Glow Kids
I really wanted to like this book; overall, I’m sympathetic to the message and the author has passable
credentials and an interesting thesis. Overall, the idea is that screens are wrecking people, particularly
kids. He Tries hard not to come off as a blanket Luddite: invoking Postman, citing technologists, etc. but
ultimately fails to provide much nuance to the statement “tech is bad”. Still, the book helped point out a
few interesting things to me.
- low fidelity technology can break schemas. An easy example of this is how a game with a bad physics
engine might make it more difficult for the user to interact with the physics of the real world. This is a
minor effect in adults but seems like it would be worse for kids. Physics is important, but imagine the
horrendous social and economic engines breaking kids’ brains on the daily. (I’d love to spend some time
researching virtual worlds and their effects on schemas.)
1.1 By extension, low-fidelity violence games seems to have altered how some kids view reality. He spends
extra time on this, recounting lurid anecdotes of children murdering their parents and teens stabbing a
peer in the woods among others.
- Screens can be addictive. The reasons for this seem varied, but involve color, motion, camera angles,
interactive reward mechanisms, and possibly a few other factors. He tries hard to compare them to
drugs. In one example he cites measures of dopamine release for 80’s video games compared to other
dopaminergic activities; the games place somewhere between sex and cocaine. In another example, he
points to virtual reality’s pain-numbing effects, better than morphine. In both cases, medical pros tell me
the connection is unsurprising. Dopamine is a poor measure of addictive capacity and the virtual reality
example is no more impressive than hypnotism (also used clinically to treat pain).
2.1 Addiction is the author’s professional forte and it shows. His discussion of rat-drug addiction in
Skinner boxes vs. “rat park” was illuminating. When the rats had nothing better to do with their lives,
most became addicted to drugs, when they had a whole park of interesting things to do, only a few
became addicted to drugs. This matches my experience with video games. Most people seem to be fine
with them, but some of us can get hopelessly addicted.
There were a few things in the book that drove me up a wall. His lectures on education and technology
were sheer foolishness. His focus seemed to constantly be correlating additional tech in the classroom
with poorer educational outcomes. This is like correlating yellow paint on cars and the speed at which
they travel. the effect of tech on education entirely depends on the tech! I’ve used games, shows, digital
textbooks, etc. to great educational gain and have similarly used social media, games, shows, and digital
books to educational detriment. The finger-wagging at capitalism and markets was similarly steeped in
thoughtless ignorance.
The chapter on cancer and tech was so hyperbolic as to be nearly unreadable; the evidence for
non-ionizing radiation as a carcinogen seems to be equivocal at best.
Overall, my takeaway from the book was
1. keep schema breaking screens away from kids
- watch out for the addictive power of screens (my phone is now in black and white)