As a writer who communicates through the internet, my sense of that network’s value is extremely ambiguous. As a parent and grandparent though my feelings are far less ambiguous.  The internet is an extremely aggressive environment full of snares and dangers.  Clearly the dangers of media driven internet are increasing as that internet becomes the world’s shared nervous system. That sharing extends to our children.  Mr. Rogers and his comfortable sweater, humming comforting songs about the diverse, friendly, safe neighborhood has been superceded by cameo, physical savants who can back flip over and over, and astounding illustrators who can reproduce classic paintings in sped up videos that last less than 25 seconds. We and our youth are always one or two clicks away from some politician and influencer trying to pull the world into extreme positions. Imagine your self on your lowest self esteem day berating yourself for small mistakes, feeling like a failed parent or student, young boy or girl. The new digital nervous system is busy installing a anorexic standards to be hawked by the headlines of your’s and your children’s conscious experience.  That internet standard of performance is designed to assure every child falls a few inches short of adequate as part of the overall sales strategy of life’s offerings for instant better.  And we are in the process of locking our children into this lion’s den of emotional avarice while a healthy physical non digital community being promoted by that same sales strategy as the more dangerous option for healthy living.  

Modest Proposal for Good

There is feral and there is freedom.  The young child’s first and most important classroom is the non digital world.  This means the world of  soul, water, blowing wind, dust, mud, worms and even low forms of excrement.  Our children are evolved organic beings, and not digital images dreaming of dirt, frogs and dolls. Yes the analogue world carries dangers, but no danger compares the to simulacrum of the present digital trance capturing a child’s development.  Feral is sending your child out the door and then sinking yourself into the waking doze of the 24 hour news cycle or the the endless supply distracting offerings on your computer.  Freedom is sending your child out the door into a park or playground or swimming pool to make, break, and forgive friends as children must do to grow up and be wise. Yes you must be there to counsel the tears of life’s inevitable breakdowns and certainly to take your child to the hospital to set that broken arm.  But all of that is nothing compared to the trance of the lions den of media and internet. Time to turn our children and ourselves out into the physical world again; the organic world where all that imperfect precious life happens. That would be good.