Hooked on technology

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I’m an iPhone-iPad-laptop junkie. Google is my friend, Pinterest to the rescue and social media to see the latest regarding what my friends are up to. Online dictionaries for quick word translations, Shazam when I hear a song on the radio I like but don’t recognize, and YouTube & Netflix as baby sitters. My laptop was down for a good two weeks, while I struggled with updates and rebooting my computer. It’s still not completely fixed, but it works, I have Office and Google Chrome up and running again, and it’s euphoric. I misplaced my phone last night for a couple of hours, and it bothered me the entire time. Everyone in my family has a lot of screen time, and we’re all hooked.  

My husband announced the other day, that when we go on our annual summer holiday this year, no phones will be aloud. I didn’t know what to say, so I pretended like I didn’t hear him.. A week without social media? No contact to the outside world? Maybe he just meant himself.

Quite often I scold myself for allowing the girls so much screen time, which for the most part, is out of my personal selfishness. When they’re playing on the iPad or watching TV, I can do something else, I don’t need to entertain them or constantly monitor why they are being so quiet. (If you have kids, you know they’re probably not up to something good if it suddenly gets quiet..) At the same time though, technology has provided us with so much good.

In addition to maintaining and learning new languages, we also watch a lot of tutorials. My eldest loves to build with Legos, and she gets a lot of ideas from watching Lego building tutorials on YouTube. We all love to craft and draw, and we get a lot of inspiration online. When my daughter was a little over four, she was obsessed with My Little Pony, so we looked up an online tutorial for her, so she could learn to draw her favorite characters. For Halloween a couple of years ago I found an image on Pinterest that cracked me up, and with eventually relatively little effort, I managed to scrape together adorable outfits for the twins. The same goes for so many other things that we do, online access is an immense privilege.

Simultaneously, there’s so much controversy in being hooked to technology. With three kids and myself being online at the same time, no matter how hard I try, I’m not able to control everything that they’re doing or watching, which is scary. A few years ago, we were streaming a children’s program on TV, and suddenly I hear swearing. It was a popular and innocent children’s animation, the video seemed legit, but someone had added voice-over swearwords into the program. The iPad is full of educational games and I try my best to monitor what they are doing, but even if it is educational and useful, in the end, fact is that they are still staring at a screen instead of running around playing. Now don’t get me wrong, the girls play a lot both outside and inside, and there is a lot more to our life than just screen time, but regardless, the addiction to technology bothers me.

The use of tablets has been integrated into all levels of education in Finland. Most, if not all, elementary students in Finland are provided with a tablet, which they use for studying and homework. Screen time is an evident part of most school days, then when you combine it with screen time during spare time, it really begins to add up. One of my biggest concerns with being constantly online or using technology, in addition to all the negative impacts of staring at a screen and being subject to all kinds of cyber threats, is that I’m worried we will forget how things are done traditionally. That we forget how to function without technology. As of fall 2016, teaching writing in cursive is no longer mandatory in Finnish schools – what will their signatures look like? Or de we presume, that by the year 2027, when these kids are officially 18 and adults in Finland, the need to sign a physical document will no longer exist? That everything will only be electronic? That technological malfunctions will all be just a memory from the past? I realize that this generation, children of generation X and millennials are born into a technologically advanced society, but I cannot help but wonder if we are making the right decisions. I’ve seen a lot of the students (ages 7 and up) work on their tablets with autocorrect and spellcheck on, will they still learn to spell like before? To write? Since they’re working directly on their tablets without external keypads, they’re not practicing typing either in the same way. What about social skills, physical interaction skills with other humans? Entertainment and playing? Am I just too conservative and old-fashioned, or is there really something that we as parents, as teachers, should be concerned about?