Parents and Children: Breaking Down the Technoference Barrier

 

No, I never read the word "technoference" before today, either.  But according to some sociologists, technoference is what happens when a parent pays more attention to a mobile phone than to their children.  And the results are not good.

 

An article by Clare Morell on the news website The Dispatch points out that even if children don't have mobile phones or screens themselves, their lives are significantly affected when their parents do.  A study that compared rates of parental mobile phone use with how well their children do when starting school found that kids whose parents used their phones a lot had deficits in language and interpersonal skills. 

 

Another problem comes when children try to learn new life skills.  It turns out that parental "scaffolding"—basic support and encouragement—is vital for children to control their emotions when dealing with new situations.  If Mommy is off in cyberspace when Junior is trying to color within the lines for the first time, she can't provide the reassurance and guidance which, however trivial-seeming for the parent, can make an earthshattering difference for the child. 

 

I'm pretty sure I remember the first time I rode a bike without training wheels.  And it was when my father held the bike for me to get on, and then gave it enough of a shove that it would stay upright no matter what I did.  Suddenly I could make it go on my own.  This was about three decades before the advent of mobile phones, and while my upbringing was not without problems, mobile-phone technoference wasn't one of them.

 

Full disclosure:  I have never been a parent, so I can't speak about childraising from personal experience.  But there is one childraising principle I have observed in action over many years, which the article terms "over-imitating."  I prefer to state it as follows:  "Whatever Daddy (or Mommy) does is OK."  This is a deep and profound, even subconscious, tendency in children to accept, embrace, and imitate whatever they see their parents doing.  It plays out in everything from such minor habits as habitual finger-tapping to major malfeasances such as adultery.  And I'm sure it applies to mobile-phone use as well.

 

One interesting study found that even babies are affected by a parent using a mobile phone within the child's field of view, even if the baby doesn't need anything in particular at the time.  If you observe the expressions of people while they are looking at their phones, it's a kind of passive, zoned-out look that showed up a lot when a sociologist decided to install a camera on a TV and take pictures of people as they watched television.  The researchers call this a "still face."  It turns out that showing a still face to an infant isn't good, because it gives the infant no positive feedback or assurance that the mother or father is paying attention to the child.  This passive look often inspires the infant to cry or otherwise try to attract attention. If Mommy stays glued to her phone, Junior escalates provocations until he gets some kind of reaction, which by this time will probably be a negative one. 

 

Yet another study showed a correlation between a four-times-greater incidence of depression in teenagers and high rates of mobile phone use among parents.

 

Now, as we should constantly remind ourselves when reading about research like this, correlation isn't necessarily causation.  The crisis in reproducibility of scientific studies means that statistical methods are often misapplied in an illogical way.  That is a topic for another blog.  But even if we disregard all the statistics and simply ask, "Can a parent's mobile-phone use get in the way of their attempts to be a good parent?" I think the answer is obvious.  Of course it can, but what can we do about it?

 

Morell has a number of recommendations, some of which are easier to do than others.  She suggests having a "phone box" to put phones in at the end of the day, so parents and children are both freed up to interact without distractions.  How one would define the day's end is up to the individual, but it sounds like a good idea.  I have a phone you can actually turn off, and I set it in my study and leave it there overnight.

 

She suggests putting away your phone whenever you are with your children.  For some people, especially single moms, that is a big ask.  But at least consciously setting aside a no-phone interval each day might be a good idea.  The only time these days I am around parents with a lot of children is when I go to church, and except for the stray ringtone during the sermon, you might otherwise think that my church is a phone-free zone.  That's an unusual situation, though, and I have no idea what these parents do with regard to mobile phones when they are home with their kids.  A good many of them homeschool, however, and you can bet the phone is put away during those times.

 

Morell says she uses something called a Wisephone.  A visit to that firm's website shows that their product has "no social media, no explicit content, no web browser" but can do basic stuff like maps, calling for rides, playing music, dealing with money, and checking the weather.  That's two or three more things than I use my phone for, so I'm ahead of her already in that regard.

