Recently I was on Reddit when a post from r/teachers made it to the front page. It was titled, "If you could say one truth to America’s parents with no repercussions, what would you tell them?" The number 1 most common answer I saw was "limit your kid's screen time!" Among the other top answers were, "your kid should not be on TikTok," and "read to your kids," which is just disheartening to see frankly. It is no secret that social media and technology are having a profound impact on our children, and it's looking like that may not be a good thing. Picture this and I'm sure that you can: you go into a restaurant and spot a family out together, their children are stuck to iPads, not paying attention to anything going on around them; completely checked out from the real world. After all, if it finally gets your child to be quiet, that's all that matters, right?
Last year Universal Pictures released M3gan, a campy sci-fi horror film about a woman who creates a animatronic, artificially intelligent smart-doll that does everything with your child. She can play, help with homework, and even make reminders to brush your teeth in the morning. Horror movie enthusiasts might recognize a similar theme in Child's Play, the concept of a child's toy that goes rogue and becomes murderous. However, M3gan says a lot more than Chucky ever did, and as goofy as the premise is the implications of M3gan are much more sinister than meets the eye. If you weren't paying close attention, you may have missed the true message behind the film.
In the beginning we are introduced to 8 year old Cady, who loses her parents in a tragic car accident and is then given into the care of her aunt Gemma, who works on technology for a major toy company. Gemma is as emotionally stunted as her 8 year old niece, and has no idea how to support Cady and is generally a cold person. That doesn't make her a bad person persay, just not very warm and especially not equipped to take care of a child that is trying to make sense of what happened to her. However, they do sort of bond over Gemma's ability to create robots, which gives her an idea..
What if she didn't have to spend time with Cady? What if she could make something that could do that job for her?
Enter M3gan (Model 3 Generative Android.) M3gan does everything that Gemma can't. She reads to Cady, plays games with her, is therapeutically supportive and helps her with everyday tasks. Of course, since Cady is a child she loves it, and is soon doing everything with M3gan until the line between toy and crutch becomes blurry. It becomes concerning when M3gan starts doing things of her own volition and ignoring the orders of her creator. People will look at the murderous android as being the sole problem, but that couldn't be further from the truth. No, the truth is that Gemma was the issue all along.
Well yes M3gan goes on a murderous rampage but I'm not being literal here. The core of Gemma and Cady's problem is that Gemma spent all of her time growing her intelligence and did nothing with her emotional intelligence. On the one hand, this is subversive for a female character and I appreciate that. Not every woman has a natural inclination to be a caretaker. No, the issue with Gemma is that her motivation falls under what a lot of people in the tech world don't understand; just because you can doesn't mean you should. There's a very good reason ethics in STEM exists, and this movie proves that.
The only person that sees the problem with M3gan and Cady's co-dependent relationship is Cady's therapist, who in the beginning questions if it's even healthy or not. Gemma is not only motivated by her own gain but her boss's greed as well. He sees the potential, astronomical money that could be made from this and never questions if it's good for kids or not. There's something to be said about how capitalism's strive for profit overrides our sense of morality. Is what your creating contributing something good to the world? That's a discussion that needs to be had before it's too late.
And we are seeing the consequences of this. As I mentioned earlier, many parents these days seem to have no issue with using technology to parent their kids. Part of this is because many parents literally don't have time to spend with them if they're working multiple jobs, and I understand that. But let's be real for a moment, are these games and apps that kids are using really helping them learn? Let me answer that question by providing one of the responses on Reddit I was talking about before:
It doesn't end here. If you go on TikTok right now and search "teachers of TikTok rant" or anything to do with educators you will find TONS of evidence straight from the mouth of the people who take care of today's youth. Here is a video posted last year from a teacher named Ms. Ligon I found that perfectly encapsulates what I'm trying to express here. I can't embed the video so you'll have to watch it on TikTok, but basically she tells of her experience working with kids and how their general disrespect is beyond anything she's ever dealt with before, and she's not the only one. From what I have gathered, kids have way less of an attention span now, and don't deal with boredom well. They don't say please and thank you and they don't take kindly to any authority. Boys have oddly backwards views on women and that's largely thanks to the alpha bro content they're consuming via the likes of Andrew Tate (just a note here, if your kid is listening to Tate take away their phone immediately. I can't even properly explain how harmful that guy is.)
I am not ignorant of the fact that every generation has their detractors and critics. When I was a kid there was plenty of them, and they all said similar things. Everybody thinks they know how to parent until they become one, right? I get it. What makes generation alpha different I think in this case is the fact that home technology has gotten so far that it has now surpassed our understanding, and we all know that kids have far better comprehension of it then their parents do. What we aren't teaching is media literacy. How can we teach children how to process what their consuming? Do they even understand what is being told to them or are they just mindlessly taking in everything without any critical thought? This is dangerous. This is alarming. This should be the number 1 topic in schools right now and instead government officials seem to be more concerned with gay and trans kids than actually getting to the root of this issue. We don't encourage our kids to read when we are quite literally banning books from shelves, and part of me knows that this is intentional. The more ignorant people are, the easier they are to manipulate.
The point of M3gan is that the technology we develop isn't literally going to come in the form of killer robots, it's going to be the consequences of parents not monitoring and limiting their children's screen time because of their unwillingness to even spend time with them. These children are future adults, and many people are forgetting that. What is going to happen to them when they apply for their first job and they have no idea how to talk professionally? How to deal with real-life issues? I fear for them and the devastating effects this is going to have on our society at large. You can watch M3gan and laugh or think however you want, but are you truly listening?
