Hiding in plain sight

Hiding in plain sight

Posted on March 26th, 2018 by Scott Warnock

A snow day. Ah, the glory. We’d be out all day, frozen, free. A lot of the stuff was dangerous, some was illegal, but (mostly) no one got hurt.

Now, at least among the adults I know, even when there are plenty of open spaces for kids to roam, it seems like the battle is just to get the kids outside.

So what are the kids doing with their time? Well, we all know, they’re playing video games and watching videos — often of other people playing video games.

What is on those screens? It’s not all bad. My eighth grader does know a lot of weirdly interesting stuff, and sometimes I have to hand it to YouTube (I already wrote about my one-time obsession with YouTuber CrazyRussianHacker). But it doesn’t take much for them to click, right in plain sight, right under noses, into questionable realms.

NPR described troubling YouTube algorithms: If you type in a [how to] search you may get disturbing autofill results. That NPR article also reported “children’s” videos about cartoon characters committing suicide or recommendations for bleach-drinking.

Your kid, sitting in the communal family room, can be isolated, a thousand miles away.

It’s tempting to leave them physically there. When an especially rammy kid (I might have had one or two of them) slaps on the headphones and curls up with a device, they can be sedate for hours.

“Whoa,” you may say, anticipating my generational digital sucker punch, “That sounds like someone reading a book.” Yes… but. A book of course can contain content that might send parents hand-wringing, and of course a physical book can just serve as a screen for something else, a la the old book-covering-comic-book scheme, but even the raciest book was finite in its scope. Not so with the web. In a YouTube search, they can leap from [how to have good hand writing] to [how to have s*x with kids]. All while you’re baking cookies in the next room.

You may get the urge to let them chill for other reasons, even on a snow day. Kids, hyperscheduled as they are, may need downtime more than ever, but as Wired reported not that long ago in “Why Teens Aren’t Partying Anymore,” socializing in person may be declining among teens, perhaps partially because parties were driven by boredom, and kids today are never bored. Anytime a hint of boredom creeps in, they tap a device. So, peculiarly, the same thing obstructing kids from building a snow fort may be preventing them from having a keg party.

But of course you worry, as I do in my own house, which has caused me to make some idiotic comments, such as when I mocked my middle son — an absolutely fine chap who does well in all spheres, academically, socially, and athletically — while we were leaving the house on a Friday night to “go out in the woods and drink some beer.” He shook his head at dumb dad, strapped on the headphones, and was off slaying opponents with and against his buddies in Fortnite for the evening.

But he will sit there for hours. Although mental health experts have since problematized it, the World Health Organization considered recognizing “gaming disorder”:

Characterizations of the disorder would include “recurrent” gaming behavior demonstrated by “impaired control over gaming,” “increasing priority given to gaming” and “escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.”

There again is this strange paradox at play. The “toys” of today are bounded imaginatively — hence the demise of Toys”R”Us. But the experiences children are having, often right under our noses, are unbounded, both in content and the extent to which they are drawn in, to the point that they subsume their lives. And they’re sitting right there, next to us.

So under our noses, they can do virtually anything they want — and that makes me think back to some years ago, when I came up with the name of this column.

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.