Published on [Permalink]

Matt Feeney:

I have no control over the degree to which digital technology rules the world outside my home, but inside my home, all the questions that society has answered, or allowed technology to answer on its behalf, remain open. Digital technology has remade the broader human world according to its powers, but its power to remake your family remains largely within your powers. You still have the power, once an iPad has found its way inside the home you share with your young children, to get rid of it, get the cursed thing out of the house, pass it along to your mother-in-law. It remains within your power to look at the total dominion of digital technology outside your home and determine what its influence will be on the inside. Who else has this power? Who else can create a world in which the extent of technology’s rule has been consciously decided by people with powerful reason to treat it with suspicion? Even for parents it’s difficult, of course. Even parents feel potent incentives to answer the question of technology in technology’s terms, rather than their own.