The Blame Game

            While reading, Alone Together, Turkle makes a point that children are now competing for attention from their parents because of their phones. She states that, “Phones, before they became an essential element in a child’s own life, were the competition, one that children didn’t necessarily feel they could best” (267). Is this actually a technological issue, or a bad parent issue? An inattentive parent will still be inattentive even without a cellphone in their hands. Before technology, there were many other distractions that people immersed themselves in. The most classic trope is of a father hating to be disturbed while reading a newspaper, or an older sibling that could never get their head out of a book to play with anyone. It seems like technology is being blamed for human error.

               

             Another argument is that technology has caused people to become antisocial. There is no longer any human interaction because of cellphone use. With this thought in mind, the society before technology must have been incredibly interactive with each other.

It seems like the majority of the people in this photo aren’t communicating at all. There aren’t any cellphones in their hands. Humans crave entertainment, and it doesn’t matter what form it comes in. Of course, this is just one picture, but it still shows that humans have always been prone to distraction. Our attention span was not made to be infinite. If it’s not books, cellphones, or newspapers, then it’s just natural spacing out. According to a study from the American Association of the Advancement of Science, people daydream forty six percent of the time. Haven’t you ever seen someone stare blankly into space? There was nothing around to garner their attention, yet they still were distracted by their own thoughts. It seems strange to blame technology rather than the people who use it.  

-Angeleen So


The AAAS Study: 

http://www.nola.com/health/index.ssf/2010/11/people_daydream_almost_half_th.html