Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is sad. I myself am addicted to computer games but played with a TON of lego growing up. I can easily rotate 3d shapes and a bunch of stuff in my visual eye, and imagine the 'feel' of how it would interact with other physical things and I think its probably somewhat attributed to all those formative years. Internet didn't exist or when it did , ran at 14.4kbps, not very compelling. Can't believe the struggles modern kids will have growing up trying to combat video game / screen addiction.
I'm right with you. I grew up on the cusp of the internet's explosive growth. I got online every chance I could get, but until I was in my mid-teens our internet was dial-up and I wasn't allowed to monopolize the phone line.
I still spent a lot of time on computers, but without the internet it was a very different dynamic, IMHO. You had to engage the critical-thinking bits of your brain a lot more, since answering questions didn't involve inputting those questions into Google and having StackOverflow/Wikipedia/random blog posts give you the answer sans any of the process/context required to arrive at that answer.
I also spent more time interacting with things physically too. Lego (parents bought me a Mindstorm kit one christmas), physical books, even just tearing apart old computers and putting them back together.
High density living in cities is dreadful for providing enough outdoors / free activity space for kids to be kids - too much noise (or a risk of them making too much noise), too much communal property they shouldn't damage or can't work on.
Growing up, I have memories of my dad building things around the house (including our cubby house), having a sandpit etc. How do you do any of that in an apartment in the city? How do you even have reasonable transit distances to places you can do those things?
This is not unusual in Manhattan. Pick any apartment and walk five minutes in every direction. You'll find a playground.
In the winter we take the subway 20 minutes to a large indoor complex with better equipment and hundreds of other children. They are not quiet!
Of all the places we go, his favorite is the subway, where he gets to say Hi! and Bye! to lots of people.
I dread the loneliness of the burbs.
There would be literally hundreds of children playing daily in that park when the weather was nice, and usually a smaller number when it wasn’t as nice, but still hardly ever zero during reasonable “kids playing outside hours”.
Ages were between kids that could barely walk there with parents or nannies all the way to young teens.
I’m sure many other cities are not like this, but in neighborhoods where people with children in NYC actually live (like the UES) there are plenty of parks and people to fill them.
Quite frankly it’s a miracle that the school district works at all. Having experienced it, school choice does not scale to a million plus kids.
Mine has a community sports league for just about anything you can think of. Swimming, soccer, baseball, lacrosse, touch football, cross country, etc...
There are four different community swimming pools, miles and miles of hiking trails, and sidewalks everywhere for bikes and dog walking. Courts for tennis and basketball. There are kids everywhere. It isn't unusual for the doorbell to ring with a kid wanting to know if your kid can come out to play. One neighbor kid used to ring our bell to ask if he could go in our backyard to play with our dog. On days like hallowe'en, people block the roads off and kids run wild.
There are elementary schools and middle schools spread throughout the neighborhood. Kids can walk or bike to school, although lots of busy parents still drive their kids.
Anyway, it’s fine to worry but personally I’d try to hold off until there’s some empirical evidence that there is a problem. If there is (“study shows kids raised in city are maladjusted” — after controlling for all other variables), I’m not aware of it.
Also, not everyone in a city lives in an apartment. Condos and single-family-homes typically include an outdoor space.
Globally, the figure is about 55%, passing the midpoint in the 2010s. The US became 50% urban in the 1920s. For England and Wales, the 1890s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization#/media/File%3AHis...
As a 12 year old in a city you can walk to a park or get on the metro/bus and visit some friends or go see a movie etc. In the burbs if your parents aren't home or are otherwise unwilling to drive you somewhere you're basically stuck at home counting the days until you turn 16.
If some "concerned citizen" doesn't report the 12 year old to child protective services. Looking at how children are pushed into so much fear it is no wonder how many of them escape into the virtual.
> Skenazy's April 1, 2008 column in The New York Sun, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone," described her making the controversial decision to let her son take the New York City Subway home alone, which was completed without incident.
That sounds more to me like a thing that happens in the suburbs, where kids need to be chauffeured around in cars everywhere and the streets are too fast and too packed with cars for bikes to be safe, so parents don't even get the opportunity to contemplate letting their kids out of their sight.
https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/M...
But overall I'm glad we did. As a teen there was absolutely nothing to do in the town we moved from. Drugs became a really big issue I heard. At least the city provided activities so we didn't get bored out of our minds.
It's not like combining a suburb space / greenery etc with a city experience is impossible. We just don't do it, since we mostly build our cities and suburbs for cars.
