Are we making ourselves into techno-monsters?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, parenting, education, technology

It took me an incredible amount of time to read i-Minds: How and Why Constant Connectivity is Rewiring our Brains and What to Do About It, Second Edition (AKA i-Minds 2.0), by Mari K. Swingle, PhD. Other than a brief post 14 days ago, which came 9 days after the prior "real" book review, I have utterly neglected this blog. To those few who follow it, I apologize.

This book is so big, 498 pages of 9-pt. type, and covers so much ground, it is hard to take it all in. The author is a therapist whose work begins when a "problem child" (or young adult) is brought to her, and she performs an EEG study. She can discern quite a number of odd things going on in the brain from the EEG, and she explains a few of them. One of the most important is "disregulation". A person gets out of control because the brain cannot self-control or self-regulate. An i-addicted person can only self-regulate when looking at their screen of choice. Children of all ages may throw tantrums for a number of reasons, but some of the most frightening tantrums occur when a child who spends too long with the laptop, phone, or tablet, is kept from using it for a time. In adults, tantrums are replaced by other kinds of misbehavior, some of which can land one in jail.

Side note: Recently the electrical grid failed in most of Texas for three days, parts of it for longer. I wonder how many homes were host to an extreme form of "cabin fever" when all the batteries ran down?

Although the book is very big, I could have read it faster if it were better written. The author presents a great deal of good and useful information and advice, very badly! Soon after I began reading, I was ready to drop it entirely. It just seemed she was so impressed with herself she had to write every fleeting thought. The writing style swings between clinical and colloquial. Just as I'd get going at a good clip, I'd encounter a word such as neuroatypicality or psychoneurophysiology, or a sentence with missing prepositions, or a half sentence ending in a period, only to find it taken up again after a subordinate clause with its own period. I guess the author took to heart the advice to avoid run-on sentences, somewhat too literally! By the way, look at the way I used a comma in the prior sentence. Try covering the comma with the corner of a piece of paper and reading it again. There is a difference in connotation. In this book commas are sometimes overused and sometimes neglected. My advice to the author: Before preparing version 3.0, hire two people in sequence: Firstly, a good copy editor, and then secondly, pass the edited copy to someone who can produce Reader's Digest Condensed Books and have it condensed. Most of the content of this book could have been said in half the space or less.

Herewith, to save space, I will do little more than reproduce my notes and comment on them:

• ch 6, "Boxed In – Anxiety in the Masses", on collecting hobbies. She is derogatory. She doesn't distinguish actual field collectors from "silver pickers". I am a collector of several categories of things, so perhaps my reaction is to my own ox being gored. The more sedentary things I collect are stamps and coins (world variety, not gold/silver coins). But in each case, I make it social by belonging to stamp and coin clubs, and even going to auctions (to be resumed after the pandemic), both as a buyer and seller, but usually a kibitzer. I also collect photographs, which gets me out and around, though I do spend a lot of time with "digital darkroom". My first love is rock collecting. "Silver picking" is buying mineral or fossil specimens from others. I've never bought a rock, though I traded for a few. I prefer to get out there and hit rocks. Any of these hobbies can be conducted without ever turning on a computer or looking at a phone. A cousin of mine's main hobby is long-distance high-altitude hang gliding (sometimes oxygen is needed!). Try doing that on your phone!
• p108, ch 8, "The Narrowing of Minds", on children who grow up gaming more than playing: "Today, many kids don't lose the creativity, they never find it!" Further, a "grouping quiz" example: 3 yellow squares of different sizes, then the choice of "which is the most similar?" a pink square or a banana? Is it the banana? Yes, according to the test the author saw, because it is the right color. If a child chooses the pink square, the ugly beep and WRONG appear, even though the shape is right. Who is to say that color supersedes shape? Particularly if no other information is given, either with this "question" or in the context of the rest of the "test".
• p140, ch 10, "Of Systems and Process", on writing (scribing) versus keyboarding, "…studies clearly show that we remember more, and significantly more, by writing than by keyboarding." I used to visit a typesetting shop. The proprietor was able to typeset in Spanish while conversing with me in English. Clearly, he could not possibly retain anything of the Spanish document. In my own case, though I can type very fast, I find I retain more by taking sketchy handwritten notes than by taking a laptop to a lecture and transcribing chunks of it verbatim.
• p202, ch 13, "Learning, Play, and Parenting", compares nature with "screen stuff, summarized in a keen table. I imaged the entire page, which is inserted here without further comment. Tap or click to see it larger, or to download it.

