How Big Tech Is Undermining Childhood

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-09-26-how-big-tech-is-undermining-childhood/

an edited transcript

Robert Kuttner: Susan Linn is a psychologist, a child advocate, and a ventriloquist who worked with Fred Rogers. She virtually invented puppet therapy, working with cancer patients at Children’s Hospital using puppets. She is a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Susan is also the founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which is now called Fairplay. She is the author of three important books: Consuming Kids, The Case for Make Believe, and most recently, Who’s Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children. Susan has written for several magazines, including the Prospect. Among her achievements as a child advocate, she convinced Disney to stop marketing Baby Einstein on the premise that it had any educational value. And the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood worked with the FTC to prevent Google from monetizing information on kids that Google had gotten through YouTube Kids. Susan has been my friend for more than 40 years. Susan, let me start by asking you, your book Consuming Kids was published almost two decades ago. What has worsened in the last two decades that persuaded you that there needed to be another book on this?

Susan Linn: The technology. You know, the technology didn’t get worse. It got better, it got more powerful. It made marketing to children more confusing, more omnipresent, more invasive than it ever was before. In 2004, the major concern was television. And that was powerful enough. But the new technologies are just so much more powerful.

Kuttner: What are some examples of that? Is the problem the medium? Or is it the message, or is it both?

Linn: It’s both. We have to remember that marketing doesn’t just sell products. It sells values as well. People don’t think enough about how the values of commercialism, the values of consumer capitalism, are really antithetical to democratic values. So we’re immersing kids in this culture, that tells them that “me first” is more important than cooperation; a culture that encourages them to think by impulse, to consume, consume, consume. Given the crisis of global warming, it is basically encouraging kids to adopt values that will ultimately destroy themselves and the planet.

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