The summer I turned 12, my older cousin (14) and her mom - who lived on the farm with us at the time - took on the job of babysitting one of the neighbor's kids (7). This kid, who I'll call "Joey," was a sweet guy, pretty laid back, and usually fairly easy to watch.
Joey was also developmentally disabled, and he had one Achilles heel - one thing that would turn him from a sweet kiddo to a whirling demon. That thing was screens. Specifically, being denied them.
It was the 90s, so by "screens," I mostly mean television. If we left the TV off all day, Joey was fine. If we let him watch even a couple minutes, though, he was glued. Ungluing him meant a huge meltdown, often involving attempts at self-harm and ending with Joey crying himself exhausted. We ended up watching him a lot even when Joey's parents weren't working, because they couldn't take him on errands like the grocery store. If Joey caught sight of a screen - any screen - this was going to happen.
So imagine my surprise when I walk in one day and Joey is playing Bagasaurus with my cousin on their ancient IBM clone.(FN1) I asked aunt, "If we're supposed to keep Joey away from screens, why is he on the computer?"
"He has to learn to use a computer for school," my aunt said. "Kids these days really can't grow up not knowing computers they way you kids did."
That comment bothered me for years. My aunt was wrong about the second half; I don't remember a time we *didn't* have a computer in the house, starting with a Commodore 64 we acquired secondhand from a hacker neighbor. It's because she was wrong about the second half that the first half bothered me.
See, I grew up "knowing computers." Which is to say, I grew up writing my own games in BASIC and (later) taking the cover off our Gateway 2000 to upgrade the RAM. And even at age 12, I knew that guiding a cartoon dinosaur around a screen with the arrow keys was not "knowing computers." It wasn't even learning to use a keyboard!
This issue continued to bother me into adulthood. Talk about Gen Z being the first "digital native" generation annoyed me greatly. By the mid-2000s, even I had consigned myself to the Swamps of End-User Sadness. Every iteration of every device, every OS, seemed to shut me out a little more from knowing my own computer. Kids growing up on these devices might know how to turn them on and open an app, but there was no way they were growing up "knowing computers." I built my own desktop in 1999, and by 2007, *I* didn't "know computers" anymore.
Fast-forward to today, when I'm reading this article:
NBC News: Parents are opting kids out of school laptop, returning them to pen and paper
and I run across this bit:
And education experts say there’s a significant difference between educating students about technology and completely relying on educational technology.
This is exactly where 12 year old me predicted we would end up if we persistently believed that using a device was the same thing as understanding it. (FN2)
Incidentally, this is also the thesis of Douglas Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed:
Program or Be Programmed: Eleven Commands for the AI Age
In the opening of this updated version, Rushkoff notes that when the original ("Ten Commands for the Digital Age") came out, the main response was "teach everyone to code!" Rushkoff notes that was not what he was trying to say.
Rushkoff's message is simpler, and like most simple things, it's not easy: Understand how these devices work *on us.* How we adapt to how they operate, to the affordances they provide and those they withhold.
Programming can reveal that. Check out Charles Petzold's Code if you don't believe me (it's where I figured all this out):
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, by Charles Petzold (pdf)
But even Code doesn't come out and say the things Rushkoff does. You have to infer them from what you know about computers and what you know about people. So different people will come to, or miss, different conclusions, because what we know about people differs for each of us.
I read these two books back to back over the last couple weeks.(FN3) They reminded me of that conversation I had with my aunt over Joey's Bagasaurus experience.
Handing our kids iPads or Chromebooks is not teaching them to be "computer literate," except in the worst end-user, raw-materials-for-data-extraction, corporate-drone sense. Certainly we don't need to hand them to *children.* Has my generation forgotten that only the saddest hacker nerds of us had computers in childhood, yet we're all just as capable of deploying iPads, smartphones, and the rest in our day jobs as anyone else? The kids will figure it out. We did.
If we're going to "teach computers" to kids (and I think we should), then let's actually teach them how to control their own devices. Let's teach them to install Linux and upgrade their own RAM. Let's teach them how browser extensions work and what it does when they use one that changes their user agent string. Let's teach them that a "privacy policy" only tells them what the company's policy is on privacy, not whether they actually have any. Let's give them a bunch of real-world examples of Section 1201 of the DMCA depriving them of the use of things they think they "own."
We won't do any of this, of course. It doesn't serve our corporate masters.
...and in case you're wondering, Joey couldn't handle the computer screen, either. I can't help but wonder if, in the long run, that wasn't to his benefit.
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(FN1) Bagasaurus is an old Tandy/PC computer game involving a cartoon dinosaur carrying a bag. The player moves the dinosaur around the screen with the arrow keys. It's not important to the story.
(FN2) no, my non-pseudonym first name is not "Cassandra." my parents were not that good at prophecy.
(FN3) I also read "Baby and Solo" by Lisbeth Posthuma, which is a neat little YA not-romance set in the 1990s. I appreciated that the author delivered on the premise, which in my estimation happens in only about 60 percent of YA fiction.
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