The Trouble with Tech
Captain Kirk was the man.
At least that’s what I thought as an impressionable fifth-grader back in 1974. Watching Star Trek re-runs, I’d fantasize about being on the bridge with badass Captain Kirk and cool Mr. Spock, traveling to worlds where no man had gone before; heading at warp speed to exotic planets and confidently seducing green women—what more could a red-blooded young boy want?
Then there was all of that cool tech! That communicator that he’d so suavely flip open and command, “Beam me up, Scotty.” Desperate to be one of his crew, I made hundreds of paper versions of that flip phone communicator while I was supposed to be paying attention to my teacher, Mrs. Legheart, as she droned on and on about the Pilgrims or fractions or some such . . . but certainly not anything as exciting as my Star Trek–inspired imagination.
I dreamed of a time when reality could catch up to my science fiction–fueled fantasy, not realizing the wisdom of the old adage “be careful what you wish for.” Because, yes indeed, the tech of Kirk is here—but at a very, very high price.
Believe me, I didn’t want that to be the case; I wanted—I yearned for—guilt-free tech. Unfortunately, it seems that we, as a society, have entered into a Faustian deal. Yes, we have these amazing handheld marvels of the digital age—tablets and smartphones—miraculous glowing devices that connect people throughout the globe and can literally access the sum of all human knowledge in the palm of our hand.
But what is the price of all this future tech? The psyche and soul of an entire generation. The sad truth is that for the oh-so-satisfying ease, comfort and titillation of these jewels of the modern age, we’ve unwittingly thrown an entire generation under the virtual bus.
C’mon—aren’t you being a bit dramatic? you might ask. But look around you. Look at any restaurant that has families with kids; look at any place where kids and teens hang out—pizzerias, schoolyards, friend’s houses—what do you see?
The head-down, glassy-eyed zombification of kids whose faces are illuminated by glowing screens. Like the soulless, expressionless people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the zombies in The Walking Dead, one by one our young people have fallen victim to this digital plague.
I had my first glimpse of this nascent global epidemic back in the summer of 2002 on the island of Crete. My newlywed wife and I had planned a trip to Greece—land of my parents and ancestors—as an escape from a hectic life in New York.
After the usual stops at Mykonos and Santorini, we decided to take the ferry down to the more rugged island of Crete and hike several hours down the ancient Samarian Gorge to the remote coastal village of Loutro. It is a magical place: Stunning, sun-drenched Greek beach with laughing bathers splashing around in the clearest blue water; a beautiful, tranquil place that time forgot . . . There are no cars, no convenience stores, no TV, no flashing lights—just traditional whitewashed houses and a handful of small waterfront inns and their beachfront tavernas.
Loutro is also known as a go-to family destination. The seclusion of the traffic-free village makes it an ideal playground for kids: kayaking, swimming, climbing of rocks, games of tag, leaps into the water—it is a kids’ paradise.
During our first day there, after having spent the whole morning at the beach, we stopped by one of the cafés for a frappe. While there, I asked the waiter where the restrooms were and was pointed toward some steep stairs down to a dimly lit, low-ceilinged basement. Once downstairs, I could see an odd glow emanating from a corner in the darkness. Squinting to adjust to the darkened room, I was able to see the light source: it was Loutro’s anemic version of an Internet café—two old Apple computers on a tiny table in a corner of the depressing cellar. As I looked closer, I could see the dark silhouettes of two pudgy American kids playing video games with their round faces illuminated by screens just inches away from their faces.
That’s odd, I thought; one of the world’s most beautiful seascapes, where the local Greek kids were playing from sunup to sundown was just a few feet away, yet these two were holed up in the darkness in the middle of a sunny afternoon.
As I chanced into that café a couple more times over the week that we were there, those two kids were always in that basement with their illuminated faces. Not being a parent myself yet, I didn’t think that much about the pudgy kids with the glowing faces and wrote them off, rather judgmentally, I must admit, as probably just the unhealthy children of bad parents.
Yet I never forgot the hypnotized expressions of those boys playing in that horrible cellar while paradise was just over their heads. Slowly, as with the drip, drip, drip of a faucet, I began to realize that the hypnotized, glassy-eyed stares were spreading; like a virtual scourge, the Glow Kids were multiplying.
Is this just a harmless indulgence or fad like some sort of digital hula hoop? Some say that glowing screens may even be good for kids—an interactive educational tool.
But the research doesn’t bear that out. In fact, there is not one credible research study that shows that a child exposed to more technology earlier in life has better educational outcomes than a tech-free kid; while there is some evidence that screen-exposed kids may have some increased pattern-recognition abilities, there just isn’t any research that shows that they become better students or better learners.
Instead, what we do have is a growing mountain of evidence showing that there can be some very significant negative clinical and neurological effects on Glow Kids. Brain-imaging research is showing that glowing screens—like those of iPads—are as stimulating to the brain’s pleasure center and as able to increase levels of dopamine (the primary feel-good neurotransmitter) as much as sex does. This brain-orgasm effect is what makes screens so addictive for adults, but even more so for children with still-developing brains that just aren’t equipped to handle that level of stimulation.
