The Effects of Technology on Children

Screens Versus Brains: Are We Robbing Our Children Of The Ability To Think?

Here’s an interesting article sent in by Richard Giles. It is written by Sue Palmer who writes and speaks about child
development and education in the modern world. Her concerns mirror those of of Baroness Susan Greenfield on IT’s impacts on children

Don
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Have you been in a primary school classroom recently? Did you notice that a large white screen has replaced the old-fashioned blackboard? And have you any idea how much of the day the children spend staring at it? In the classrooms I’ve visited, the ‘interactive whiteboard’ features in almost every lesson. Children sit, with blank zoned-out faces, staring at brightly coloured shapes and figures zooming around the screen……”As children engage in more screen activity, they definitely read less – and the effect is likely to be permanent…..Ultimately, screen images render the printed word simply boring, at a crucial phase when the child’s
brain and mind are developing. SNIP

Is Modern Technology Killing Us?

From Truthout

By Erica Etelson, Truthout | Op-Ed

Excerpt

“Science now makes all things possible . . . but it does not thereby make all possible things desirable.” – Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine

The first thing I’d like to say about modern technology is this: I’d be dead without it. So would my son, surgically delivered and hospitalized for jaundice, and so too most of the people I know who at some point or another have stamped out life-threatening infections with antibiotics. As I pen this screed, I’m mindful of the fact that a good deal fewer than 7 billion humans could survive on this planet without the machinery, fuel, communications and computation devices that are the blood and backbone of contemporary civilization. But the fact that technology has enabled the human population to grow to 7 billion doesn’t necessarily mean that it can sustain this many of us forever. To assume that it will, without examining its (and our) vulnerabilities, is reckless.
SNIP
The problem with technology is that most innovations have unintended consequences, and those unintended consequences are piling up, causing harm and creating dangers of existential magnitude. We turn a blind eye to those dangers and uncritically presume that, for all but the creepiest technologies (such as animal cloning), the benefits outweigh the risks and that technological innovation is humanity’s highest calling.
SNIP