Matt Feeney, on the deepest, essentially philosophical, reason for resisting the triumph of digital technology over family life—deeper than utilitarian arguments about mental and emotional health:

My objections to the encroachment of digital technology on my own family’s life…were never about mental health. The dark intuition that came up when I watched my young children sweeping their way into an iPad trance was not that this device would make them unhappy or unsafe. It was that it would make them unfree. Indeed, what remains the most compelling finding, to me, about the psychological effects of computer use is the one in which this question of human freedom is directly implicated—the possibility that, over time, engagement with digital technologies shortens our attention span, alters the balance of power between our short-term urge to forage for new stimulation and our ability to tame this urge for the sake of sustained concentration. Digital technology erodes the trait that, arguably, makes us human, our power to posit ends for ourselves, consciously, and to pursue those ends with a measure of focus and planning, and to take pleasure in these sustained efforts. Setting and pursuing our ends is how we use our human endowments to form our selves, how we integrate our disparate impulses and appetites into a single life story. Curating these capacities and habits in our children, seeing them grow under the influence of their human as opposed to rodent tendencies, would seem to be one of our most basic jobs as parents.