Rob Horning, New Inquiry, Children are Our Future: Resistance, Addition, and the Digital Natives
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Lines that once separated, say, public from indiscreet, consumers from connoisseurs, sharing from stealing, enthusiasm from compulsion, have been progressively blurred. We can’t trust the horizon to stay fixed, which distorts our own sense of limits. Just when it seems possible to keep up with the information flow, new torrents flood into focus. Just when we think we have mastered the breadth of our desires, other temptations emerge and we spread ourselves thinner. We think we are presenting a coherent picture of who we are online, only to recognize suddenly that we are not so sure of that identity ourselves. We become afraid of missing out on things at the same time we dread the ramifications of becoming clued in. Prodded by the awareness of plenitude within reach, we end up with insatiable appetite for disappointment. Pleasure becomes coextensive with unbounded connectivity, but moral intuition would seem to suggest that unbounded pleasures cannot be sustainable. We end up both wanting and not wanting what technology can provide simultaneously, another reason why the metaphor of addiction seems applicable.But by expediting our access to ever more data, technology isn’t merely overwhelming our moral or neurological capabilities to resist. Instead, its chief ideological accomplishment is to complement preexisting assumptions about our shared values that are already built into consumerism — that quantity is synonymous with quality, that more is automatically better, that contentment is a mirage, that it’s normal to be ostentatious and to conceive the scope of our ambitions and our identity as limitless (which, incidentally, promises to make us limitlessly productive as we pursue these dreams). It may be that the extent to which we are indoctrinated into those values determines the degree to which we find technology addictive, and nothing inherent in technology makes us compulsive about it.
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