 

I'm also in sync with her recommendations to go analog (or at least not use your phone for everything):  get a separate alarm clock (check), use a paper calendar (check), use a real camera instead of your phone camera (check), and use a notepad and pen (check).  I claim no particular virtue for doing these things:  I just never quit doing them when I got a mobile phone.  Others may have more of a problem transitioning.

 

So even if kids don't have mobile phones themselves, their parents' phones can cause problems.  Parenting is a huge responsibility, and my metaphorical hat is off to anyone who attempts it.  Just be aware that your smartphone may get in the way of being the best parent you want to be.

 

Sources:  Clare Morell's article "Parents, Put Down the Phones" is on the (paywall-protected, unfortunately) website The Dispatch, which some may be able to access at https://thedispatch.com/article/parenting-phones-screen-time-kids-development-imitation/.  I also referred to the Wisephone website at https://wisephone.com/. 

Is There A Contact-Tracing App In Your Future?

Excuse the similarity to last week's headline about immunity passports in your future, but with so little going on right now either in the economy or elsewhere, thinking about the future seems to be a good thing to do.  And it's likely that you will hear more in the coming weeks about contact-tracing apps for your mobile phone.

A contact-tracing app is designed to follow you around like a 24-hour detective, noticing everybody you've been within Bluetooth range of.  Bluetooth is a short-range communications system that virtually all mobile phones have, and its typical range is about six feet (two meters), which is conveniently just the same as the social-distancing space we are supposed to be keeping to avoid COVID-19 nowadays.  If anyone you've been near subsequently tests positive for COVID-19, this fact is communicated via the app to everyone who has come within proximity to that infected person in the last week or two, and they know to quarantine themselves and get tested too. 

In the computer geek's ideal world, not only would everybody have such an app, but the app would also take note of the physical location where the encounter with the infected person occurred.  That way you could let people even without mobile phones know that if they were in such-and-such place at such-and-such time, there was somebody there who could have infected them.

Countries such as South Korea which have implemented extensive contact tracing by non-automated means have found that it greatly reduced the need for blanket restrictions on movement, such as the U. S. and many other countries are enduring right now.  So worldwide, a number of countries are developing contact-tracing apps.  The BBC reports that Australia and Denmark hope to roll theirs out within two weeks, and Germany won't be far behind. 

In the U. S., the states of North and South Dakota as well as Utah have announced that they are working on similar projects.  However, the tech giants Google and Apple are reluctant to implement the GPS-coupled geographic data feature, because they fear that for example, if the Walmart in your neighborhood gets cited as a place where somebody could have picked up COVID-19, that could hurt the store's business. 

At an Oxford University ethics website, Bryce Goodman discusses the ethical implications of these proposed apps.  He sees it as a privacy-versus-health tradeoff, and would push the lever way toward health and away from privacy.  He points out that the same kind of privacy-intrusive data tracking is already being used to sell us things like skin cream, so why not use it to save lives? 

Until a vaccine against COVID-19 is available, we are either going to have to keep doing what we're doing now—hunkering down and wrecking the economy—or get a lot better at tracing contacts and quarantining only those people who need to be quarantined.  I agree with Goodman when he points out that the extremely blunt instrument of a general lockdown is much harder on some people than others—mainly those who can't work from home and are suffering from the lack of a paycheck, or any distinct prospect of one in the future.  So anything we can do safely to lift the economically costly restrictions should be considered seriously.

On the other hand, whatever humankind can conceive, an unkind human can hack, and it's very easy to picture how a widely-used, let alone compulsory, contact-tracing app could be twisted to cause embarrassment, loss of business, or worse.  Ideally, what would emerge from the system would be a big-data picture of the entire process of how the disease is spreading, geography and names included.  That information would have to exist somewhere, regardless of how often the proposers of the idea say it would be anonymized, because the whole point of the system is identifying people, and perhaps places as well.