Cities should have plenty of parks, easy access to dense areas tastefully built (for walking, shopping, restaurants, coffee), and have plenty of trees, small and larger squares, and public transport, with several public buildings and monuments thrown in. A river or large lake or sea wouldn't hurt either where possible.
When I was a kid in Cupertino and San Jose, I biked everywhere. I biked to school, to meet friends in other neighborhoods, shopping centers (even Milpitas to Eastridge), etc. Even the shitshow that was County Transit got me to Los Gatos ahd Palo Alto. The nearest bus stop was a mile away; I biked there.
And I'd argue that most burbs have fewer crime and drug risks, but both tend to be way overstated by media.
Akao, cities tend to have a much higher ratio of people to sports fields. If you play baseball / football / soccer, you have much greater access (for pickup games as well as organized leagues).
This is simply so untrue, that's it's laughable. High density, urban spaces have by-and-lqege more opportunities and places for kids than the hellhole that is the exurbs and most of the post war suburbs.
Our apartment building has its own patio space, a reasonably large butterfly garden, and some gardening plots in the back yard. We've set aside one of the garden plots for the kids to do whatever they want in (last summer's cherry tomato harvest was a sight to see), and turned another into a sandbox.
We spend lots and lots of time outside in those sorts of communal spaces. For my part, I feel sorry for kids living in these intensively inward-facing suburban environments where there are no sidewalks or community spaces, and kids are dependent on adults with cars to help them get together with their friends.
I walk across the street to the municipal park, where there's not only a playground, but also open outdoor spaces that people use for (to cite things I've observed this weekend) picnics, childrens' birthday parties, pickup sports, martial arts classes, playing frisbee with dogs, and general horsing around. There are smaller parks with playgrounds every 3 blocks or so in my part of town.
People raised in a stereotypical American suburb (as I was) tend not to grow up with common spaces that people use for individual purposes. It can be easy to end up equating space that's useful with space that one has exclusive use of, and so assume that city dwellers must be deprived.
I grew up in a midsized city, when I was a kid I could walk, bus, or ride my bike literally anywhere I wanted to go without really any notable restrictions, including parks with sandpits. My parents kept a draw full of bus schedules. The best part is there were literally kids everywhere, so you were never lonely even if you left the house alone. We'd organize pick-up games of soccer or baseball or kickball, etc. I even went ice skating by myself. Sometimes I'd just walk outside during the summer just to see which of the "neighborhood kids" were out. I'd spend hours just exploring the city on foot or bike, so much so that I'd come home with sore legs. All snow storms were followed by sledding in the park. I spent very little time with my parents.
When we got older it was mall and movies, record stores, arcades.
We also had a back yard, shared between six families.
Sometimes my parents would even send me on errands for them.
I had an after school job starting at 16 and I'd never be able to if I had to be driven there, my dad was always home, but without a car. I'd take the bus there.
I was rarely home, it was amazing.
Compare that to the suburbs or rural areas where the only way to get anywhere is a parent driving a kid somewhere. Sounds stifling. My parents would never shuffle me around everywhere. (In fact, I didn't even care for it as an adult, sometimes I just wanted to go for a walk! But leaving required a car, no sidewalks, traffic much too fast for a bike)
I could walk, bus, or ride my bike literally anywhere ... Compare that to the suburbs or rural areas
I grew up in the suburbs. All my friends where within walking or biking distance, as was the local library. There was a small forest less than 5 minutes walk from our house we could explore, as well a nice sledding hill. There was a small field at the end of the road that had a couple of soccer goals. The 'big city' was ~30 minutes away by bus. When I got a bit older they even opened a mall within 20 minute bike ride of where we lived.
Basically whether a place is "good for kids" is entirely orthogonal to if its urban or suburban.
Why can't you do both?
Did they also study how much you learn about using a computer by stacking bricks?
What if they found that kids who only play with bricks suck at Tetris? Would that be a cause for concern?
That's a poor measure of somethings value.
Do you have elderly parents you support with their computers? Then maybe you know what I am talking about.
I am not saying kids shouldn't play with bricks. The whole premise of the article seems silly. Nobody claims kids should play with computers instead of bricks.
As for becoming computer savvy, I've seen kids pick up quite a lot from playing with computers. They quickly figure out how to find and launch the games they like, for example. And they also experiment, for example rearranging the UI. Then there is Minecraft.
Children should be interacting with the physical world because they’re little animals who should be interacting with their surroundings to learn how they work, just as you and I should be using our bodies because it feels great and helps our minds to work.
Using a computer is an abstraction that can wait until after children have a solid model for how the world works. Computers are tools, wonderful, fascinating, useful tools, but Tetris isn’t even 3D, generalising from actual blocks to Tetris is not going to tax the imagination of anyone.
