Smartphones in a family
Many supporters of the patriarchal family fulminate against smartphones which seemingly destroy a natural way of communication between family members. They see a typical picture of a contemporary moment when sitting around a dinner table parents and children stare at screens of their personal gadgets in silence. Smartphones supposedly segregate the interests of the family members in such a way that the latter have nothing to say to each other in the real world. All their attention is occupied by the events happening somewhere in a virtual space. The very basis of natural human relationships is eroded by a new behavioural pattern different from what healthy family relations supposedly imply.
The interesting thing is that such grievances come not from just retrograde oldies who live in some pre-modern societies where religious and traditional dogmas prevail. Quite young philosophers and progressive thinkers from liberal democracies deliver such a discourse from time to time. And, surprisingly, no one is confused that the contemporary Western paradigm which glorifies individualism in all its manifestations has almost nothing to do with an old-school concept of a traditional family.
It seems smartphones appear a whipping boy for the ones who criticize the declining collective interrelations in modern societies. It is convenient to lay the blame on technologies without noticing anything positive in a paradigm shift they offer. What can be positive in the weakening of the relationships between generations, you may ask. Who can benefit from a widening gap between individuals when their emotional connections are affected by the white noise continuously coming from the always-connected gadgets?
It is worth starting to answer the questions with a reminder about freedom of choice as one of the largest crucial achievements of democracy. With regard to our situations when family members are gathered together for a dinner, the choice on what to say and whom to listen to has to appear before each family member.
In the old glory times when no easily accessible sources of information such as television and internet were available, the main news about everything happening around was brought to all family members by elders. Fathers and grandpas were informing women and children about the latest events explaining them along the line how the events should be interpreted correctly. The older the elders were, the bigger amount of information along with dipper insights they could deliver to the youth. Back then, the younger generations had a very narrow choice on where they could get knowledge.
Of course, they could also listen to school teachers and priests and read books. But in many cases, it was understood by default that their oldies knew everything the books and teachers might tell about. In fact, no better source of the actual “streaming” information with comments and explanations than family heads was available for the young people in those days. And the youth was listening to the fathers with bated breath.
We are not going to focus on the early days of radio and TV broadcasting when it was mainly used for state propaganda. All generations were equally exposed to brainwashing from those highly centralized media sources. Just recollect Dr. Goebbels with his talks on the German radio to correlate the phenomenon with the then Nazi ideology.
After WW2, many young people from Western societies started to doubt what talking heads from the national broadcasters were delivering. In the 1960s, the generation gap got a full-scale heist. And the final loss of credibility happened with oldies when the Internet appeared. These days, the advanced information technologies provided us with what the true democracy always endeavoured to — the widest possible choice ever in terms of news and people’s opinions.
Taking this fact into account, let’s try to imagine a possible alternative to the current state of affairs at our dinner table. This is not about a one-time-only case when somebody from family members can share a unique piece of information with the others. This is not about a local event that has just happened next door and a witness of which one of the family members has happened to be. This is about a trend, a repeating modus operandi when a mom or, for example, a grandpa can everyday inform the rest family with something truly meaningful and important, something capable of outweighing in its importance anything else coming from the internet through gadgets.
If we are talking about an average Western family, nobody from its members can deliver a more ample and interesting content than the internet can do day after day. The always-connected smartphones provide each family member with not just omniscience by request. They do it in a highly customized manner when every individual can select what meets his/her particular personal interests best. Social networks, news channels, games, movies, and a huge variety of the other available sources of information on the internet constitute a multifaceted projection of global crowd wisdom.
Gender, age, profession, hobby, and any other personal feature all do not matter when you select a channel through which you can get the content which perfectly reflects just your own unique identity. Who from your relatives can provide you with such freedom of choice over the topics for discussions? Who from the living human beings can compete with the almost divine power of knowledge running over the internet-connected gadgets? Both questions seem rhetorical.
The propagators of the “natural” smartphone-free family relationships should ponder over their personal experience in terms of the meaningful topics they could offer to their family members. How can they beat the opinions of the blogging superstars? What new can they personally propose to their younger relatives to learn from them? How effectively can they correlate their personal ideas with what the other relatives consider important and interesting? And which grander purpose should make everybody put away smartphones from a dinner table in favour of an “alive” conversation?
If someone can find objectively sufficient answers to those questions, an attempt to reload relationships at a family dinner table is worth trying. If not, it is worth remembering that modern young people have a right to suppose that senility and Alzheimer are approaching the older generations rapidly these days. Is it really worth giving the youth another reason to think they are right?
