Stay Involved, Don't Opt Out

Children learn language by being with other people. A screen playing a video, a recording talking at them, none of that substitutes for the back-and-forth of actual contact. So I find myself wondering: as the people around us pull further into their own devices and away from each other, are we nudging more kids toward something that looks like autism? Whatever happened to a plain conversation, or the quiet pleasure of a book you can't put down?

Not being able to connect with another person is a genuine problem, and I can picture where it leads. Virtual play dates for kids. How far from real life is that? Maybe we all end up at home, letting the cloud and the internet stand in for us, the ether handling the talking we used to do ourselves. Reading and writing might stop being skills anyone needs, with computers trading messages for us just by hearing our voices. Push it further and we won't even use words, only thoughts and images passed around to share an idea.

This began as a short piece about how kids need human contact to learn and to really flourish, and somewhere along the way it got a little frightening. Picture a day when people no longer sign their names, partly because cursive was never taught to them, but mostly because reading and writing aren't treated as necessary anymore. We have been doing a version of this since machines first arrived, pulling the human hand out of the things we make and use every day. And I keep asking myself whether we are also losing something harder to name: the good feeling that skilled, devoted craftsmen and craftswomen leave inside their work.

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