year, Sean Parker, the serial tech entrepreneur and founding president of Facebook, voiced just such a concern as he “unloaded” on his former company:
“[Social media] literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
That brings us to today.
On January 6th, two Apple shareholders, Jana Partners and CalsTrs (The California State Teachers’ Retirement System ), publish a 2,500-word open letter urging Tim Cook and his team to do more to protect children from the harmful consequences of smartphone use. The missive to Apple, replete with citations, reads like an article found in a scholarly publication. The authors make a broad range of recommendations [as always, edits and emphasis mine]:
“Expert Committee: Convening a committee of experts including child development specialists (we would recommend Dr. Rich and Professor Twenge be included) to help study this issue and monitor ongoing developments in technology, including how such developments are integrated into the lives of children and teenagers.
Research: Partnering with these and other experts and offering your vast information resources to assist additional research efforts.
New Tools and Options: … Enhancing mobile device software so that parents can implement changes so that their child or teenager is not being handed the same phone as a 40-year old… For example, the initial setup menu could be expanded so that…parents can enter the age of the user and be given age-appropriate setup options…
Education: Explaining to parents why Apple is offering additional choices and the research that went into them, to help parents make more informed decisions.
Reporting: Hiring or assigning a high-level executive to monitor this issue and issuing annual progress reports, just as Apple does for environmental and supply chain issues.”
A few days later, the NY Times publishes a Farhad Manjoo piece titled It’s Time for Apple to Build a Less Addictive iPhone. Manjoo’s lively piece is peppered with interesting links and refers directly to the “Apple Manifesto”:
“… when I called several experts, I found they agreed with the investors. Sure, they said, Apple isn’t responsible for the excesses of the digital ad business, but it does have a moral responsibility to — and a business interest in — the well-being of its customers.
And there’s another, more important reason for Apple to take on tech addiction: because it would probably do an elegant job of addressing the problem.
‘I do think this is their time to step up,’ said Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who now runs Time Well Spent, an organization working to improve technology’s impact on society.
‘In fact,’ Mr. Harris added, ‘they may be our only hope.’
For one thing, Apple’s business model does not depend on tech addiction.’”
and:
“… this means that Apple can set the rules for everyone. With a single update to its operating system and its app store, Apple could curb some of the worst excesses.”
Needless to say, the concerned shareholders’ letter and the NYTimes article ricocheted around the blogosphere. Everyone wants to be on the right side of this discussion. Quoting the NYTimes again:
“‘How we live with technology is the cultural issue of the next half-century,’ said James Steyer, the founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that studies how children are affected by media.”
A few observations, not necessarily in order of importance…
We’ll start with an ironic good for Apple. The company’s relatively small market share belies its cultural influence, and its oft-criticized iron fist could be seen as a good thing. The company has already implemented some parental controls and has said that it wants to do more. As Manjoo and others have noted, this is yet another opportunity to do good and to do well at the same time.
Regarding the shareholders’ letter, we should disregard their small percentage ownership, about .2%, and focus instead on substance…of which there is too much. Behind their broad coverage of the problem lurks an admission: We don’t know what’s most important, everything is a priority so, just in case, let’s throw everything at the issue. It’s a common trap I call SOE, the Strategy Of Everything.
For example, do we really need Apple to set up an Expert Committee to “monitor ongoing development in technology”? Do we need more Research, or should Apple designers be exhorted to read the existing corpus? Is the issuance of annual progress reports, by a high-level exec no less, an urgent need when market forces and critics will do the job for free?
I’m also skeptical of the “setup options” solution. Young humans grow by making guesses, by trial and error. Children will find ways around the obstacles; clever social media (and other suppliers of dangerous substances) will look for ways around Apple’s defenses, the eternal battle between the weapon and the shield. Parents won’t be able to completely surrender their role to Apple’s software. Tech chiefs, from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates, had/have strong opinions about parents’ role in managing children’s casual access to technology.
An obvious rebuttal: Look, we have the benefit of hindsight. The worries expressed in 1984 and 1995 by Turkle and others weren’t followed by large scale disasters. Humankind moved forward, changed a bit, certainly, but not destroyed.
But smartphones are qualitatively and quantitatively different, they’re more intimate, we touch them hundred times a day or more, and there are many more of them than PCs, used in more types of settings.
As an example of the difference, how smartphones change our relationship with the world, regard the security guards that we’ve come to barely notice in businesses, shopping centers, airports. When you do notice, it’s not uncommon to see a uniformed guards engrossed, hypnotized by their smartphones, their attention robbed from the people and properties they’re supposed to protect. Who will guard the guardians? Perhaps we need a committee to study protections for business users.
I fall on the side of It’ll Be Different This Time. We don’t need committees and yearly progress reports, but we can’t be passive, we need to proactively protect our children and ourselves. The trouble with simple answers is such responsibility doesn’t lie in any single place.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
