Draft of article on cell phones and texting

[Shepherd]

Dear Waccos,
Following is a rough draft from which I will write various articles from 700 to over 2000 words and submit to local and national publications early next week. I solicit your criticisms on how to improve it. What would you delete, add, or change? Might you be willing to respond with a quote that I could consider using? I welcome your comment on content, style, tone, language, transitions, organization, etc. Please make comments in CAPITALS, bold, or in some other way that I can clearly distinguish them.
Thanks for any help,
Shepherd

Pediatrician and Three-Year-Old on Cell Phone

DRAFT: NOT FOR PUBLICATION, YET
CRITICISMS SOLICITED, TO [email protected]

By Shepherd Bliss (2181 words)

“The three-year-old just walked right past me,” the Santa Rosa pediatrician reported, “talking into her cell phone.” That stark image of toddler attached to machine has troubled me.

“I was amused at first,” the physician continued. “Then I felt sad. She was learning how to relate to people through a machine. It was so mechanical. Cell phones can be a way for people to connect, but they also speed things up.”

This dinosaur’s vague, over half a century ago memories from having once been that young are of dogs and cats, big people, wooden toys, plants and puddles, rather than soulless machines. Non-verbal play attracted me more than talking into a plastic device. Must we rush even toddlers into machines?

The immediacy of cell phones and their push-button control can increase impatience with things that are slower, like the development of deep human relationships, lasting love, growing plants, and caring for animals. Cell phones can be powerful forces that expand the consumer culture of instant messaging and instant gratification, thus reducing embodied human relations and dialogue that leads beyond data and information to wisdom and depth.

I wonder about the long-term consequences of such young children already taking their gaze away from living people and constantly-changing nature to look down into and be captured by a static machine. Who benefits and what is lost? I wonder how much time she and other such young people spend on this tiny gadget. What is appropriate high technology for three-year-olds and what conditions obsessive behavior?

In contrast to the three-year-old with cell phone, I recently visited my friends Randi and Claudia with their five-month-old bundled onto Randi’s chest, eyes fixed on her mother, occasionally smiling at the rest of us, returning to absorb her mother’s warm intimacy. It comforted me. I have also been delighted to hang out with Carolina and Laurent, being lead by their sixteen-month-old, so full of vitality, splashing in water, beginning to form words. He inspires me. I wonder what is in store for these children in this high-tech, sped-up digital world.

Cell phones are certainly good for emergencies, convenient, functional, practical, and have many advantages. But the disadvantages warrant attention, including the unintended consequences of three-year-olds mimicking cell phoning rather than learning how to socialize by playing with other children and living creatures. I watch with delight as youngsters interact with the chickens on my small farm, look up with awe into the giant redwoods, feel their dance partner the wind, and see the birds above. The sixteen-month-old already knows how to stuff his mouth with berries, whose purple color ring his wide smile.

At a library I recently also saw a small girl fixated on a computer screen. When I asked the librarian how old she thought the child was, she responded, “Probably under three.” But there she was, moving the “mouse” around and watching the machine respond so promptly. Screens radiate light, which looking at directly can be harmful, especially to young eyes and brains.

Now I’m getting more concerned by this trend of children absorbed by machines rather than living beings or even picture books. The tools and technologies that we use are not neutral; they help shape who we become. Cybertime creates unnatural time pressures, heightening stress and anxiety.

On the other hand, I’ve heard of toddlers who throw cell phones into toilets and bathtubs. Good for them! That spontaneous spirit of play is a healthy alternative to the beginning of consumer addiction. Technophiles seek to protect their hand-held devices, whereas I am more concerned to protect children from pre-mature technology that is not age appropriate.

Another recent incident with cell phones comes to mind. I seek to get my Sonoma State University (SSU) students outside the classroom and even off campus for educational and social purposes out into the real world. So I invited a freshman class to go to the big city, Santa Rosa, to see a film at the Rialto.

We agreed to have dinner before. I recalled my delight decades ago when a professor invited a class to share a meal off campus. But upon arriving at the dinner table the first thing that most of these teenagers did was to put their cell phones on the table. Some of their little gadgets promptly vibrated, buzzed, and made a variety of demanding sounds. I was aghast at the rudeness.

