Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario and Saskatchewan. Here’s this week’s! It’s bad in Canada; but this situation is even worse in the United States, since university costs so much more there (no idea why).
As a card-carrying fuddy duddy, I can rattle off a multitude of reasons why our culture is going downhill. And chief among them is technology. We text at the dinner table instead of talking. We play video games and lose out on relationships. We find our community on Facebook rather than in real life.
And yet as much as I bemoan the downsides of technology, I’m a tech fan and a tech addict myself.
When my grandfather was 67 he had a massive stroke that paralyzed his left side. For the next twenty-five years my mother and my aunts were constantly trying to drum up things this once active man could do to amuse himself as he sat in his nursing home. And one thing Grandpa loved to do was read.
Unfortunately, holding a book and turning a page when you only have one hand is awfully difficult. And reading is also difficult when you have major glaucoma. To make matters worse, large print books are extremely bulky, thus compounding that hard-to-turn-the-page problem.
He died about a decade ago now, so he did not live long enough to see the absolute miracle that Steve Jobs created in the iPad. Certainly it’s wonderful for keeping toddlers entertained in doctor’s offices, or for looking at pictures or browsing the internet. But when I think of what joy he could have gotten out of it by allowing him to read easily, I tear up. Turn the page by swishing across that screen. Make the print bigger automatically by moving your fingers. It would have enhanced his quality of life so substantially.
Do you know what else has the capacity to enhance grandparents’ quality of life? Skype. Even if you live across the country, you can watch grandkids grow. You can even read bedtime stories! I met one set of grandparents who were “baby-sitting” remotely. Their grandkids were 10 and 12 and could be home alone, but their dad was deployed and their mom worked long hours. So the grandparents would talk to the kids before they went to school, helping them with last minute homework and telling them what to pack for lunch. And they’d check in as soon as they got home, debriefing on their day. It made mom feel more secure, too.
Skype helps our armed forces personnel stay connected to those they’ve left behind at home, too. My girls even find that they’re able to keep close with friends from other cities because of Skype calls. When I was a teen and I met a friend at camp, or at a conference, I may have bonded with them, but the relationship was very short-lived. Phone calls were too expensive and letters were a pain. But today, the majority of my kids’ Facebook and Skype connections don’t even live near here.
One of Facebook’s biggest benefits to me is keeping up with friends and family who have moved away. Indeed, I often feel closer to more distant relatives I’ve “friended” on Facebook than I do to closer relatives who aren’t on the network. With Facebook I can easily keep up with their news, see pictures of their kids growing, and hear about their joys and sorrows and even quirky senses of humour.
Back in the 1980s, Bell began an advertising campaign calling on people to “reach out and touch someone” through phone calls. Today we really can, and it’s all through the internet. Yes, we need to guard against technology encroaching on our real life, but technology itself is not the enemy. And I, personally, would not turn back the clock to the days of rotary dial party lines and bulky, large-print books for anything.
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Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 25 years and happily married for 20! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 8 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.
I personally cringe when I see someone entertaining their small children with technology. If you are teaching children from a young age that they need technology to entertain themselves (instead of “old fashioned” learning to entertaining yourself with toys in the waiting room or sitting quietly with one or two small toys in your lap) while waiting at the doctor’s office or in the store, you are setting them right up to be texting during dinner or being reliant on technology too much. My 6 year old recently played in our local Upward basketball league at our church. When we were there watching her games, some family members kept trying to entertain my two younger children (ages 2 and 4) with their phones, but I wouldn’t let them. I told them that my kids needed to learn how to sit down and watch the games. Without the distraction of other people playing on their own phones, my children did just fine sitting and behaving.
Interesting point to a certain extend, but then again, if we allow children to sit with two small toys in their laps at the doctor’s office, by your logic, would that not still lead to teens who always want to text or have an ipod or a teen version of a “toy” of some sort at the dinner table? No, I think it’s watching adults text at the dinner table or being allowed to do it in the first place that leads to teen texting at the table. We have a no texting at the table or when someone is speaking to you at our house. Our child is only 5 years old and we ourselves don’t have iphones/pads…but when her teenaged aunts visit they have to follow the rules of OUR house, so she sees that their brother/her father, makes them put that stuff away and she hears him telling them that it is disrespectful to text at the table, etc.
*extent (and sorry for other typos/grammatical errors. I didn’t do a proof-read and I should have.
I agree! We moved 14 hours away from our parents, so we now sometimes talk with them on Skype. My daughters like seeing Grandma and Grandpa while they’re talking. 🙂 I also like being connected with friends through Facebook… it feels like we’re still in touch, even though I’ve moved away. Recently, a friend of mine called me – we had been penpals in school and then lost tough, but reconnected over Facebook and then on the phone. It was fun!
I definitely think we can coexist with technology without it taking over our lives completely. For example, my 2 1/2 year old will not read books or even watch learning videos for anything, but he’ll play learning games on the Kindle Fire or the iPad. I can live with that. And Facebook has made it so much easier to get in touch with people. My entire high school reunion last summer was planned on Facebook – no tracking down peoples’ addresses and phone numbers. So much easier! And my parents have had to temporarily relocate for my dad’s job to another state, away from all their grandchildren, so we Skype regularly.
I’ve seen what happens, though, when technology infiltrates life too much. One day I was out to lunch with my mom and there was a family of four in a booth near us – dad, mom, and two pre-teens/teens. The two kids spent the ENTIRE time wearing earbuds looking down at the devices in their hands. They never looked up or said a word. That made me seriously sad. And I’ve been in face-to-face conversations with friends when all of a sudden they whip out their buzzing phones and start texting or responding to Twitter or Facebook without so much as an “Excuse me”. Which I consider pretty rude.
So while I embrace technology and social media and all the things they can do for us, I also have a boundary – when I’m with people, I put face-to-face interaction first. There’s no substitute for that kind of connection. There just isn’t.
I agree one hundred percent, Sheila! It bothers me that a lot of my favorite blogs (and even my favorite preachers!) seem to try to blame a plethora of societal ills on facebook or instagram or pinterest or ipads. Facebook didn’t replace people sitting on front porches to chat with their neighbors; it filled a void, replacing those moments where a stay-at-home mom thinks “I wonder how so-and-so is, maybe I should call — oops there’s the laundry buzzer and why are the kids screaming bloody murder??”. Nor did smartphones replace family conversation around a dinner table; I agree they have no place there, but it is a very optimistic assumption that the same family that allows them there would have been chatting it up together in the absence of that type of technology.
I live in North Carolina and my grandfather lives in New Zealand. He’s a great fellow, almost 90 and sharp as a tack. He was a medical missionary in the Congo about 60 years ago, so you can imagine the stories he can tell!
I would never have gotten to know him if it weren’t for Skype.
I love this post, Sheila. Technology has been a gift to us. My Hubby travels 90% of the time. With technology we can Skye, FaceTime, text or call frequently. It makes it easier for him to stay involved in daily life at home.
We also use tech to help us with schooling. We can access a wide variety of information that was previously difficult to obtain. And educational games help reinforce math facts & increase reading skills.
iPods help keep my kids quiet at Doctor appointments. Because of my health issues, we end up having lots of appointments & I know I can take them with me if I can’t find child care. They will sit & play their games or read iBooks.
We do limit tech at times to keep it under control. It is just like anything else, if you aren’t careful it can take over your life. I remember as a teen having to be told to stop bringing my books to the table. My brother had to be told not to bring toys to the table. So tech is not the downfall of family time, it’s parents who don’t set boundaries & expectations…