Age of the techno-tweens

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Children are storming ahead of their parents in embracing technology. While the benefits are clear, Katrina Manson finds experts concerned about the adverse effects

In Yosi Philip-McKenzie’s house, there are more computers than people. He has an MP3 player, a Walkman, a hi-fi, a mobile phone and a “dongle” for transferring files. He knows how to download BBC programmes from the web, has created personal pages on the social-networking websites Bebo, MySpace and MSN Spaces, and knows many secrets you would expect of an uber-geek.
Despite these intensely techie credentials, including a penchant for making PowerPoint slide shows about the Olympics, Philip-McKenzie is not a pin-striped advertising exec armed with the latest gadgets. He is eight years old, and one of millions of techno-tweens who can toggle before they toddle, know their Pokémon from their podcasts, and scoff at the idea of consulting a manual.
NI_MPU('middle');“It’s so easy,” Philip-McKenzie says. “I’ve known about iPods since I was four. If there were no computers, I would die.”
In the modern tech-heavy home, children weaned on a diet of gadgets and gizmos take to technology like plugs to a socket. Many children become e-literate before they are conventionally literate, often picking up tricks from older siblings, and develop an aptitude for tools and tasks that many parents find baffling.
Living with on-hand tech advice in the form of a child may have its benefits, but many parents face a dilemma when fully endorsing a multimedia, screen-based life. Some believe it is a terrific way to develop dexterity, quick thinking, a capacity for multitasking and eye-hand co-ordination, as well as nourishing a thirst for independent learning and equipping children with the essential tools for success in today’s tech-driven world. For others, it spells the birth of a generation of socially inept, obese screen-watchers, for whom communication means sending short, rapid-fire messages remotely, rather than taking the time to think through challenging ideas and engaging face-to-face.
The American digital-learning expert Marc Prensky believes a generational shift has taken place because children’s brains are so wired today that they learn in a different, tech-savvy way. In his view, members of older generations are mere “digital immigrants” following in the wake of the “digital natives” who are their offspring, brought up receiving fast information and preferring graphics to text. It’s not kids who are the problem, he reckons; it’s parents and teachers who lag behind them.
“Even for very simple tasks like text messaging and using the phone book, children take the time to learn how to master their phones,” says Josh Dhaliwal, director of the phone consultancy Mobile Youth. More than a million five- to nine-year-olds in the UK now have their own mobile: a third of their age group.
“Children don’t fear asking questions,” Dhaliwal says. “In the end, they become able to educate their parents in more complex areas, such as using the browser and downloading ring tones.”
The irreversible trend towards fast media makes the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield nervous. She has predicted that today’s reliance on screens rather than books means that “in the future, we may have people who don’t need to know how to read or write”. Baroness Greenfield is director of the Royal Institution, the British scientific academy, as well as the Institute for the Future of the Mind, which is conducting research into the development of the young psyche.
“In the old days, we would watch for the post and order up books from the stacks in the library,” she says. “Today, you can press a button and have an instant answer. It’s like junk food destroying your taste buds: if you need stimulation all the time, it stops you thinking.
“Children are exposed to lots of facts — but do they know how to relate them? How will they know what questions they want to ask? If you’ve only ever sat in front of booming, buzzing multimedia, with constant, loud, bright, fast-moving images, how can you evaluate what things mean?” A mother of three from north London, Intisar Osman is one of many “digital immigrants” who has watched her children overtake her in the tech stakes with frightening speed. Josh, now 17, received his Sega Megadrive at 5; Toby, now 7, had a GameCube at 3; Rio, who is 2, already has a Game Boy and can set up and switch on a Sony PlayStation from scratch.
Osman is proud of her digital natives’ hunter-gatherer skills. For her, what’s best is that the children are forced to think for themselves.
“If you don’t have the technology in your house, your kids will be left behind,” she says. “They’ve certainly shot past me. It’s good for them: if they say ‘I can’t do this’, they have to learn how to do it themselves, because I can’t help them.”
The immersive pull of tech toys can also create a virtual nursery sufficiently diverting to kick the latest Barbie firmly into touch.
“It keeps them occupied without you having to come and help,” Osman says. “If I wanted to crack on with a bit of work, I’d just put Toby on the computer. For two hours, I won’t know he’s there: he’s as quiet as a mouse. It’s the way forward. He will sit and concentrate, and normally his attention span is limited. I couldn’t take him to the cinema, and he’ll only read a couple of pages of a book.”
Two-year-old Rio even stops crying when given a games console to play with. The “e-dummy” idea has not earned universal plaudits, however, and some experts express concern that young minds are failing to develop true concentration and social skills.
“Children may be mesmerised, but it’s a different sort of focus,” says Joan Almon, from Alliance for Childhood, a US association of health and education experts that campaigns against a screen-centred life. “It can be more like hypnosis than a deep act of concentration.
“We’re finding young people are not nearly as creative as previously, and that they are growing up without the ability to work with others. One of the real shortcomings of a life spent immersed in technology is that it is often very isolated. Even if you communicate, it tends to be at a distance, by text or e-mail. The young conduct a third fewer face-to-face conversations than in the previous generation.” Recent research into the side effects of technology suggests that living inside an electronic cocoon is enough to drive you to digital distraction. One study conducted by psychologists at King’s College London found that sending e-mails and text messages knocks 10 points off a person’s IQ, twice the impact of smoking marijuana. Another study claimed that the constant demands made by a flurry of simultaneous texts, e-mails and calls leads to serious attention disorder.