Tech in the Family Home
Add before you subtract.
Dear Friends,
It’s not an easy business figuring out how to use (or not use) digital technologies in your family home.
Most adults use smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. as part of their professional work (yes, even full-time homemakers). Sometimes this reality—that we can’t get rid of all these things entirely, and maybe even wouldn’t want to—tempts parents to throw up their hands and just give into the eternal flow of tech for their household culture.
It does no one any good to pretend that willpower alone is going to effectively solve our individualized family and personal problems with tech. We need strategies to support our success!
In my début piece at Public Discourse today, today, I am sharing some thoughts on the ways that tech serves us and a couple of strategies for making sure that it doesn’t control us.
Read my essay here:
“Technology in the Family Home: Add Before You Subtract.”
And see if you can spot “the 3 R’s” of my friends
in the piece! Ruth and Peco are doing very good work on formulating practical pathways that individuals and families can take to reverse our capitulation to tech, part of the larger process of “unmachining.”Are you happy with your household tech culture and tech use? What would you change if you could?
Do you find conflict between a desire to minimize tech (if you have that desire) and the fact that tech meets or partially meets some important needs for you?
What are some ways that you might “add before [or while] you subtract?”
Have a wonderful week!
I have been pondering for a day and I am struggling to put my finger on my response to this piece. In theory I like the idea of "add before you subtract" and I think it's wise advice. But especially when it comes to the social aspects of tech and connection, I think adding is really hard due to structural factors, and subtracting is hard but lonely. This seems abstract, so here's an example. I quit Facebook in 2014 after having been an infrequent user for a few years, and I've never had any social media since. It's a near occasion of sin for me and moderation is harder to maintain than an explicit ban. But there isn't a real way to "add" that type of high-frequency, update-style connection with friends, family, and community back into my life. Social media is where lives are lived now, and I've missed out on a LOT (open invites to playground playdates, COVID exposure notifications, neighborhood meeting information, just to name a few, and this is just the stuff I know about) by not participating. There really isn't a substitute as far as I've found, and loneliness and isolation are simply the price I have paid for not participating, and that price is steep. I think there are a lot of ways around the "new tech" issues, because you can find other ways in and/or make use of "older" tech (you can listen to CDs rather than stream, you can play Scrabble rather than Words with Friends, etc.) but tech has so drastically changed *how we relate to and communicate with each other* that I have been forced to adopt a more binary position than I really want to take. In or out, no substitutions.
Wonderful article, Dixie, and such a helpful reminder! I have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater, especially with technology - I'll do the unwise 'diet' move of not using it at all, and that just ultimately fails. It also isn't realistic. In an interview Fr. Matt Canlis (an Anglican priest in our area) had awhile ago, he mentioned that he didn't previously have a smart phone and didn't want to go down that rabbit-hole; but, then, his parish had told him that they wanted to learn alongside his example of how to use it wisely, not how to simply go without...which wasn't an option for most.