The Tartan

By: The Tartan Editorial Board

Surely there’s a problem with kids today, right? This past Friday, we here at The Tartan editorial board got to chatting about kids these days with their iPads, V-Bucks, and making purchases on their parents’ Amazon accounts. These are bad habits of which us mature, wizened 20-year-olds are certainly innocent. Right?

Before we throw stones at the iPad kids of “Generation Alpha,” let’s check the integrity of our own glass house. We all grew up with technology, and we’re the first generation of true internet natives. That being said, the rollout of iPhones and laptops in our childhood was widely varied; some of us on the Edboard were texting and Instagramming as early as fourth grade, while some had to wait until high school; some of us had technology but weren’t super online, while others had Tumblr accounts. Like it or not, we are all iPad kids to some extent. Perhaps we weren’t playing Subway Surfers at age four, but to draw the line for acceptable childhood technology use precisely beyond our own level of usage seems a bit biased. 

However, it feels like there is a genuine difference between our relationship to the internet and that of Gen Alpha. And let’s do our best to talk about in a non-finger-wagging way, lest we make hypocrites of ourselves as iPad kids criticizing iPad kids.

To people slightly older than us — the Millennials and young Gen Xers — our internet upbringing might sound horrifying. Some of us on the EdBoard spent our adolescence mainlining hours of internet per day, which inevitably led to us seeing weird stuff ranging from the creepy to the genuinely traumatic. It was the Wild West out there, with trends like the knife game or the (likely apocryphal) Blue Whale Challenge, chain emails, gross images of a made-up STD named after colorful breakfast food (if you know you know), gore and violent videos, porn, screamer websites, alternate reality games, Omegle, the list goes on (and is even longer if you had TOR on your computer). 

But compared to the content that infests the internet now, that stuff seems tame. At the end of the day, most of the weird and traumatic stuff we encountered in our youth was likely created by individuals or groups who just wanted to freak people out. The people posting gore on Instagram weren’t in it for the money; they wanted to traumatize kids to achieve virality or for the pure love of the game. That’s obviously not good, but it feels less insidious than what we see these days.

Today, attention has become deeply monetized on every platform. Brilliant coders and computer scientists spend careers developing algorithms that track every online move and feed users the content they are statistically most likely to click on so that advertisers can gain a fraction of a percent greater likelihood of someone buying their product. Even more concerning are content farms that flood platforms with nonsense, procedurally-generated videos tailored to children by including recognizable characters and bright colors. Not to sound moral-panicky, but don’t you think that might do something to a kid?  Children are pretty smart, and engaging with stories can help them develop psychologically by teaching them about emotions, social conventions, and narrative structure. What on Earth could they be learning from “FUN LEARN COLORS ATV and JETSKI w/ SUPERHEROES for Children Nursery Rhymes”? 

And sure, since the time of Socrates people have complained about how technology will ruin our ability to think. But maybe this time they’re right. It’s understandable why a tired, busy parent might just put their kid in front of a smart TV playing “Learn Colors With Lollipop Monkey Steals Lollipop – Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes For Kids” to keep them entertained, but kids can also absorb information at an alarming rate. If you feed them trashy generative content, it’s not unreasonable to think that might impact their development. This is not to mention the more material harms to overusing screens at a young age, from vision issues to poor development of fine-motor skills. 

As the first generation of people to be raised on their internet, we’re uniquely equipped to think critically about this issue. We understand the dynamics of internet culture in a way many older individuals don’t, and it’s important that we not be hypocritical reactionaries regarding kids having internet access. (For instance, let’s not be like a recent Vice news article which uncritically quotes someone complaining about a literal five-year-old being poorly behaved.)

Moreover, we need to be self-aware. We should be able to talk about how digital devices are distracting and bad for our brain, while also admitting that sometimes we check Instagram during lecture.

The internet can be a fantastic tool for learning about the world, developing perspectives, and  forming interpersonal relationships. It’s part of our lives and it’s here to stay, so we better be smart about it.

As our conversation about iPad kids winded down, Tartan Operations Manager and famed summer camp counselor Zach Gelman pointed out that at his camp, kids would always be pretty annoyed to not have internet access, but that they got used to it fast. It’s an addiction, but not something we can’t kick if we really try.