Its a time for families, but something I saw yesterday filled me with sadness and dread. Walking down 7th avenue in the middle of a rush, the sun has set and its that dusky kind of dark at rush hour. A man and woman pushing a baby carriage toward me, I notice a light inside the carriage illuminating the baby. As I get closer, I see they suspended a digital tablet near the opening for the baby to watch, its small head bathed in its weird translucent glow. Right before this, I was leaving an eatery passing a table of a young family as the father pushed his cell phone toward his toddler to play with. This was no one time thing, the child knew exactly how to manipulate the device once it got into its tiny, pudgy hands.

There’s no other way to see this: this shit is fucked up. I’m no Luddite, I’m as tech savvy as any 10 people you’ll meet. I was there at the beginning of the cyber age, I’ve witnessed the revolution and its evolution. I was the first generation to grow up in front of a television. But I also raised a child into a fantastic adult and I’m here to say that both of those incidents are as close to a futuristic version of child abuse as you’re going to get. In each case these children were robbed of an essential aspect of humanity: human interaction. And not only robbed, but replaced with a virtual one in which the value is inferred as the same. The device’s ubiquity is the real and present danger, its different than plopping a kid down in front of a TV to get a few hours of peace. We carry these with us as a personal gateway into a world of color and images that in many instances have no contextual value. In light of the current revelations regarding the sinister intent of all our online providers – from data mining for profit and propaganda to a possible realignment of access at a higher cost that benefits the few – how do we justify replacing human interaction with a transfixation to a virtual light box, a lightbox that we all know will do everything it can to steal your soul? A phone is not a passive actor, it is programmed to know you, adjust to your preferences and then lead you to where content providers want you to go.

Is it not bad enough we make conscious choices as adults or young adults to allow these devices to control our very move? But we rob our babies of the real sights and sounds of life, forcing them to experience life through only the backs of their retinas, which by the time they hit puberty will be scorched with a million images of nothing, of data that is meaningless. That baby in the carriage should have been hearing the sounds of traffic; of people and conversations in passing; seeing the blur of humans through the small opening, the shadows of buildings filtering through and the rhythmic drone of the carriage’s wheels against the sidewalk. The child in the restaurant needs to interact with its physical environment at every juncture: the tables and chairs, the smells, sounds, people; he/she needs to understand how to comport themselves, how to adjust, how to tolerate. They need to be curious. Generations of researchers, psychologists and neuro-scientists have proven to us that this is what makes the human mind grow, create new synapses to answer challenges in its environment. A baby is born with no facility for color, just contrasts of black and white, and its first interactions are in that mode. Then face-to-face contact creates the bond between the mother and child which extends to the father then the family, the neighborhood, community and the world. The kinetic world teaches the child patience, the value of boredom, the depths of the inner mind as a balm to the outside rigors and a chalice of creativity. Its the first step in becoming a citizen of their home, then community, then the world.

But when we stick a glowing brick in front of them, filled with images that we ourselves have no hand in creating, in essence trusting strangers to mollify and entertain our own children, then what do we call ourselves? Certainly not good parents. I’ll call them something worse.