Annotations

MLA citations:

Plowman, Lydia, Joanna McPake and Christine Stephen. “The Technologisation of Childhood? Young Children and Technology in the Home”. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection. CHILDREN & SOCIETY VOLUME 24, (2010) pp. 63–74, Web. 18 Apr. 2011.

Overview, Pitch, Complaint, Moment:

Lydia Plowman and her colleague at University of Stirling in UK describe an 18-month empirical investigation of three- and four-year-old children’s uses of technology at home, including a survey of 346 families and 24 case studies. At the time a huge debate was going on about whether technology was hampering children’s development or assisting the learning process. The authors try to convince the reader that the negative influence of technology on children is not as serious as the media depicted. The authors are addressing concerns and anxiety of parents and society due to increasing illness like social isolation and obesity among children. Plowman et al also challenges some existing studies that point out the potential impediments that technology poses on children’s sociocultural and cognitive development, even threats on their wellbeing. Their research discovered that parenting style and level of involvement played critical roles in shaping children’s interaction with digital devices, as most parents agreed that their children should have a balanced time of devoting to physical, interactive activities and to inactive activities like engaging in video games. The study was conducted in 2005, when all the subjects of the study grew up with a variety of electronic devices around. The researchers’ finding is at odds with the popular assumption during this time that technology is responsible for poisoning the childhood; instead, the case studies suggest that children often are active rather than passive users of technology.

What's the author's assumption?

The article is based on the assumption that the media was exaggerating the severity of technological influence on childhood. The authors believe that the both sides of the heated debate about technology’s effect on children’s psychological and cognitive development need new evidences to support their claims. They conducted the research and construct their article based on the assumption, trying to shed new light into the conversation.

How it may enhance my argument in PSA:

The secondary source indicates that parents are actually playing an active role in intervening children’s relationship with technology. In the research that Plowman et al conducted, they found that most parents expected their children to engaging a reasonable time and energy into their interaction with digital devices. This is contradicting Dr. Morgenson’s argument that adults were absent as directive roles for children. Since Dr. Morgenson’s article was written in 1972, this research conducted in 2005 clearly disproved his pessimistic view of the influence of technology. Rather than leading the world into a “Minor Dark Age” and depriving human beings of their creativity, technology is actually becoming a regular routine of people’s lives. The family structure is not threatened by the technology; instead, technology provides family members with a variety of ways to interacting with each other, as the researchers noticed, adults and children are often using the technology at the same time, and adults qualify their roles as informed guiders for children.  Most adults, unlike Dr. Morgenson predicted, are responsible parents who attend to their children.

Two Additional Secondary Sources:

1. Technology and creativity, whether technology hampers children and adults’ creativity (psychological source)
2. Does intellectualization hampers creativity? (Psychological source)

How these two sources relate to each other?

As Dr. Morgenson mentioned in his speech, technology “kills beauty, mystery, and the innocence of children; it comes close to killing childhood”, and he defined creativity as one vital component of childhood. The first additional source will provide information about the relationship between technology and creativity; it helps us to determine whether Dr. Morgenson’s claim is accurate. The second additional source address the by-product of technology advance, which Dr. Morgenson assailed in his speech, accusing the intellectualization, or pre-maturation came in the way of children’s creativity. The secondary source may prove the authenticity of this claim, and thus serves as evidence for the primary source analysis. Overall, the two additional sources address different potential questions in the primary source; together they will enhance and support the final argument.