There will be mistakes made, and perhaps intentionally false data provided to the system.  How would you feel if you had been doing everything right and suddenly your phone tells you you have COVID-19 and have to stay in total isolation for two weeks?  Or what if some hacker maliciously publishes the names of everybody who has contacted someone with COVID-19 in a whole city?  Welcome to Pariahville.

Those are some downsides I can think of without even trying hard, and I'm sure there are others.  On the upside, I have to admit it would be nice to go back to something approximating normal and get a haircut, pump gas, and (horrors!) even go to a movie without feeling either fearful, guilty, or both.  But I would have confidence to do such things only if I knew that my chances of catching the disease of the hour would be so small that it would fall down into the risk noise of being run over by a bus or hit by lightning.  Right now, that's not the case.

And here's where this topic folds into last week's topic:  the immunity-passport idea.  It might develop that the contact-tracing app becomes a de facto disease-free passport.  If you've been using it faithfully for however long, and if the great majority of people around you are also using it, and if it really works, the fact that it shows you are clean can be trusted.  But if I was running a movie theater, I'd want to see that green spot or whatever it would be on your app before I'd let you in.  And that would get us right back to where many citizens of China are today, who have to show a green color on their compulsory smartphone COVID-19 app before they're permitted to move around most places.  In that regard, China is not a place I would like to emulate right now.

I'm no prophet, and I can't tell whether contact-tracing apps will get very far (Singapore has had less than 25% participation in their voluntary rollout, which makes it almost useless), or will become the de-facto passport to ordinary life again.  Probably what will happen is somewhere in between.  But it will be interesting to see if we can use this high-tech solution to fight what is presently devastating many lives, both in terms of sickness and death, and in terms of economic loss and social isolation.

Sources:  I thank Michael Cook, editor of mercatornet.com, for calling my attention to contact-tracing apps and providing me with these sources I referred to:  the BBC at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52325352 and the Oxford Practical Ethics site at http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2020/04/guest-post-pandemic-ethics-social-justice-demands-mass-surveillance-social-distancing-contact-tracing-and-covid-19/ .  I also referred to an article from the Reuters website at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-apps/showdown-looms-between-silicon-valley-u-s-states-over-contact-tracing-apps-idUSKCN22702F. 

Under the Cloud

The business world is almost as fad-ridden as the education world, and one of the hot words in the last few years is "cloud" as in "I'll get it from the cloud," or "We put all our data on the cloud."  In this sense, the word means a set of Internet servers where your important data is archived so that it is accessible from anywhere that has an Internet connection.  The concept is increasingly vital to commercial and institutional users worldwide, and makes sense in that context.  But as Scientific American columnist David Pogue warns in the February issue, Apple and Microsoft are taking not-so-subtle steps to force many individual users of their products onto the cloud.  And I doubt that anyone reading this column can avoid using Apple and Microsoft products without a lot of inconvenience. 

The situation, as I understand it, is basically this:  suppose you have data that needs continual updating on your portable gizmo (which can be an iPad, an iPhone, a BlackBerry, one of those Android things, or you name it), and you'd also like the same version of the same data on your laptop.  In the old days, whenever you made changes on your calendar, for example, you would then physically plug your portable device through a USB cable or whatnot into your laptop and tell it to sync.  That way, your laptop calendar would agree with your handheld thingy's calendar and vice versa, and you wouldn't find yourself at Aunt Mimi's when you were supposed to be having your teeth cleaned.  So far, so good.

Then the number of handheld devices proliferated, and so did their operating systems, and so did the ways you can have laptops and towers talk with portable systems (wireless, IR, Bluetooth, etc.), and at least according to the manufacturers and their unofficial representatives, it just got to be too hard to come up with proprietary software to sync absolutely every portable thingamajig with each operating system for all the popular computers.  So they just said forget it:  the real data will sit on the cloud, where we can keep track of it, and then all we have to do is make sure that every piece of hardware (portable or not) can keep in touch with the cloud.  And that solved the problem. . . .

