Last week, Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, released . The latest crop of “digital citizens” are taking to screens with a vengeance. Ownership of tablet devices has increased fivefold, from 8 to 40 percent, since the last report, just two years ago. During that same period, the percentage of children with access to some type of “smart” mobile device leapt from 52 to 75 percent; mobile media usage almost doubled, coming in at a whopping 72 percent. But most stunning is the revelation about the under-two set: 40 percent are using mobile devices.
Author Victoria Rideout discovered some persistent trends that merit attention, including a significant digital divide, between poor and affluent children; the amount of time children read, or are read to, daily (which had dipped from 58 to 47 percent from 2005 to 2011); and the enduring attraction of television, still the most popular “platform for children’s educational content.” The divide, mirroring rapid shifts in the tech landscape, has morphed into two categories: a traditional gap, reflecting access to high-speed internet, and the “app gap,” flourishing amid the growth of mobile screens.
While nearly half of the nation’s poor children now have access to high-speed internet, their more affluent peers continue to have the broadband advantage, with 90 percent just steps away from the virtual world. Lower-income families are slowly edging up in their use of mobile media devices and apps. Smart-phone access climbed up from nearly 30 to just over 50 percent in the two-year period between surveys; tablet ownership rose from a meager 2 percent to 20 percent, with reported use by 65 percent of lower-income children—a huge jump from the 22 percent two years earlier.
What this all portends for children’s learning and development is anybody’s guess. Research can barely keep up with the habits of today’s little ones, whose antics on the rug of the family electronic hearth are spooking even their tech-savvy parents. More than four million have viewed the You Tube video “A Magazine is an iPad that Does Not Work,” since it first went viral in October of 2011.
And we thought the was a big deal.
Back in ancient Greece, as Denise E. Murray wrote, before the advent of the iPad, in an article in the journal of Language, Learning & Technology, Plato and Socrates agonized over the adoption of alphabetic writing. In the Phaedrus, by Plato, his teacher Socrates declares: “The fact is that this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written.” Murray noted that “many scholars and others separate into two usually opposing camps: those who fear the new technology, fearing it will negatively change life as they know it, and those who extol the virtues of the new technology, believing it will create new, beneficial ways of knowing and interacting.” But she dismisses the commonly held view that technology is revolutionary, arguing that it merely facilitates changes already beginning to take place in society.
Much food for thought, as we follow in the footsteps of our ancestors, trying to keep the best interests of children front and center in the latest chapter of civilization.
