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"Screen Kids"
Posted on Monday, July 30, 2007 at 12:46 PM by Jason Barker
Albert Mohler recently wrote on his blog about the well-documented phenomenon of "screen kids" - youth whose life is built upon electronic communication and entertainment. In the article Mohler quotes a 1999 speech by Bill Gates about the current generation for whom electronic media are truly an intrinsic part of their lives:
To them, the idea that all the rich information should be easy to search and find, and that you should be able to find other kids in another country and speak to them about what their thinking is about that topic. They'll simply take that for granted. They'll think of buying as something where you can go out and get the best prices, or get the product reviews across the Internet. And so, they will think about the Internet in a far more profound way than most of us who grew up without it being an ever-present tool.
While it's easy to laugh that Bill Gates is hardly a seer when it comes to the Internet and electronic media - his 1995 The Road Ahead said little about the Internet when it was in fact booming, and even this lecture fails (as Apple's coup demonstrates) to anticipate the rise of something like the iPod while mentioning kids using computers to listen to and organize their music - his prediction is nonetheless a concise statement of the importance of the Internet in the lives of modern teens. And, as this quotation states, this importance will only rise in the years to come.
It is for this reason that online Orthodox media is such an essential form of ministry and outreach. The Internet is where teens currently look - and will look even more in the future - for information about spirituality and for spiritual resources: it is therefore imperative that we provide things like online multimedia Bible studies and Internet radio and video.
At the same time, Mohler makes an important point:
We need a generation of parents who will exercise their authority to teach their children how to use these technologies responsibly. This means no digital babysitters and no screen kids. This would mean family dinners with no digital noise, just the rare sound of parents and children talking to each other. This would mean balancing "screen time" with "paper time" -- that activity previously known as reading books.
The media we provide for youth must not be "electronic babysitters" or resources to equip youth to be autodidacts - it must be media that is shared by parents and children. I strongly encourage parents to go through my Bible study materials and discuss them with their children. I'm sure that Fr. Christopher Metropulos, John and Tatiana Maddex, and Ruston Miles - along with all the other Orthodox media providers and educators - would likewise encourage parents and children to listen and view online Orthodox media as a family, rather than exclusively consuming the media as individuals. We all want the resources we create to build up the entire Body of Christ - families as well as individuals (and, of course, parishes).
Furthermore, Mohler correctly points out the need to read books, and not limit textual consumption to short Web articles and blog posts. I've discussed the issue of printed text versus electronic text before - in fact, it was inspired by another post by Mohler - but I nonetheless want to agree with him that reading and meditating upon longer texts is an essential discipline.
Posted in Miscellaneous