How do digital immigrants deal with young digital natives?

In 2001, education and technology writer Marc Prensky popularized the term digital natives to describe the first generations of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games and other technologies. (The rest of us are digital immigrants, struggling to understand.)

In her article “The Touch-Screen Generation” in The Atlantic (April), Hanna Rosin writes about how young children—even toddlers—are spending more and more time with digital technology. She asks, “Should parents recoil or rejoice?”

In 1999, Rosin writes, the American Academy of Pediatrics discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, “citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for ‘direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers.’ ” In 2006, 90 percent of parents said their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Yet in its updated policy in 2011, the AAP “largely took the same approach it took in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids,” writes Rosin.

What are parents to do? Well, Rosin is one, with three children “who are all fans of the touch screen.” But when she talks with people (also parents of young children) who help develop interactive media for children, she finds them more restrictive than she is about their children using technology.

Rosin describes “the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children.” Parents are afraid that if they don’t use the new technology just right, “their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can’t make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.”

Rosin asks, How do small children actually experience electronic media, and what does that experience do to their development?

Because much of the recent technology is new, most of the research in this area concerns toddlers’ interaction with television. Researchers eventually identified certain rules that promote engagement: “stories have to be linear and easy to follow, cuts and time lapses have to be used very sparingly, and language has to be pared down and repeated.”

Now researchers are beginning to study toddlers’ use of iPads to see what they can learn and if they can transfer what they learn to the real world. They ask further, “What effect does interactivity have on learning? What role do familiar characters play in children’s learning from iPads?”

Rosin wondered if too many apps developed for children emphasized education over play. Then she came across apps designed by a Swedish game studio named Toca Boca.

In 2011, the studio’s founders, Emil Ovemar and Björn Jeffery, launched Toca Tea Party. “The game is not all that different from a real tea party,” writes Rosin. It’s not overtly educational, and there’s no winning and no reward. “The game is either very boring or terrifically exciting, depending on what you make of it,” she writes. For kids, the game is fun every time, “because it’s dependent entirely on imagination.”

Rosin notes that “every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people.” However, despite “legitimate broader questions about how American children spend their time,” parents have to decide for themselves.

Rosin decided to let her young son have access to an iPad for six months. “After about 10 days, the iPad fell out of his rotation, just like every toy does.” It was just one more tool.

We digital immigrants will continue to struggle with our digital natives.

Writing as confession and witness

What follows are notes for a talk I gave on April 10 at Life Enrichment at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan.

Where do we hear these terms: confession and witness? One place is in police dramas, where the cops or detectives interview suspects and try to get them to confess to a crime, or they talk to witnesses to find out what happened.

Another place we hear these terms is in church, right? Catholics, at least, go to confession, but even Protestants sometimes offer prayers of confession. And Christians are often exhorted to bear witness to their faith.

I want to place these terms in another sphere—writing—which is something I’ve been doing for more than 30 years as a journalist, a reviewer and a sometimes fiction writer.

Let me give you a quick bio: I graduated from Wichita State University in 1976 and moved to Newton to be part of an intentional Christian community (more on that later). In 1978, I began working as editorial assistant for The Mennonite, at that time the magazine of the General Conference Mennonite Church. I worked downtown in Newton at what was then the headquarters of that denomination. Mostly I did copy editing but increasingly did some reporting. In 1984, I became assistant editor and did more writing as well as editing. In 1992, I became editor. Then in 1998, the magazine merged with the magazine of the Mennonite Church to become a new magazine, also called The Mennonite. I became associate editor, as I still am today.

So as a journalist I’ve worked hard at the “witness” part. I’ve gone to meetings and observed what was said, what a group of church leaders decided about something. I’ve tried to be a good observer and witness. I still do this occasionally; in fact, I was just in Kansas City last week to cover meetings of our church’s Executive Board. The goal of a good journalist is to be as objective as possible, to be a good witness.

But the “confession” part comes in because we recognize that none of us is completely objective. We must be attentive to our prejudices, our slant on things and acknowledge these. Confession requires looking inward, observing ourselves, then expressing what we find.

Such confession comes more into play when writing fiction or memoir. In 2011, I published a book called Present Tense: A Mennonite Spirituality, in which I try to address what Mennonite spirituality is. I report on (or witness to) what I’ve observed over the years as a Mennonite and as a Mennonite journalist. I draw on many books I’ve read on spirituality and theology and Scripture. But I also write much about my own experience (confession), so it’s partly a memoir.

[Here I summarized the book.]

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve also been a book reviewer for the Wichita Eagle for more than 20 years. Here, too, my writing has combined witness and confession. Reviewing involves reporting what I’ve observed in reading a book—what it’s about, what it’s trying to achieve and how well the author succeeds. Since most of what I review for the Eagle is fiction, I judge its success on how well it tells its story, how well it connects with human experience, how beautiful its prose is. But when reviewing, as in any writing, I reveal some of my own experience and perspective. This is often subtle and understated—readers want to know about the book, not you, yet every reader brings his or her point of view to a book, and it’s only honest to reveal that to some degree. This also lends some credibility to your review.

