iPads and the Toddler's Brain

Just now on NPR, there was a discussion about toddlers and iPads that could have really used a Heideggerian intervention.  The issue was, more or less, what is happening when you give a 2 year old an iPad and they get completely absorbed for 5 hours straight?  Is this good for them or not?  And does it help them to learn what they need to learn in order to mature into smart, productive kids and adults?  NPR seems to love this stuff; there’s a shorter article on the same topic here. 

A range of experts was consulted, most of whom said that we don’t have enough (empirical) research to answer these questions yet, but that we shouldn’t panic – we just need to make sure that kids get a balance of screen time and face-to-face interaction with other people.  But the question that started the whole discussion was a father’s question about what is going on for his son when he “zones out” in front of the iPad.  This question remained unaddressed, as far as I could tell from my own zoning in and out of the radio discussion.  But isn’t this basically a matter of Benommenheit, or captivation, literally “being taken,” being absorbed in an object to the point where everything else fades away. 

Heidegger identifies Benommenheit as the predominant affect of the animal who exists as “poor in world” rather than Being-in-the-world?  However problematic Heidegger’s account of animality may be (Are animals really poor in world?  What about Koko?  Did we have to cut a slit in the abdomen of a bee to find that out? etc etc), nevertheless I think that the concept of Benommenheit is helpful for addressing the experience of “zoning out” in the face of technologies such as touch screens, the internet, the TV, or even the radio.  You get online, and suddenly 2 hours have passed.  Have you learned something?  Sure.  But content is not the issue; what’s at stake is a way of Being-in-the-world that impoverishes the world to the point of altering the ontological structure of human existence.  That may not be a bad thing, but it’s a different (more interesting, in my view) issue from the ontical import of this or that study.

Think about this in relation to Iggy the cat, who likes to play with his human’s iPad, to the readiness with which autistic children interact with touch screens, and to Kym Maclaren’s brilliant work on the phenomenology of mother-child interactions.  Again, I do not in any way wish to imply that autistic kids are like kittens, or even that authentic Being-in-the-world is all that it’s cracked up to be.  Just putting a few ideas out there.