“手機里的惡魔”？硅谷父母對電子產品說不

SAN FRANCISCO — The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.

舊金山——對一件東西愈了解往往就愈警惕。技術專家們知道手機的運作原理，所以許多人拿定主意，不讓自己的孩子靠近手機。

A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.

有一種謹慎的態(tài)度一直在發(fā)酵中，如今這種態(tài)度變成了地區(qū)性共識：屏幕作為學習工具的好處被夸大了，上癮和阻礙孩子發(fā)育的風險似乎很高。如今硅谷爭論的是，接觸手機到什么程度是合適的。

“Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. “If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”

“不看屏幕比花一點點時間看屏幕要容易，”嫁給了一位Facebook工程師的前社會計算研究者克里斯廷·施特歇爾(Kristin Stecher)表示。“如果我的孩子有使用屏幕的時間，那他們只會想要更多。”

Ms. Stecher, 37, and her husband, Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their house. Their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time “budget,” no regular hours they are allowed to be on screens. The only time a screen can be used is during the travel portion of a long car ride (the four-hour drive to Tahoe counts) or during a plane trip.

37歲的施特歇爾和丈夫魯沙巴·多希(Rushabh Doshi)一直在對使用屏幕的時間長短進行研究，他們得出了一個簡單的結論：他們基本上不希望家里有人使用屏幕。他們有兩個女兒，一個五歲，一個三歲，兩個孩子完全沒有使用屏幕時間的“預算”，也就是說，他們完全不允許兩個孩子有定期使用屏幕的時間。唯一能使用屏幕的時候，是在長時間坐車期間(開車四小時去塔霍湖的路上)，或是在坐飛機的時候。

Recently she has softened this approach. Every Friday evening the family watches one movie.There is a looming issue Ms. Stecher sees in the future: Her husband, who is 39, loves video games and thinks they can be educational and entertaining. She does not.

最近，她軟化了這一立場。每周五，這家人都會看一部電影。在施特歇爾看來，未來存在一個迫在眉睫的問題：她39歲的丈夫愛打電子游戲，并且認為電子游戲既有教育意義，又有娛樂性。她可不這么認為。

“We’ll cross that when we come to it,” said Ms. Stecher, who is due soon with a boy.

“遇到這個問題時，我們會出現(xiàn)沖突，”即將誕下一名男孩的施特歇爾說。

Some of the people who built video programs are now horrified by how many places a child can now watch a video.

如今孩子能看視頻的地方之多，讓一些打造視頻節(jié)目的人感到震驚。

Asked about limiting screen time for children, Hunter Walk, a venture capitalist who for years directed product for YouTube at Google, sent a photo of a potty training toilet with an iPad attached and wrote: “Hashtag ‘products we didn’t buy.’”

當被問及限制孩子使用屏幕的時間時，在谷歌(Google)為YouTube進行產品指導的風險投資人亨特·沃克(Hunter Walk)發(fā)來了一張圖片，上面顯示著一個帶有iPad訓練孩子上廁所的便盆，他寫道：“#‘我們不認同的產品’”。

Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook and is now at Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arm, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”

曾在Facebook擔任行政助理，如今在馬克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)的慈善機構“陳-扎克伯格行動”(Chan Zuckerberg Initiative)任職的阿西納·查瓦里亞(Athena Chavarria)說：“我深信我們的手機里有惡魔，并且這個惡魔正在對我們的孩子造成傷害。”

Ms. Chavarria did not let her children have cellphones until high school, and even now bans phone use in the car and severely limits it at home.

直到高中，查瓦里亞都不讓自己的孩子擁有手機，并且即便是現(xiàn)在，她也仍然禁止在車里使用手機，家里使用手機也嚴格受限。

She said she lives by the mantra that the last child in the class to get a phone wins. Her daughter did not get a phone until she started ninth grade.

她說自己信奉一句俗話，即班上的贏家是最后一個有手機的孩子。她的女兒直到九年級開始時，才有了一部手機。

“Other parents are like, ‘Aren’t you worried you don’t know where your kids are when you can’t find them?’” Ms. Chavarria said. “And I’m like, ‘No, I do not need to know where my kids are every second of the day.’”For longtime tech leaders, watching how the tools they built affect their children has felt like a reckoning on their life and work.

“其他父母會說，‘當你找不到孩子的時候，你不擔心他們在哪兒嗎?’”查瓦里亞說。“我說，‘不擔心，我不需要每分每秒都知道我的孩子們在哪里。’”對于在科技業(yè)長期擔任領導人的人士來說，看著這些他們打造的工具對自己孩子的影響，感覺就像是對他們生活和工作的一種報應。

Among those is Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the chief executive of a robotics and drone company. He is also the founder of GeekDad.com.

在這些人當中，就有《連線》(Wired)前主編克里斯·安德森(Chris Anderson)。他目前是一家機器人和無人機公司的首席執(zhí)行官，并且創(chuàng)辦了GeekDad.com。

“On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine,” Mr. Anderson said of screens.

“在糖果和可卡因之間，它更接近于可卡因，”安德森如此評價那些屏幕。

Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said.

打造出這些產品的技術專家和觀察科技革命的作者們都很天真，他說。

“We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.”

“我們以為能控制它，”安德森說。“但它已經超越了我們的控制能力。它直接被傳送到了正在發(fā)育的大腦的愉悅中樞。這超越了我們作為普通父母的理解能力。”

He has five children and 12 tech rules. They include: no phones until the summer before high school, no screens in bedrooms, network-level content blocking, no social media until age 13, no iPads at all and screen time schedules enforced by Google Wifi that he controls from his phone. Bad behavior? The child goes offline for 24 hours.

