The answer could include elements from biology, developmental psychology, numerical abilities, attention span, thinking in modes, serendipity, numerical literacy, physical states, dependence/freedom, curiosity, change in communication skills, behavioural patterns, philosophy of society...
I am in the process of reading Sherry Turkle's Alone Together - I'll report back with what she has to say when finished. In the meantime, early on in the book she reports that the effect of affordable robotic creatures as pets for children this age seems to create an odd preference for the artificial over the real. Apparently it is time to carry forward and broaden out the old research begun by Liebert and Sprafkin in The Early Window. It seems (if memory serves) that Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death has some trajectories of thought which anticipate some of these issues as well.
Thanks Bill for your input, quoting very relevant material indeed. I am awaiting your report on this preference (or not) for the artificial.
Could this whole thing become "transitive-like"? Is the fact that we 'fix' on children's enticement for artificial relations mean that we as adults are enticed by the artificial?
Can censoring or banning information from children's view cause an opposite effect to what the parent may actually be seeking?
Colin this may be of interest to you, it is addressing a related topic:
6th Global Conference
Videogame Cultures and the Future of Interactive Entertainment
Thursday 17th July - Saturday 19th July 2014
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/cyber/videogame-cultures-the-future-of-interactive-entertainment/call-for-papers//
They tend to be very impersonal, reserved in plenary sessions and generally lacking is soft skills.
Colin,
I said I would report back on Sherry Turkle when I had finished Alone Together. I was thinking that she would address the very issue that you are asking about here, vis-à-vis the developmental effect of the internet upon children. As it turns out, the biggest impact upon children which Turkle highlights is not the child and the internet. It is the child and the parent in light of the parent's usage of the internet. She has anecdote after anecdote of the relational distance and separation which the internet brings into the parent/child relationship. She addresses matters as simple (yet tragic) as parents playing on social media when picking kids up from school, attending their games, or (supposedly) spending relational time with them (the children do not have these parents' attention, although they have their physical presence), to adult children doing other things while giving the appearance of spending time with aging parents on Skype or Facetime. The biggest impact on children of the internet which Turkle addresses is its tendency to remove us from one another relationally while we are physically in the same place. I think she is right. My wife and I invariably go out to supper at nice restaurants and witness lovers, husbands and wives, and whole families sitting at a table, texting, and smiling at their cell phones, rather than speaking with one another. This seems to be evidence of a blindness on our parts as regards the value of our primary relationships.
That is excellent Bill, thanks for getting back to me (us) and spending time relating Turkle's fine work. She is an author I really like, always intriguing and of a great value to society. Interpersonal communication is always hard to tune, tweak and fine-tune, I think especially between (evolving) couple and family members. One may now ask whether the means, techniques and reasons we spend time relationally removing ourselves from one another is not "necessary" rather than just bad manners. Of course for the purposes of any clear discussion on the topic, one would have to fully stipulate what "necessary" means.... Necessary to cope with, Necessary to support the other's presence, necessary to escape from, necessary for reasons entirely external to the internal relations.
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