It's a Hard Knock Life

I have a confession - I've never liked babies. It's challenging to pinpoint the exact reason why. If I'm on an airplane with a baby, I immediately put in my headphones. If I see a mom with a baby out and about, I move as far away as possible. And the big one - if I'm asked to hold a baby, I decline. It's better that way.

You could say that I've spent the better part of the last decade avoiding them at all costs. My plan has been, for the most part, successful, that is, until my friends started having them. I was confronted with this problem the past few weeks as my travel extravaganza drew to a close.

My last stops were to visit old friends who had children. Despite my sentiments above, I managed to make it through two full days of babies - some happy, some screaming and some still developing a personality. At one point during the trip, I could even picture myself having children…that is until a child found the lung capacity and stamina to scream the last thirty minutes of my flight - #ruinedit.

You know what else caught my eye during this time? Technology in the hands of every child nowadays. Literally every child. Regardless of age - there's a phone or Smart TV or iPad near a child or directly on their person. And it deeply unsettled me. Why?

Even though technology is a revolutionary product and I am an active consumer of all things tech, media, entertainment, etc., it's not a product designed for children.

Let me elaborate for a moment….

In the 6th grade, my teacher assigned each student to create a diorama. I do not recall the specifics - just that I ventured to a search engine to find images of "lockers" for my background. The key work seemed innocuous enough until I hit the "Search" button and scattered amongst the images of school lockers was an image of a semi-naked woman. I immediately navigated to another image - crisis averted. Except even fifteen years later, I can still recall the image. And this was before Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or Instagram.

I think of the internet like an adolescent teenager - rebellious and pushing the envelope. We've allowed tech companies to grow larger, become more intrusive in our lives but applied light punishment when they break the rules. Collecting children's personal information - our reaction - "that's bad!" but let's just impose fines on Google and TikTok. It's comparable to sending a teenager to their room and taking away their technology for an hour. It's ineffective and unlikely to cause real, lasting change.

We are living in an age where there is no oversight for our digital cities. Think about it. On a recent trip, while seated in Boston Logan Airport, I saw no fewer than twenty law enforcement agents over the span of an hour on patrol.

There's nothing comparable online. I've never encountered law enforcement online (perhaps I'm not looking in the right spots). And if they exist online, their presence is passive - there's nothing to differentiate them from other users. The internet is incredibly decentralized. Each company has their own terms and conditions - i.e .what they are willing to stomach and ways to moderate content.

The closest form of enforcers are "moderators" or humans asked to view flagged content. Federal laws require tech companies to remove "illegal" content by using moderators and algorithms. Let's not kid ourselves - these moderators are reactive, not proactive watchers. The house is already on fire when they arrive on the scene.

An excellent example of this issue was March 2019 after the horrific shooting in New Zealand. My favorite website (YouTube) struggled to take down videos of the shooting from their website as humans outsmarted the "company's detection systems" (i.e. both humans and algorithms).

When we hand over technology to children and allow them to surf the internet or watch videos on YouTube (more on that in a second), we are allowing them to enter the Wild West. We surrender control.

To be fair, YouTube has been actively trying to solve the problem for children. They have created a separate app called "YouTube Kids" for children under 13. This version of their app imposes time limits, parental controls and the ability to block content. It's a start but it is not enough.

For example, YouTube's ability to distinguish adults from children. Currently, the website surfaces a challenge question - a math question to be specific. In my opinion, this approach is antiquated - children could easily navigate to YouTube's parent site (Google) for the answer. They may not know multiplication but they do know how to Google.

Further, YouTube Kids is an anomaly - there's no Facebook, Instagram or Twitter for Kids (there is a Kids section on Netflix though). There are few safe spaces for children to navigate online. And even the places they can go are not guaranteed to be safe (even YouTube Kids has trouble keeping inappropriate content off its Kids platform).

It's a whole new ballgame now for children born in the millennium. They will have to navigate problems I never dreamed of - cyber bullying (and I thought people writing on mySpace was bad enough when I was in high school), finsta vs. rinsta accounts, illegal data collection or the loss of tactility (i.e. holding text books or playing with physical toys).

Even if we succeed in carving out safe spaces, there's a bigger question about smartphone addiction. I've opined in previous blogs that my mobile device is always nearby and if not, I go into a panic attack. It only took a decade to develop my smartphone addiction (yes, I firmly believe I have a semi-unhealthy relationship with my device). But what are we doing to this future generation if their unhealthy relationship with technology starts before they can even speak? Or understand there's a world beyond the blue screen? How can they give consent? How can parents moderate or filter good vs. bad content?

We, yes, we (tech + society) has created a Frankenstein monster. We placed too much trust in these tech companies to keep our information, our communities and now, our children safe. And now we have to pay the price. It's going to be a long road to making the internet safe and great again for children.