I'm pretty sure we recently saw a study that showed a lot of kids being tech illiterate despite growing with and regularly using a bunch of gadgets.
Turns out playing with a screen doesn't teach you computers.
Honestly, some people just treat computers as magic despite using them every day and having it explained what it's doing. We don't need to expose kids to computers more -- it's literally impossible not to -- we need to get them to -- or not squash -- their desire to ask 'why', 'how', and 'how can this be changed'.
What does using a computer here mean? Playing video games? Staring at YT videos? Or coding?
There’s a whole field of embodied cognition and linguistics that predicts this
Seems analogous to the argument against video games replacing blocks.
And really, if we can’t unthinkingly trust Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children’s Hospital, what can we believe in???
The journalistic practice of inserting quotes from official-sounding people as “evidence” is epistemologically revolting.
Also, playing with blocks doesn’t do anything to your inner ear.
Both blocks and Minecraft require spatial reasoning Minecraft worlds, being larger, might even require more. However, young kids are still learning motor skills and sensorimotor integration, which will be very different when manipulating real blocks vs. an iPad. Playing with blocks could also offer different opportunities for practicing verbal or social skills, and needs a bit more imagination.
Figuring out the “best” amount of screen vs. real world time is tricky—-this sort of research is hard to do well—-and undoubtedly varies from kid to kid.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1rcoqu/my_3year_...
That old person already developed their spatial skills in an actual 3D environment. There is evidence that babies and toddlers need substantial experience to learn to see their environment properly.
In experiments, an infant will accept that an object transformed into a random other object while briefly out of their sight. They will not accept that one object turned into two objects.
This makes sense. A plate is flat from one angle of view and round from another. You change the angle of view, the shape radically changes. But it remains a single object.
Babies don't yet know which transformations make sense, so they will accept that a truck transformed into a clown toy. They will not accept that a truck transformed into two clown toys.
So I think you have that backwards. People with an already developed understanding of 3D spatial relationships based on lots of living in an actual 3D world can relate meaningfully to a virtual environment. This in no way supports the idea that simply seeing a representation on a screen of a 3D environment can help a developing child properly code up their spatial reasoning.
This combined with the Lego talk above reminded me of having to constantly check my VCR slot for Lego bricks placed there by my toddler daughter.
I agree that we shouldn’t have unquestioning faith in anything anyone says. However, that doesn’t mean we also need to assign equal weight to everyone’s ideas. If someone has relevant expertise—-and being the lead author of a professional organization’s guidelines is surely relevant here—it doesn’t seem bonkers to give their persepective a bit more weight.
Mentioning actual research would be better, of course. I would bet dollars to donuts that the next bit of the author’s conversation with him was “For example, in our 2005 APAM paper, we found that....” However, the newspaper article’s author probably doesn’t want to go on a long tangent trying to meta-analyze the existing research, all to make a point that’s incidental to the article’s thesis. In that context, a quote from an expert seems totally reasonable.
OK, to be fair, they didn't mention all that in the Times article, but they did mention that he is the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics's guidelines on screen time. As far as I am aware, the AAP has a good scientific reputation, so one would expect that they wouldn't get someone who doesn't know his stuff to author their guidelines.
The Times also has a good reputation, so I'd expect the journalist to have looked up Dr. Christakis and seen that he appears to be qualified on this subject.
You are right that we shouldn't unthinkingly trust...but we also to avoid being excessive about it, because no one has the time to personally check everything. This is why reputation matters. If you get your information from reputable sources, you can delegate more of the checking to them without much risk. This is one of those cases, especially since they gave enough information to trivial look up more about him if you don't want to go by the Times and the AAP reputations.
[1] https://www.seattlechildrens.org/directory/dimitri-a-christa...
Based on what ACTUAL evidence?
Stay close to family. Say hi to your neighbors. Play with blocks. Go outside. It’s dirt cheap. Your phone can even ride along with you in your pocket!
Education trending toward screens is troubling but at the same time it allows for totally custom learning paths for kids that scale better than a teacher. Blend it with playtime and interaction with other kids and that’s not always bad! Most of my education was learning in books, after all. Headline: “books are taking over human contact for the non-wealthy!!!”
I would also suggest that for most people the issue is not “cost” but “difficulty.” Screens are easy. You control them, and they’re not as difficult as people. Interacting with others carries risk. Take the risk!
Welp. The dystopia is here folks. We're living in it right now.
Lonely old people are being cheered up by tetrahedrons with eyeballs employing harsh lo-fi guttural noises approximating human voices.
I mean I'm not rushing out the door right this moment to go find a job working in elderly care, but I wish our society had a better answer to how we take care of our older generations than this.