他有五個孩子，給他們定了12條與科技相關的規(guī)則。其中包括：上高中前的那個暑假才能有手機;臥室里不能有屏幕;網絡級內容屏蔽;13歲才能用社交媒體;絕對禁止使用iPad;對使用屏幕的時間設下時間表，該時間表由谷歌Wifi執(zhí)行，他可以從自己的手機上進行控制。孩子不聽話?那就斷網24小時。

“I didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences,” Mr. Anderson said.“This is scar tissue talking. We’ve made every mistake in the book, and I think we got it wrong with some of my kids,” Mr. Anderson said. “We glimpsed into the chasm of addiction, and there were some lost years, which we feel bad about.”

“直到我注意到癥狀和后果前，我都不知道我們對他們的大腦做了什么，”安德森說。“這可是瘢痕組織在說話。我們犯下了規(guī)則里的所有錯，而且我認為，我們在孩子身上犯了錯，”安德森說。“我們看到了上癮的深淵，錯了幾個年頭，對此我們感到很遺憾”。

His children attended private elementary school, where he saw the administration introduce iPads and smart whiteboards, only to “descend into chaos and then pull back from it all.”

他的子女上的是私立小學，他看到學校會用iPad和智能白板，結果“陷入了混亂，之后從中退出”。

This idea that Silicon Valley parents are wary about tech is not new. The godfathers of tech expressed these concerns years ago, and concern has been loudest from the top.

硅谷父母對科技感到擔憂并非新鮮事?？萍冀谈競兌嗄昵熬驮磉_過這些擔憂，來自最頂層人士的擔心聲音最大。

Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said earlier this year that he would not let his nephew join social networks. Bill Gates banned cellphones until his children were teenagers, and Melinda Gates wrote that she wished they had waited even longer. Steve Jobs would not let his young children near iPads.

蘋果(Apple)CEO蒂姆·庫克(Tim Cook)今年早些時候表示，他不會讓自己的侄子上社交網絡。比爾·蓋茨(Bill Gates)禁止他的孩子在十幾歲之前用手機，而梅琳達·蓋茨(Melinda Gates)曾寫道，她希望他們可以再晚一些給孩子手機。史蒂夫·喬布斯(Steve Jobs)不會讓自己年幼的孩子靠近iPad。

But in the last year, a fleet of high-profile Silicon Valley defectors have been sounding alarms in increasingly dire terms about what these gadgets do to the human brain. Suddenly rank-and-file Silicon Valley workers are obsessed. No-tech homes are cropping up across the region. Nannies are being asked to sign no-phone contracts.

但在去年，對于這些電子產品對人腦的影響，一群著名硅谷變節(jié)者發(fā)出了越來越可怕的警告。突然間，硅谷的普通員工對這個概念癡迷了起來。整個地區(qū)突然出現(xiàn)了各種對高科技電子產品說不的家庭。保姆們被要求簽署不用手機的合同。

Those who have exposed their children to screens try to talk them out of addiction by explaining how the tech works.

那些讓孩子接觸屏幕的人，試圖通過解釋科技的運作原理，說服他們戒除屏幕癮。

John Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners and the former C.E.O. of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the technology.

在硅谷工作的Greylock Partners公司風險投資人約翰·利利(John Lilly)表示，他試圖幫助自己13歲的兒子理解，他受到了那些打造這些科技產品的人的操縱。利利曾是摩斯拉(Mozilla)的前CEO。

“I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”

“我盡力告訴他，有人專門寫代碼，就是為了讓你有這種感受——我在試圖幫他理解這些東西是如何被打造出來的，這些東西其中的價值觀，以及為了創(chuàng)造出這種感覺，人們都做了什么，”利利說。“他的反應是，‘我只想花20美元，拿到《堡壘之夜》(Fortnite)的皮膚’。”

And there are those in tech who disagree that screens are dangerous. Jason Toff, 32, who ran the video platform Vine and now works for Google, lets his 3-year-old play on an iPad, which he believes is no better or worse than a book. This opinion is unpopular enough with his fellow tech workers that he feels there is now “a stigma.”

此外，科技業(yè)還有一些人，不同意屏幕很危險的觀點。32歲的杰森·托夫(Jason Toff)曾運營視頻平臺Vine，如今是谷歌的員工，他會讓自己三歲的兒子玩iPad。在他看來，iPad和一本書沒什么差別。這種觀點在他的科技業(yè)同行那里不怎么受歡迎，以至于他覺得現(xiàn)在這是“一種不光彩的感覺”。

“One reaction I got just yesterday was, ‘Doesn’t it worry you that all the major tech execs are limiting screen time?’” Mr. Toff said. “And I was like, ‘Maybe it should, but I guess I’ve always been skeptical of norms.’ People are just scared of the unknown.”

“昨天我得到的一種回應是，‘所有主要的科技公司高管都在限制屏幕使用時間，你不擔心嗎?’”托夫說。“我的回答是，‘也許它應該被限制，但我可能對標準行為一直都持懷疑態(tài)度。’人們只是害怕未知。”

“It’s contrarian,” Mr. Toff said. “But I feel like I’m speaking for a lot of parents that are afraid of speaking out loud for fear of judgment.”

“這有些離經叛道，”托夫表示。“但我覺得自己是在為許多因為擔心被指指點點，而不敢大聲說出來的父母發(fā)聲。”

He said he thinks back to his own childhood growing up watching a lot of TV. “I think I turned out O.K.,” Mr. Toff said.

他說，回想起自己小時候看了很多電視。“我覺得我最后也沒什么問題，”托夫表示。