When my youngest niece was a toddler, she was obsessed with this "tablet for toddlers":
Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Smart Stages Tablet
It's basically a set of alphabet buttons, with a switch to set one of three "learning levels." Each level plays the name of the letter, a word that starts with that letter, a sound that goes with the word/image on the button, or all three.
Niece is now six. While I was at dinner with the family last night, she found this thing in a box of old toys. She was playing with it and laughing at how silly it seems to her now. (Girl has mad spelling skills.)
Meanwhile, I couldn't help but think this toy is a master class in training future device end-users to tolerate being mined for their data.
Telling you the letters is not all this device does. Every fourth letter you press, the device says "it's music time!" and plays a jingle. A multicolored LED cycles to light up the edges of the toy while the music plays.
The jingle is only a few seconds long, but it happens after every fourth button press like clockwork. I quickly became annoyed that Niece couldn't even spell my first name without an interruption. Twas the same flavor of annoyance I get when pop-up ads get in my way.
This device is habituating kids to being interrupted as they try to work on a tablet. It's showing them that the tablet interrupting you to do its own crap is just what tablets do. No, you don't own or control the device, get used to it.
I kept this to myself. My grumbling about the state of devices and their effects on kids is getting old around the family dinner table. And I'm aware of how "old man yells at cloud" all this sounds.
Still, I can't help but see this "toddler tablet" as some kind of turning point. There is no reason for it to interrupt kids every four letters unless the goal is to habituate them to never developing deep attention while on a device. It's not *possible* for a kid to develop deep attention on this thing, even if they want to.
Contrast the Speak 'n Spell, which had the same "push button, get letter" feature. But connecting letters to buttons was ALL IT DID. It did not interrupt you every few letters. My cousins and I spent HOURS at a time poking words into the Speak 'n Spell (and laughing when it didn't recognize words like "butt." we were kids, okay?). I doubt we would have had the patience or attention for that if the Speak 'n Spell had interrupted us to play a song every fourth letter. I would have thrown my Little Professor calculator across the room if it had interrupted me while I was trying to answer its math questions.
Of course, in 1979 we all still assumed our devices worked for us. Today, we're expected to assume they do not - if we stumble into the bad habit (for capitalism) of thinking about it at all. Shh, just let OneDrive have your data.
It's not even tech companies holding us to these standards. Social shame is huge. My sister in law (Niece's mom) explicitly requested "no electronic toys" when Niece was born, even going so far as to fill her gift registries with non-electronic options. She got so much crap from her family about "what's the harm?" and "just let kids play" that she finally caved just to shut them up. I can't say I think Niece benefited. (I refuse to be anything other than "the aunt who always gets you books," so SIL's request did not bother me either way.)
I am once again typing this offline. I'll hop on to post it, but that's all. And smol.pub's interface never interrupts me with its own agenda. Yet there's no avoiding tech that does this in real life. My fear is that the more we teach kids to expect it from toddlerhood, the less power we have to demand or to build anything better. You can't work for what you can't envision.
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