What’s more, an ever-increasing amount of clinical research correlates screen tech with psychiatric disorders like ADHD, addiction, anxiety, depression, increased aggression and even psychosis. Perhaps most shocking of all, recent brain-imaging studies conclusively show that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person’s developing brain in the same way that cocaine addiction can.
That’s right—a kid’s brain on tech looks like a brain on drugs.
In fact, glowing screens are such a powerful drug that the University of Washington has been using a virtual reality video game to help burn victims with pain management during their treatments. Amazingly, while burn patients are immersed in the game, they experience a pain-reducing, morphine-like analgesic effect and thus don’t require any actual narcotics. While this is a wonderful use of screen technology for pain-management medicine, we are also unwittingly giving this digital morphine to kids.
Ironically, while we’ve declared a so-called War on Drugs, we’ve allowed this virtual drug—which Dr. Peter Whybrow, director of neuroscience at UCLA, calls “electronic cocaine”; which Commander Dr. Andrew Doan, who has an M.D. and Ph.D. in neuroscience and heads addiction research for the U.S. Navy, calls digital “pharmakeia” (Greek for “drug”); and which Chinese researchers call “electronic heroin”—to slip into the homes and classrooms of our youngest and most vulnerable, seemingly oblivious to any negative effects.
Meanwhile, China has identified Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as its number-one health crisis, with more than 20 million Internet-addicted teens, and South Korea has opened 400 tech addiction rehab facilities and given every student, teacher and parent a handbook warning them of the potential dangers of screens and technology. Yet here in the United States, clueless and sometimes corrupt school bureaucrats are pushing to put glowing tablets—yes, electronic cocaine—into the hands of every kindergartener.
Why not? Tech in the classroom is big business, estimated to top $60 billion by 2018. Yet what I also discovered as I researched this book is that tech in the classroom is also the story of greed, scandal and FBI investigations.
Even if our schools are letting us down by not protecting kids from the dangers of age-inappropriate tech, surely parents are beginning to see the problems associated with screens? Unfortunately, many caring and well-meaning parents are either simply not tuned in to how damaging screens are, or those who do sense that there may be a problem remain in convenience-induced denial.
After all, it is difficult to hear that something that so many of us have come to love can somehow be bad for us and even worse for our kids. We’ve become so dependent on the digital babysitter or the so-called virtual learning tool that we don’t really want to hear that our handy-dandy smartphones and our wonderful, all-knowing iPads can actually be damaging our kids’ brains—say it ain’t so!
But like it or not, it is so.
As one of the country’s foremost addiction experts, I know addiction when I see it. And I’m seeing it in epidemic proportions in the obsessive video gaming, compulsive texting and hypnotized stares of the kids I treat. Indeed, in the past decade, I’ve done clinical work with over a thousand teenagers and have noticed the insidious and addictive effect of screens, which has led to a whole host of clinical disorders and a digitally induced adolescent malaise.
Yet as screens glaze children the world over, parents either ignore the problem or just throw up their hands and sigh, “It’s just the way kids are today.” But kids haven’t always been this way; it’s only been six years since the invention of the iPad—and in that blink of time, an entire generation of kids has been psychologically impacted and neurologically rewired.
I’m fully aware that I may get some pushback or even anger from tech lovers and video gamers. But neither this book nor I am anti-tech. Rather, this book is aimed at informing adults who care about the society they live in while also warning and informing parents about the clinical and neurological dangers that excessive screen exposure can have on their kids.
I love my tech. I also love driving my car; I just don’t think that my eight-year-old twins should be driving it yet. So fret not, video warriors; my focus is tech effects on children. I am not here to advocate pulling the plug on those of you past the age of consent. Although you might want to think about getting outdoors a little every now and again. To quote the great William Shatner in his famous Star Trek convention parody on Saturday Night Live years ago: “Get a life!” And I don’t mean a synthetic life or even a Second Life. I mean an honest-to-goodness, walking-outdoors, smelling-the-roses, having-a-girlfriend, feeling-the-grass-under-your-feet sort of life.
Please don’t get me wrong; I really do understand the appeal. I’m not just an addiction expert, I’m also a recovering addict—the original masters of escaping reality. Truth be told, even though I have been in recovery from my addiction issues for many, many years, I find it increasingly challenging to maintain a healthy relationship with my seductive little smartphone.
Running a high-end rehab facility and treating many patients, I rationalized that I always need to be available in case of client emergencies. But the reality is that it’s hard for me to unplug—even while on vacation. Like the cardiologist who smokes, I realize that I’m not immune to addictive tendencies creeping back into my life. And I’m also left wondering: if I’m having such a hard time managing my tech usage with my fully developed adult brain, with all of my training and addiction recovery work, what chance does an impulsive eight-year-old have?
Whatever we may think about tech usage for adults, a person doesn’t need to be an addiction expert or a neuroscientist—or a Luddite—to see the undeniably negative effects of age-inappropriate tech, both in the latest research and in the everyday reality of plugged-in and tuned-out kids.
Yet as smart writers and witty bloggers debate the pros and cons of technology, the ever-increasing ubiquity of tech is doing real damage to kids now.
As the late, great Yogi would say, it’s getting late early.
—NK
January 2016
Sag Harbor, NY