Humanity: Children and the media vs kids and technology (ePub)

Children and the media - kids and Technology combo - The need for limits
by Hearts and Minds Media
Kids and Technology - Nature vs Nurture?
How to keep screen time in check for kids' health and development
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Edited by Hearts & Minds Media 2017
It seems these days that kids are operating electronic devices such as smartphones practically moments after being born. Just take a look around any local playgroup or playground: You’ll be likely to see kids as young as 2 or even younger clutching mom or dad’s phone to play games or view videos. When it comes to technology, kids are not only starting to use it at a younger age but are using it in more varied situations, both at home and at school.
Children and the Media
The media machine is changing daily utilising new technologies to stimulate, surprise and saturate not only older but the next generation on new methods of living and experiencing life. It is a force to be reckoned with, with the ability to influence actions and behaviour at least through modelling behaviour leading to desensitisation towards sex, violence with the verbal content of this new medium. The BBFC for example is the UK watchdog towards inappropriate content in film and TV which refrains from following its own standards of content rarely cutting or removing a film from the UK market (10 films only banned in the past 10 years; BBFC, 2017)
From the poem by Edmund Blake, Muggeridge quotes:
This Life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole,
And leads you to believe a lie,
When you see with, not through, the eye.1
Television is the special target of Muggeridge's criticism. He contends that the tube induces us to "see with the eyes" to secular fantasy and dissuades us from "seeing through the eyes" to spiritual reality.
Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society
“If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge