Devices for Children

I recently read this Guardian article where the author, Oliver Keens, talks about how his daughter is unable to develop her own musical taste due to it being "basically inaccessible without a phone".

When he was his daughter's age, Oliver had his own small cassette player and collection of tapes—the music of which didn't match at all with the tastes of his parents. Today's situation is very different: the only way Oliver's daughter can access music, he writes, "is by making me get my phone out and play a song on my Spotify account."

While the article is focused on music, it points at a much broader problem: in a world where smartphones have replaced all other gadgets as the "one device to rule them all", parents have only two options to choose from when deciding how much digital access to give their children: everything, or nothing.

I can attest to that being a problem from the other end too. To get some kind of balance between "everything" and "nothing", parents try to impose their own restrictions on screen time, either manually or with the help of automated tools. Unfortunately, "screen time" is a very sweeping concept and doesn't take into account exactly what people are doing on their phones. I've seen this result in phones being confiscated by parents at arbitrary times—such as five minutes into a conversation with a friend or halfway through a Duolingo lesson—all because the phone was previously used that day to watch videos, or listen to music, or catch up on Instagram, or conduct research for an assignment, and all those various activities got clubbed together as "being on the phone".

Things used to be easier when screens were larger, and it was obvious to other people what one was doing. When my family got our first computer, "computer time" for my brother and myself was restricted to half an hour every alternate day. But it wasn't a hard-and-fast restriction, and if we were in the middle of "chatting" with someone or upgrading the OS or trying to take a printout, it was evident to everybody what was going on and why. Smartphones are more private, and aside from a rigid "always report what you're doing" system it's not easy for that awareness to automatically permeate.

In the meantime, smartphones are more essential than ever. My computer time may have been short by today's standards, but we also had a cassette player cum radio, a well-stocked library, dogs, and an efficient postal service—not to mention the family phone. Like the notorious iPad commercial, many of those various activities are now hard to perform without a smartphone or tablet.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Contrary to popular belief, not every device is a smartphone. The Freewrite is what one could describe as "a typewriter for the 21st century". Designed to exude the same robustness and clickety feel of a typewriter, the Freewrite replaces paper and ribbons with a non-backlit e-paper screen (think ebook readers like Kindle and Kobo). This results in a distraction-free device dedicated to writing, at the same time allowing one to interact with today's digital world. One of the Freewrite's two sturdy knobs lets you choose which file you want to edit; the other toggles the WiFi for syncing your documents to the cloud.

And—as reviewer Ian Bogost found out—when you use this device, it's clear what you are doing. "An open laptop is a Pandora's box," he writes. "What is its owner doing? Writing, or otherwise working? Watching porn? Wasting time on Facebook while you try to lecture or run a meeting?"

By contrast, the Freewrite "[situates] the writer in the world, while also making the writer's work transparent to any who would happen to look or wonder. And given that the device is small and light enough to take anywhere, that place could be anywhere—the armchair, the bed, the toilet, the terrace, the lawn. It signals that its user is writing, because it can do nothing else."

Single purpose devices like the Freewrite do two things. They signal to other people—such as a concerned parent—exactly what kind of activity is taking place; at the same time they avoid the tendency of the multipurpose device to distract you with other temptations since the device is already in your hand.

At $650, the Freewrite is on the expensive side and unlikely to be found in the average household. In his article, Oliver Keens talks about the Mighty Vibe, a screenless music player that can play off a pre-downloaded Spotify playlist.

But to define that list, you still need a smartphone. It's hard to come across devices that are truly untethered, and Oliver quotes novelist and game writer Naomi Alderman on why that may be. "So much of our technology is coded up by 25-year-olds working for companies run by 37-year-olds. They maybe have not raised children to adulthood and don't have friends who have, so the question 'how do I give my kid easy access to some but not all of my music' hasn't come up."

That doesn't mean such devices don't exist, although they are often niche and can be hard to come across. Oliver Keens' article talks about the Yoto, a speaker that plays music stored on physical cards and is accessible to children as young as two.

More generally, there is a small but growing movement of people—children and otherwise—who are ditching their multipurpose touchscreens for simpler, more tactile devices like ebook readers, dedicated music players, and handheld digital or analog cameras. These peoples' collections can include carefully preserved vintage devices that aren't manufactured any more, but also new releases like the FiiO CP13 cassette player or the Ricoh Pentax 17 analog portrait camera designed specifically for digital minimalists.

"In 2024," begins Naomi Alderman in her article The Danger of Digitizing Everything, "I will walk into a physical space—a restaurant, a hairdresser, an arts venue, an artisanal cheese shop—and instead of being handed a physical piece of paper with some useful information on it, or being told it in words, I will be shown a faded roundel with a QR code on it." She goes on to describe the growing disenfranchisement of people without smartphones—people, Oliver pointed out, including children under 10 who haven't yet got their first phone, but also anyone who chooses to distance themselves from such devices. "We have not thought enough about digital inclusion," Naomi writes (quoted in Oliver's article), "or how to allow staggered access to digital things."

Single-purpose devices offer such an option. As Iain Bogost wrote, things are "both enhanced and ruined by computers. Isn't it reasonable that the solution to this paradox would include neither the unrepentant embrace of digital life, nor its curt rejection either?" Maybe, he suggests, we can have a model where more things become "an activity that has computers in it, rather than an activity that takes place inside computers."

These devices would have to be designed with care: it's too easy to fall into the trap of making something dependent on a smartphone—an extreme example being Andrew Kelley's new dishwasher, which refused to operate until it could phone home once by connecting to the WiFi and being activated through an app. Fortunately, it looks like these well thought-out devices are becoming more common. With a bit of thinking on our part, we can help by encouraging them.

Thanks to Savitri for reviewing this post.