But if you were used to firing up your old laptop and plugging it into your BlackBerry that you've had since 2003, and you are dead-set against keeping your data in a place that you know not where and you know not when it might go down, you are now out in the cold and under the cloud, so to speak.  According to Mr. Pogue, the latest operating systems from both Apple and Microsoft either don't allow you to do hard-wired transfers without involving the cloud, or make it so hard to do that you almost have to get a networking certificate from Microsoft to know how to do it. A discussion thread on an Apple forum on exactly this topic has been going on since last October, and has accumulated 150 pages of comments.  So there are more than a few people upset about this.

Call me Amish, but it doesn't affect me because my form of a BlackBerry is a three-by-five card.  Or rather, many three-by-five cards.  I suppose if you took all the three-by-five cards I've used in the last decade and piled them up, they would make a stack high enough to fall over and form the kind of mess my desk looks like some days.  In fact, that may be why. . . anyway, somehow I have survived thirty years of an occasionally intense professional life with nothing more advanced than a laptop or two and a mobile phone that you still have to use the numeric keypad for to send a text.  It's so annoying to do it that way that I hardly ever send texts, which is all right by me. 

But seriously, this specific issue is an example of a more general trend that organizations are following: a move toward exerting increasing control of any computer that is connected to one of their networks.  For example, I spend some time at the University of Texas at Austin.  If I was using a University-provided laptop (which I'm not, as it turns out), I would now have to make sure that all the data on it was encrypted in accordance with a University-provided type of encryption software so that if it happens to get stolen, the thieves can't run off with University data.  That makes sense from a liability and security point of view—I have blogged on numerous scandals and crimes that happened when someone took home a laptop full of supposedly secure data—but it represents another intrusion, if you will, into a space that was formerly rather private. 

Of course, if the University owns the laptop, they get to say what you can and can't do with it.  Privately owned computers connected to privately rented networks are another matter, but then you still have to deal with Apple or Microsoft, and their pressure to keep your stuff on the cloud will prove irresistible.  The Star Trek Borg, a race of cybernetic beings, liked to say "resistance is futile," but that was only a TV show.   

Personally, I don't see any real harm in letting Microsoft know the details of my next dental appointment.  And yes, those massive servers go down from time to time, but then so does your laptop.  I admit that I would feel a certain kind of existential queasiness in entrusting the only record of my professional schedule to some ethereal system that is everywhere and nowhere, rather than having it in a tangible, solid form on pieces of paper in my appointment calendar in my briefcase.  (Yes, I do that the old-fashioned way too.)  Maybe people living in the 1850s felt the same way about the newfangled electromagnetic telegrams, and didn't really trust them on an instinctive level as much as they would trust a letter written by the hand of a friend they knew.  But they got used to trusting telegrams, and I suppose we will get used to trusting the cloud, as long as our trust is not abused. 

Sources:  The online version of David Pogue's article "The Curse of the Cloud" can be found at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/were-forced-to-use-cloud-services-but-at-what-cost/.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on BlackBerry and Borg (Star Trek). 

Privacy in Public: Mobile Phones and Personal Spaces

The other evening I was waiting in line in a cafeteria, and the woman ahead of me, who was rather short, was reading her phone.  A few years ago, the phrase "reading her phone" would have ranked as nonsense, but nowadays when most mobile phones seem to do everything a desktop computer used to do, only faster, reading your phone has become a humdrum, routine part of life.  Anyway, she was flipping through what looked like either twitters or Facebook comments, and I, being a compulsive reader of anything in my field of vision, began to read along with her.  The content was nothing remarkable—little notes from friends about what other friends were doing, pictures of small children (grandchildren?), comments about an upcoming wedding—I frankly forgot nearly all of what I saw a few minutes after I saw it.  What stuck with me was a question:  what exactly was I doing in reading that lady's phone over her shoulder?  What would you call it?  And does the fact that you can do something like that have any larger implications?

I don't need a Ph. D. in moral philosophy (which I don't have anyway) to know that it was wrong to read somebody else's private messages, from whatever source derived.  Nowadays, of course, they may not really be private.  On Facebook and personal blogs and so on, people make public all sorts of matters that earlier generations would have buried deep inside a locked diary.  But the presumption is that the content of a person's own phone is, well, personal and private.  And it was not right for me to read her mail, so to speak.  I watched an old movie the other night which had a plot that turned on the theft of a letter—a theft that was noted by a landlady, who called the cops and brought the whole criminal scheme tumbling down thereby.  Stealing a letter is an overt, easily documented act.  But just looking over somebody's shoulder in a cafeteria line—who can tell what you're seeing? 

The closest word I can think of that means something like what I did is "eavesdropping,"  but that involves hearing, not seeing.  "Eyedropping" won't work—it sounds like what goes on in an opthalmologist's office.  "Spying" would cover it, but I didn't go to the cafeteria with the intention of snooping on somebody else's phone messages.  I just happened to be standing where, without any real effort or intention on my part, I was able to read private material.  The parallel between that and a situation where you are in a restaurant booth and can't help overhearing conversations in the next booth is pretty exact. 

Whatever it should be called, it's something that happens more and more often as people with portable electronic communications devices take over public spaces in subtle but significant ways.  What about those folks who have either an ear-mounted phone, or one of those little earbud-cord microphones that you have to look closely to see?  They're the same ones who conduct one-sided phone conversations in hallways or sidewalks at normal volume, so that at a distance they give every appearance of talking with an invisible companion, which leads one to doubt their sanity until you get close enough to see the electronics they're talking to.  We don't mind people having normal conversations in public when both parties are right there, so why should we mind if one of the participants happens to be at the other end of an electronic link?  I'm not sure, except that sometimes people talk about things over the phone that they wouldn't mention in a public place.  And if they're doing it over a mobile phone, they sometimes tend to forget their surroundings, and passersby end up privy to TMI (too much information).  This is just as discourteous as what I did to the lady in front of me in the cafeteria line, but it's discourtesy of a different type. 

The real problem, I think, is that the boundary between public and private is getting really fuzzy, and you can get into trouble if you mix up the two.  Saying, "I'd like to kill you!" out in a field where only you and your listener can hear you is one thing.  It may be a serious threat, or it may be nothing more than a joke between well-acquainted friends.  But saying the same thing on Facebook or another internet-mediated forum can land you in jail.

Here are two pieces of advice, one for users of technologies that tend to make the private public, and the other for bystanders who end up hearing or seeing something that the user didn't intend for you to hear or see.  For users, try to realize that while you may be focused just on your friends you are chatting with, the medium you are using is full of holes that leak information to casual passersby—people just browsing the sidewalk or the web, and even folks you may be trying to keep a secret from.  So use some discretion in what you look at or say.  If you wouldn't want to hear someone else saying what you're saying, don't say it, or at least wait for a more private circumstance than looking at your phone while waiting in line or talking through your earbud mike at a crowded bus stop.

And for bystanders, I would say that while sometimes you really can't help overhearing or "overseeing" someone's private information, you can help what you do with it.  If you can read somebody else's email over a shoulder, well, quit it.  If you can hear somebody's private conversation, maybe move to a chair where you can't.  And otherwise, try to be nice even to thoughtless or nasty people.  To some folks, old-fashioned courtesies such as beginning a letter with "Dear" look hypocritical:  if you aren't really dear to me, why should I address you that way?  But courtesy is the social lubricant that you don't wake up the next day with a hangover from.  It makes life easier and more pleasant for all of us, and while it has aspects of hypocrisy, I like to think of it as more like clean, well-tailored clothing that covers a less-than-presentable body.  And come to think of it, that's something else that is out of fashion, and maybe for the same reason.  But just as there is good taste in clothing, there is good taste in the use of mobile phones, and here's hoping more people use them more tastefully.

Sources:  After I wrote this blog, I found a website that makes most of my points and more, and with pictures.  It's "How to Practice Cell Phone Etiquette" at http://www.wikihow.com/Practice-Cell-Phone-Etiquette.  Highly recommended.