Recently, for example, I reviewed a book that I really liked that I say may become a spiritual classic—My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman [see my earlier post]. My review shows, I think, that I am, like Wiman, a Christian, yet also that the book has something to say to those who struggle with faith. It also will speak to those who love poetry, though, while Wiman is a poet, I am not.

Confession and witness share a goal of seeking the truth, which is also a goal, I believe, of good writing and good art.

Writing should bear witness to reality, whether that reality is ugly or beautiful or—as is most often the case—some mixture of the two. That witness should be clear, concise, concrete and beautiful.

Writing should also reveal the view, the struggle, of the author. It should pursue a truth that is clear-eyed and honest, one that shows I am one of you. I, too, struggle with carving some kind of meaning out of the suffering—or the joy—that I experience.

Writing goes deeper than merely finding the killer and getting him to confess. It delves into that killer’s soul and finds the humanity he shares with you and me.

A possible spiritual classic

Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and until recently the editor of Poetry magazine, has written what may become a spiritual classic, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, $24, 182 pages).

 

He opens his book with a four-line stanza from one of his uncompleted poems:

My God my bright abyss

into which all my longing will not go

once more I come to the edge of all I know

and believing nothing believe in this:

He closes the book with the same four lines, with one exception: the colon after “this” becomes a period.

Thus, as a good poet does, he captures the paradoxical journey of faith he is on, at “the edge of all I know,” looking forward. Then, at the end, “believing nothing believe in this,” a sure but tentative faith.

In a preface, Wiman says he “wanted to write a book that might help someone who is at once as confused and certain about the source of life and consciousness as I am.”

The book is filled with aphorisms that address this paradox of faith and doubt. These ring true but often demand rereading and reflection. Early on he writes, “Inspiration is to thought what grace is to faith: intrusive, transcendent, transformative, but also evanescent and, all too often, anomalous.”

The writing throughout is, understandably, poetic, as in this description of his origins: “I grew up in a flat little sandblasted town in West Texas: pumpjacks and pickup trucks, cotton like grounded clouds, a dying strip, a lively dump, and above it all a huge blue and boundless void I never really noticed until I left, when it began to expand alarmingly inside of me.”

Wiman’s language about faith is refreshing because it does not employ the usual insider phrases. He often contrasts faith and belief, noting that “faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change.”

Belief, on the other hand, is more intellectual and superficial. “How astonishing it is,” he writes, “the fierceness with which we cling to beliefs that have made us miserable, or beliefs that prove to be so obviously inadequate when extreme suffering—or great joy—comes.”

Another theme under the rubric of paradox is the co-mingling of God’s presence and absence. Wiman writes: “If grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.”

In 2005, Wiman learned that he had an incurable cancer of the blood, which he calls “as rare as it is unpredictable, ‘smoldering’ in some people for decades, turning others to quick tender.” Despite frequent hospitalizations and a bone marrow transplant, he wrote a book of essays, an excellent poetry collection (Every Riven Thing) and a translation of poetry by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, all while editing Poetry.

He also wrote this book in sections over a period of years. Some parts are written during the early stages of cancer treatment, when he faced a more immediate chance of dying. He describes this with incisive feeling: “It is qualitatively different when death leans over to sniff you, when massive unmetaphorical pain goes crawling through your bones, when fear … ices your spine.”

Wiman weaves in excerpts from poems from a variety of sources, including some of his own. And one of his recurring themes is the affinity of poetry and faith. He points to the importance of imagination in experiencing God: “Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us.”

He describes a real poem as having “singular music and lightning insight,” while a living god “is not outside of reality but in it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive.”

This is why, he writes later, “poetry is so powerful, and so integral to any unified spiritual life: it preserves both aspects of spiritual experience, because to name is to praise and lose in one instant. So many ways of saying God.” There’s that paradox again, something you’ll find in poetry and in the Christian mystics.

However, Wiman does not see poetry as a replacement for faith. He notes that “modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone,” but for him, “Christ … is a shard of glass in your gut.”

He says he is a Christian because of Jesus’ cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Christ’s suffering, he writes, “shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering,” and “Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible.” And he is a Christian, he writes, “because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people.”

Wiman does more than record thoughts unconnected to his life. He writes of his experiences of this love through his wife and his twin daughters, who have helped carry him through seven years of cancer.

In the end, he concludes that at the heart of faith is “acceptance of all the gifts that God, even in the midst of death, grants us.”

My Bright Abyss is a book of depth and insight that demands careful reading and reflecting. I will certainly be rereading it more than once in the years ahead.