A slow healing exercise that exercises functional movement in the body, acts as meditation[1], acts as a source for human bodily contact (pushing hands exercise/sparring routines) and creates community ties with other practitioners. This last point also being important in staving off dementia-related diseases.
maybe in another 100 years well have gotten over this hurdle. Go humanity!
[1]https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-health-be...
Give it time and don't focus too much on the doom and gloom crowd. The solutions never come from that crowd. I find following the work of actual ecologists, social scientists and psychologists a source of much more hope these days.
Ahem.
"Look I found something, where's my treat?"
Google "cloth mother", "wire mother" and "pit of despair" if you want to learn more about Harlow.
I thought the same thing after reading:
> Mr. Pedraza said. “The human is very important right now.”
And these lonely old people you're referring to are likely seen as burdens by their own families who regard every last scrap of their time as means to advance a career.
> When you sign up for the service, you can design a boyfriend (or girlfriend) to your specifications — kind of like picking the genes for a designer baby, except for an imaginary adult. You pick his name, his age, his interests and personality traits. You tell the app if you prefer blonds or brunettes, tall guys or short, guys who like theater or guys who watch sports. Then you swipe your credit card — $25 per month, cha-ching! — and the imaginary man of your dreams starts texting you.
-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/01...
Devil's advocate: the baby boomers are going to be (and already are) such an immense resource suck on the younger generations that I think it's good we're attempting to automate some of the burden away.
Emotional labour is labour. That means it can be alienated, commoditised, intermediated by an internet platform, globalised, and provided by the lowest bidder.
The sharing economy sucks this out still further. Why spend your time being nice to an old person uncompensated when a VC-funded platform will pay you a few cents to perform niceness to a stranger across the world? "Sharing economy" replaces "belonging economy".
I'm not sure there's a way out of this without society as a whole moving away from money as the value of all things.
And let's not overlook the role of culture wars in all this, where old/young has become a particularly strong axis.
(Of course, if we look back in history at who used to be performing all this emotional labour uncompensated, we tend to find that it was women. And they were socially coerced into doing so...)
Sometimes I wish that Black mirror episode where you got reputation points for doing good deeds became real.
China, by the way, is in a fairly horrifying state as far as altruism between strangers goes. I wouldn't look towards it as a model.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/why-altruism-r...
...in a system that forces incentive systems onto everybody.
Many people will do great things for each other if they don't feel like they're being nickel and dimed for every little god damn thing they do.
Our culture has hyper-commoditized almost everything and now we all expect to be compensated for even the smallest things because of it.
It's not a natural state of humanity. This is just how we are as a people, culturally.
The reason we do not already live in the dystopia you describe is that money is not actually believed to be the value of all things. People do not usually act as if it is.
I'm wondering if that's actually an example of social signaling and countersignaling. When PCs were expensive, the only people who bought them were those who a.) had a lot of money and b.) derived significant benefit from them. As they get cheaper, constraint a.) gets relaxed, and everyone derived significant benefit from them. Now that they're a commodity and used by the masses, one way to distinguish yourself from the masses is to adopt behaviors that say "I don't need to be plugged in to maintain my place in society." Computers are still a significant advantage, but one way to demonstrate resources & status is to conspicuously go without the advantages that the majority of the population enjoys, showing that you don't need them after all.
In this regard, it joins phenomena like eating organic; buying sports cars, or a Prius/Tesla; owning a big home (larger than the living space you actually need); and acting like an asshole. Most of these give neutral-to-negative benefits to the person in question, and cost more, but are frequently done by upper-middle-class or wealthy people because they can.
Ironically, reading the NYTimes is itself a class marker, one for upper-middle-class coastal elites. This happens to be exactly the group most likely to jump on the no-screen-time bandwagon and have leisure time available to spend on real human contact. So in some ways, this piece is telling their readership "You've arrived now. You can afford luxury goods."
Is there a conflict of interest, where paying for someone's attention would incentivize that someone to become a disproportionate part of the other person's life?
If there's a difference between "real" and "fake" relationship, then that difference reminds me of filling a need (of stimulation?) using drugs: the drug makes the need go away, without the taker being stimulated in any useful way, "Brave New World" style.
Seems like a similar thing, except that instead of the product being hand-crafted one-on-one by someone with a PhD, now it's mass-produced elsewhere by the mechanical turk.
When my grandfather was approaching the grave and had to battle several serious medical issues, he hired a live-in nurse to help him with everything from cooking dinner to helping him on and off the toilet (she was a large Samoan lady). She took care of him full-time (not on a live-in basis, though) for a couple years, occasionally having someone from her family fill in if she needed to take care of something. The whole family got to know her quite well, and in a way she became a part of the family, performing the duties that the rest of us, for whatever reason, could not.
