The Cyber Zoo as a Real Problem for Our Kids

I’m an elder and a member of the Green Party. There’s an initiative to establish an “Elders Caucus” within the party. About a year ago a listserve (e-list) was set up to conduct the relevant organizational discussions. To become an officially accredited caucus the group has to get 100 members to sign up.

About six months ago another e-list was set up to host non-business free-form discussions among members about issues of interest. Yesterday the discussion list was shut down. It became a distracting and distressing zoo. Some nights there were hundreds of posts about topics having nothing at all to do with elders’ issues.

When there’s a critical mass of human beings, I’ve never seen a discussion-type e-list that didn’t become a flaming cauldron. Via the Elders Issues list I now have been educated to every horrible slur that a terf can call a feminazi and vice versa. It took the list all of six months to flame out and burn up. This, among the Sage Elders of the Greenest Party with its sagacious values of Ecology, Democracy, Justice, Peace, and Nonviolence.

Typical of the cyber world, right?

But when I see my grandchildren exposed to this world I shudder.

A combination of many people and many channels for expression is very likely to add up to a zoo of overwhelm. The Elders Caucus is actually a relatively small group . . . it does not yet even have the 100 members needed for accreditation! So here we have a case of about 80 people with about seven channels of expression:
. Caucus-relevant Discussion list
. Business list
. “Issues” Discussion list
. Slack threads
. Facebook Page
. Facebook Group
. Twitter page

It’s too much. It’s overwhelming for us mature, adult, enlightened elders.

A typical teenager now gets a phone and a passport into a cyber-world of billions of potential “participants” and at least hundreds of potential channels. Theoretically, they can select and filter, of course, but they face enormous temptation to join this and that, to see this and that, to be clued in . . . and, for many, the Overwhelm Device is with them at every moment, 24/7.

I realize there’s a phenomenon where adults can tend to be over-concerned about new and different things their children are getting exposed to (cars in the 1920s, television in the 1950s, etc.) but, even with that in mind, I have to say that I think the cyber-preoccupation goes to a different level of concern. It think it leads somewhere really pathological. It’s just ten years now of “everybody having a phone that’s a channel to the World Wide Web” and we already hear much about distraction, isolation, even addiction.

A zoo of cyber-insanity. I expect that a future generation will look at their parents looking at their screens and rebel against the phenomenon. A future counterculture will be embracing slogans like: “Face-to-Face” and “Screen-Free” and “Cyber-Free.”