• p263 +/-, ch 17, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Esports and the Business of Gaming", on the relabling of i-games as "eSports": a cynical attempt to coopt the positive image of sports. The author decries "…the deviant brilliance of early game design ensuring that children legitimately would be penalized for leaving a game mid-play (or not returning…". This triggers extreme peer pressure. When a child (of any age less than 200 years) cries, "But I HAVE TO!!", he or she fears becoming a pariah more than death. It is time for some extreme re-training.
• p296-7, ch 19, "Breaking the Trance", "Ten things parents learned in science class the gaming industry wants them to forget (aka Lost Lessons from Research 101)". I scanned this pair of pages also, but I'd better not include them here. Put an e-mail address in a comment and I'll send you the image. The "Ten things" boil down to ten of the most popular fallacies of logic, exploited by the game-writing-and-selling industry to keep regulators at bay.
• p310, ch 20, "i-Tech and Healthcare – To Care or i-Care", "Why do we want to replace ourselves with interactive technologies? Why do we want i-tech taking care of our children and … our elders?" This fosters dissociation and vanquishes healthy attachment. Isaac Asimov foresaw this, blurrily, in his very early story "Robbie", about a robot babysitter to which the child became attached, moreso than to the parents. But Asimov's point was introducing the concepts that became his "3 laws of robotics", so he sidestepped whether the child in question was in any way harmed; I suspect he thought not, as he was himself famously neurotic and might have preferred a robot caretaker to a human nurse.
• p 356, erratum, "Zukerberg" for "Zuckerberg". Spelled correctly in other places. [grammatical errors and other solecisms would have filled pages]
• p394, ch 26, "Community, Communication, Digital Mediation, and Friendship", to txt or not to txt? Are emojis replacing facial expressions such that we no longer can read actual faces? A factor tending towards autism. I have long asserted that I get along with machines better than people. But I recognize it and have taken steps for 60+ years to learn to relate to people in spite of my own autistic tendencies. I fear that, had I been born in 2020 rather than the 1940's, I'd have become a clear case of Aspergerism, or "high-functioning autism", or worse. We can all exhibit autistic behaviors under stress, such as the autistic rocking of someone who has suddenly lost their beloved spouse, child, or pet. Such should be rare.
• p459-50, ch 31, "i-Addiction and i-Life", levels of i-addiction:

1. Generalized Internet Addiction: "Excess internet use is not an addiction in itself, but rather, the internet is the space where an individual can engage in addictive behavior." The Net facilitates access to one's fetish, but does not create the addiction.
2. Fantasy Internet Addiction: Addictive behaviors that would otherwise not occur, such as engaging in role-playing games (less frenetic games such as Dungeons & Dragons, that can be played as a board game, came after their online counterparts); and chat rooms and similar sites with pseudonymous interaction including cybersex.
3. Technological Internet Addiction: The technology itself is the addicting element. The Poster Child is compulsive follow-the-white-rabbit searching, which for some people can consume hour after hour, even day after day. [unbounded exploration] Here process itself is the bait on the hook.

• p463, same chapter, "Scientific Corner" [a feature found scattered throughout the book], an introduction to IAT, the Internet Addiction Test [search for "Internet Addiction Test Young" to find one you can take online. Many versions are behind a paywall]. My score is 18 (out of 72, see below). Paradoxically, many of the most addicted persons who are single young men have a lower score than you'd expect on the IAT, because all the questions about their relationships are answered with "no effect" or "not relevant", because they have no relationships!

• p491, ch 33, "Our Future Our Selves", The coolness factor is overcoming prudence in applying technologies that are dehumanizing us. [Many parents who work for Google, FB, etc., send their own children to private schools where screens of any kind may not be used prior to 8th grade, and the school strongly encourages that the home environment ought to be nearly screen-free. What do they know that the rest of us don't?]

Human intelligence, like all natural intelligence, is embodied. The body is a part of nature. Send your kids outdoors! Free-range children grow up the best adjusted! To grow up as an appendage of digital culture is to become more like the machine than like a human.

You have what you need from what is written above. For the research and references, do get the book, but be prepared to use it as a resource. Only read it through if you're as much a glutton for punishment as I was, reading the whole thing! I hated the presentation, but content kept me going.