Digital Backlash

Yesterday was about as relaxed as any day I've ever had. I spent the morning and part of the afternoon with the dog in the garden, reading. I might have done a little trimming and watering here and there, but no major yardwork. I mostly just sat in our last remaining rickety wooden garden chair and read Jonathan Haidt's book, "The Anxious Generation," as Olga snoozed.
 

She showed no sign of wanting a walk of any kind. Instead, as she snored, I watched birds on the feeder from my position a few feet away, including a blue tit that came with its demanding baby chick and fed it deliberately and constantly.

I pretty much agree with Haidt's book, which essentially says that kids have been deprived of a secure, nurturing childhood by the twin evils of 24-hour social media access via their omnipresent smartphones and overprotective parents who won't let them explore the real world on their own terms. He suggests that parents limit screen time, that schools take away or lock up students' phones during the school day, and that parents allow kids more freedom to play, walk to parks and playgrounds, run errands and be independent. He laments the loss of the kind of childhood that many of us enjoyed, when we could bike ride around our neighborhoods, walk to school or the store unaccompanied, and play with friends with no adult guidance, supervision or timetable. He says there's no reason kids can't continue to do all of that.

I thought it was quite sensible and interesting. I see kids every day who, when not in class, retreat into the library shelves with their phones -- who don't take a walk, don't go to recess and don't socialize with friends. All that will change next year when phones are prohibited. (Of course, you know who will wind up enforcing those prohibitions in the library? ME! I need a raise, honestly.) Like that blue tit feeding its chick, we need to push our kids to become more independent.

Then, in the afternoon, I came across an article in The New York Times that was basically about my life! It actually ran at the end of March and I somehow missed it -- it's about people from Generation X working in creative industries whose careers were sidelined by changes in technology.

"If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work," wrote the author, Steven Kurutz. "That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand."

Basically, my poor beleaguered generation was in the right place at the right time to bear the brunt of the digital revolution -- too old to fully adapt to the new marketplace and remain desirable to employers, too young to retire. I certainly learned to adapt to the Internet as a reporter -- I regularly posted my own stories online and ran my own news blog when I worked in New Jersey, and helped our newspapers manage online content when I was an editor in New York. But I wasn't like younger people, growing up in an era of Twitter, Google, YouTube, TikTok and gig work. There are plenty of people who still go into journalism but that industry looks nothing like it did when I first inhabited it, and in that sense, I'm a dinosaur.

It's funny -- back in the '90s I used to say that journalism was secure because people would always need news. What I didn't envision was the transformation of news itself. I worked in local news, writing about local governments, cities, communities and people. Nowadays, many potential readers seem to have decided they don't need professionally reported local news. All politics is national, everyone reads the same national news sites or watches national TV news, and any local news needs are met by Facebook and other social media, with (I think) dubious results. I doubt people are as well-informed about their local communities as they used to be, when local newspapers flourished.

Anyway, the article mentioned a filmmaker named Chris Wilcha, who is a few years younger than me but has seen his own creative work diminish. He cobbled together a film from the archives of several documentaries that he launched and never finished, including several focused directly or indirectly on analog media including vinyl records, radio broadcasting and film photography. Dave and I rented it last night -- it's called "Flipside" and we got it from Apple TV. I enjoyed it, even though it is something of a ramble. I was just glad Wilcha, after so many false starts, finally managed to get a movie made.

Meanwhile, my Gen X creativity is now focused here, on my blog. Not such a bad thing, I suppose. I don't get paid for it, but at least I can write about whatever I want!