Would she have been there had she not been getting paid? No, but part of that has to do with the fact that had we not been paying her, she wouldn't even be able to afford a place to live or be able to fuel her car to come over every day.
Similarly, if insurance companies weren't paying the company that creates these avatars, which in turn pays the people who operate the avatars, these relationships would never have an opportunity to form in the first place.
As for my grandfather's nurse, she attended my grandfather's funeral with the rest of the family. Even brought her young granddaughter along with her. She wasn't being paid that day.
In other words, I think you're worrying too much.
2. Because she was herself no one could replace her. If she is a shape with eyes. Then the next week someone else could take over. This makes the relationship way faker.
As far as I can tell care.coach does not give you a caretaker. There's a reason it's an avatar and not a person. It takes your input and assigns it to someone who writes up with a response. That person may or may not be the same person who responded the last time.
It's not a relationship. It's an illusion of a relationship. That's really scary to me.
These 'fake' relationships aren't new. Therapy, counseling, coaching, tutors etc. They _can_ be incredibly rewarding and fulfilling.
In my experience, the rich are misguided. They do indeed believe the above. Every rich person I know is raising their child to be anti-tech, and they cite a lot of the same things as this article (unsurprisingly written in the NYT). This is a mistake though. They are venting their own frustration with the lack of power the internet and computers have brought to their world on their children. Technology has removed gatekeepers, destroyed old media, turned politics on its head, devalued classically valuable roles... By turning their children against tech the rich are drinking their own kool-aid if you will.
Make no mistake. The future will be designed, commanded and operated from and through screens. Technology is power and the best thing you can do for your child is have them embrace tech head on.
Wealth and power will still certainly be a thing, but in such a dynamic, connected environment, a simple hereditary transfer of power is likely to become harder in many venues.
Frustratingly, I could do my job from rural France and strike some sort of imperfect-but-preferable balance, it's only really company policies that prohibit it. I'm sort of hoping for a shift change that makes more places more open to offering a more mixed lifestyle.
It's stunning how prescient Neal Stephenson's writings have been, both in terms of technological progression and also our human responses to those progressions.
"Shortly thereafter, in 1992, just as Berners-Lee's World Wide Web had come to fruition, Neal Stephenson was inspired by the recent invention, which led to him publishing Snow Crash, a science-fiction novel that illustrated much of today's online life, including a virtual reality where people meet, do business, and play.
Even today, many of today's greatest innovators reference Snow Crash as inspiration for their work. Google co-founder Sergey Brin named the book as one of his favorite novels. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson's ideas. At Facebook, the book, alongside Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, is also given to anyone who starts a job at the virtual-reality company Oculus.
What's funny, Stephenson, who is now the Chief Futurist at the VR startup Magic Leap, told Vanity Fair that he was just "making shit up" when he wrote the novel.
The other thing is the nature of human contact. It's one thing to be close physically to someone, which until recently was the only form of contact. But I find that having internet services allows me to contact more people than ever before. You can reach out to find exactly the people who interest you, regardless of where they are. You can keep old friendships alive with a few minutes of typing each month.
Back in the days before the internet, you had to very wealthy to have friends in faraway places. It's not everyone who could do a Grand Tour of Europe while writing poetry and meeting a variety of interesting people.
Bearing in mind, it isn't some trivial object like toenail clippers. It's likely one of the more important objects in both of their lives.
It's the reason a hand-made swiss watch is so expensive, because you are literally paying a person to waste his time working on a trinket. Basically you "own" his time, and this is a luxury product.
The results of extremely specialized labor shouldn't be conflated with the work of humanity at large.
And what is the message they want to convey? The rich use screens to exploit us? Or to get rich, don't use screens? Both notions are completely ridiculous.
The main takeaway I guess is that there are "the rich", and the rest of us. So unfair! I feel the rage building inside of me already. Hate the rich! My internet addiction is strictly their fault! How dare they build addictive services like Google or Facebook, and thereby ruin my life?
Wait, did I just waste 15 minutes reading the NYT? I guess they are to blame, too, if I don't become rich.
This is a silly exaggeration. A paid email account is well under 10$/mo, domain included. Not using Facebook is free. Great, aggressive adblocking software is free.
Not only can the middle class afford it, it's not even a noticeable cost. You don't have to be a president of your own company with two secretaries to take basic control over your digital experience.
Also, in a lot of parts in the world $10 per month is a lot of money.
like boiling a frog, even the "aware" forget.