My dinner guests were soon miles away texting, having what sounded like one-way conversations intruding into our dinner, and playing phone games, ignoring the rest of us at the table in front of them. What happened to old-fashioned connective meal-time conversations?

Though it was a memorable teaching moment for me, it was not what I would have preferred. I had hoped that the dinner table might provide a place for a more intimate conversation than a classroom. Instead, these adolescents withdrew their attention from the present moment and any group discussion of the film we were about to see into their personal, individual cell phone routines and relationships with people absent from our common scene. They were off and away.

As they multi-tasked, I felt all alone—a slow dinosaur at a table with fast-moving butterflies flickering away into cyberspace, their consciousnesses split. Am I just an old fuddy-duddy witnessing a new culture to which I am a stranger?

I didn’t say anything to my students at the time, though I did later copy a Press Democrat article on the downsides of texting and circulated it to class to initiate discussion. The students were defensive, but it was a good experience in critical thinking, which is what I teach and am seeking to practice here. As I walked from class on SSU’s beautiful redwood-lined campus, I noticed many students with faces buried in that consumptive machine, missing the redwoods and other humans passing by, as well as the birds above calling to them.

I’m not lobbying against cell phones or texting, which would be futile anyway. The issue is more when and where and what the consequences might be at a certain age and in certain situations. My intenton here is to explore the limitations of recent high tech developments. What might be appropriate cell phone and texting protocols for young people at different ages? My concern is that for some their primary relationship becomes with a talking machine, rather than with a multi-dimensional person with whom to have spontaneous, life-deepening and life-changing dialogue. Skills with the use of an ease with a machine does not necessarily enhance good relationships with people.

Fortunately, some students at SSU do understand the downsides of texting and related phenomenon. The article “Digital Communication: The Death of Verbal Communication in our Society” was published by the campus newspaper, “The Star,” on April 28 of this year. Brian Evans contends that “we as a society have been spoiled by the luxuries of Internet, cellular communication, iPhones, Blackberries, etc.” He laments that they have “diminished the personalization of communicating” and “texting has limited our laughter to Lol.” The sound-bite, minimalist approach that texting and twittering employ can contract the soul and imagination, rather than expand them.

Let me confess that I do have a cell phone—still the first bulky one I got, about six years ago. My former partner obtained it for me when I moved off the mainland, so we could stay in touch. Though I seldom use it, having it does make me feel safer, comfortable and more connected; it has become essential to my lifestyle. But I use it much less than my landline and phone answering machine—my kind of technology—and I do not text. I prefer the old-fashioned being with someone in person and having dialogue.

Alas, I have also been caught in the cell phone snare. While lecturing in class one day, mine went off, much to the delight, giggles, and snickers of my students. Was I ever embarrassed and even ashamed.

“The Flickering Mind” titles a book by award-winning journalist Todd Oppenheimer, sub-titled “The False Promises of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved.” Though published what some now consider long ago, 2003, its nearly 500 pages document the downsides of computers in education long before texting became so popular and disruptive. His chapters include “Hidden Troubles,” “Bulldozing the Imagination,” and “The Human Touch.”

We may have a social epidemic on our hands. Studies reported in three Press Democrat articles this year reveal that “American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Co.” (May 30). One reporter said that “last year his 13-year-old racked up 14,528 texts in one month.”

“Texting on a Date?” reports that the number of text messages has risen to about 75 billion a month (Feb. 20) and is going up. Downsides include “declines in spelling, word choice and writing complexity…and an inability to focus.” (Feb. 23) Text-bullying and sending naked photos have become problematic, including at least one documented suicide.

This large volume of text messages and the amount of time young people spend engaged with them is staggering. It could be considered a form of enslavement to an object. “Time poverty is now a recognized psychological and social stressor,” according to psychotherapist Linda Buzzell, co-editor of the new Sierra Club Book’s “Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind.” She adds, “We struggle with diminishing success to adapt to the strange mechanical and disembodied world we have created,” including “endless 24/7 online communications… constantly rushing to keep up as we inevitably fall further behind.” In that machine-driven process “we find ourselves destroying not only our own health, but our habitat and the habitat of the people, plants and animals with whom we share the planet.”

The most proficient texters are not as likely to be the best live conversationalists. Their thumbs and other fingers may be more agile, but I wonder about the rest of their bodies and capacities, including thinking and feeling. Texting narrows the range of emotions that can be expressed.

“Techo-addiction” is how some psychologists describe this phenomenon, which includes other recent developments, such as Facebook, My Space, You Tube, and Twitter. An indication that addiction is an appropriate description is when you see someone walk across a busy street, not in the crosswalk, texting, instead of looking, thus risking their life. My concern is that for some their primary relationship becomes with a talking machine, rather than with a multi-dimensional person.

My college students seem to have more trouble reading books and sustaining attention than they did even a few years ago; they appear more distant and distracted. Their emails have gotten briefer and are not always in standard English. They seem to have less patience for ambiguity and paradox, preferring machine-like yeses and noes and making overstatements like “always” and “never.”

Though I do not allow cell phones to be on during class, I sometimes hear them vibrate and know that some students are so addicted that they are adept at concealing these tools—which can become almost like armor or weapons--under their clothes and desks the way earlier generations of youth would carefully conceal cigarette smoking.

In California it is illegal to hold cell phones to one’s ear while driving, though I notice many violators, who thus threaten the rest of us with more accidents. Plane, train, and ship accidents have been documented to have happened while or just after pilots’ attentions were diverted while texting.

It took a long time to make cigarette smoking illegal in certain public places, though the dangers had been clearly documented for many years. I hope that it does not take as long to make cell phones illegal in some places, especially moving vehicles, as well as elsewhere. Cell phones can be powerful forces in expanding the consumer culture and reducing embodied human relations and deep communication with others that involves texture, emotion, and nuances.

The critique of soulless machines implicit in this article echoes a tradition reaching back more than a century that includes British novelist D.H. Lawrence, German-speaking poet Rilke, German-American psychologist Erich Fromm, American gardeners Scott and Helen Nearing, and French sociologist Jacques Ellul. Contemporary American advocates of this tradition include psychotherapist Chellis Glendinning (“When Technology Wounds”), public relations expert Jerry Mander (“In the Absence of the Sacred”), and farmer Wendell Berry (“In the Presence of Fear.”)

As I recall the pediatrician speaking about the incident with the three-year-old being conditioned for an adult life of consumption with an early onset cell phone addiction, I wonder about how much she was missing by looking so intently at a machine, rather than gazing into the eyes of another human or noticing nature around her as she walked about this fabulous Redwood Empire. Instead of speeding up to keep up with machines such as cell phones, we humans could benefit from slowing down to nature’s pace, and smelling the fragrant flowers along the way.

[NudeTea]

I solicit your criticisms on how to improve it.

Overall, it is certainly a well-thought-out essay, Shepherd. Let me start on a good note and with a sincere pat on your back before I critique this.

On a side note, I disagree. My son was on a cell phone at the age of three. It's not just the visuals but the audibles that we must note. Did you get to hear the conversation the three year old was having? It's been my experience that for our son to be able to talk to Grandma when Grandma is miles away granted him a deeper sense of security and connectedness to family. It also granted him, even at that tender age, the thrill of achievement and learning.

As to your question on how to improve your composition though, I would remind you that we are indeed in the age of short attention spans. There's a whole science as to how to make web pages readable because so many people these days simply scan the screen. It's my opinion that it also applies to common letters, in that people speed read and scan for 'the gist' of what is being said amidst the clutter of other words.

That in mind, I will admit that it took me a while to discover what you were asking in your letter. There's a lot of 'personal opinion' and 'background experience' in this letter you wrote, and the way you wrote it distracts from what you're asking the reader to aspire to (imho). Since the bulk of the letter sounds like 'opinion,' it's my opinion that they will see that opinion, decide immediately if they agree or disagree, and then move on unless your request is clearer.

What do you want? Make that request clearer at the start, state your proofs and experiences in bullet-point or outline format, since these are easier to comprehend when quick-scanning, and close with a repeat of your request.

Blessings, Shepherd.
Stephe