Technopanics, the Printing Press, and American Girl Dolls
Should we panic about the supercomputers in teens’ pockets?
Happy Thanksgiving! This year, I’m thankful for family, friends, and a magic sleepsuit that makes my child look like a tiny, adorable Michelin Man. I’m also especially thankful for all of you. If you like Techno Sapiens, I’d be very grateful if you’d share it with a few friends. See you next week!
7 min read
A friend recently shared with me, as she put it, disturbing news. American Girl had released its latest historical character doll. Like all American Girl dolls, Courtney is 18 inches tall, comes with a variety of clothing and hair accessories, and is the subject of a book meant to illustrate the events of a certain historical time period. That time period? The 1980s.
That’s odd, I thought. American Girl must be rethinking the “historical period” strategy. Perhaps they’re experimenting with more contemporary dolls. A reaction to lost market share to Writing My First Code toys, or something. I did some digging.1
Courtney is a blonde, curly-haired white girl who wears hot pink tights and a scrunchie. One of the most upsetting discoveries I made was a footnote on the American Girl website:
To style Courtney’s hair, we recommend finger styling for best results. To finger style, separate a small section of hair and lightly mist with lukewarm water, then gently work your fingers through it, twirling as you go to create tight curls.
This styling process is far more labor intensive than what I use on myself, a human woman.
But the second upsetting discovery arose after some quick math. Courtney’s story is set in the 1980s. It is 2021. That spans four decades. When I was clinging to my mom’s pant leg, begging her for an American Girl doll2, it was the 1990s. What was four decades before that? The 1950s. Girls today are tangling up the wires of Courtney’s tiny walkman and filling her miniature PacMan lunchbox with baby carrots. This is the historical equivalent of my dressing a doll in a poodle skirt and playing songs on her tiny jukebox.3
And young girls today, just like childhood me, probably find the vestiges of that historical time period unrecognizable. For adults, they’re more familiar, occupying a small slot in the hippocampus, filed away in our memories. But upon closer inspection, the leg warmers and jazzercise VHS tapes are just as foreign to us.
That’s because a lot has changed over the past four decades. In fact, a lot has changed in the past decade alone. In 2011, just 35% of Americans owned a smartphone. In 2021, that number is 85%. Looking around, we see a world that is, at times, hard to believe. In our pockets, we hold supercomputers with 100,000 times the processing power of the computer used to guide Apollo 11 to the moon. We have access to the entirety of the world’s information, at any moment, all of the time. We can share our opinions, our photos, our innermost thoughts with thousands of people, all over the world, within seconds.
Teens, whose knowledge of life before smartphones comes from textbooks, stories, and tiny doll accessories, often take enthusiastically to new technologies. The adults in their lives, who reflect on the days of mixtapes and cabbage patch kids, or sock hops and drive-in theaters, with nostalgia, often panic about it. Nearly 97% of U.S. teens (ages 13-17) use social media, but 64% of parents report they are at least somewhat worried (42% are “moderately” or “extremely” worried) that their teen is spending too much time online.
As parents, from where we sit, the past is quaint, the present is futuristic, and the future is terrifying.
But are these supercomputers in teens’ pockets, these tools for connecting and sharing, just another technology subject to the panicked hand-wringing of those who grew up without them? Is the panic warranted?
We shouldn’t fear new technologies, but we should take them seriously.
As you might imagine, I find myself in frequent conversations about teens and technology: academic presentations, interviews, discussions with parents, chats with friends and acquaintances.4 The tone of the conversation is often one of panic. Social media destroying a generation of teenagers! This type of scary generalization, I feel, is somewhat unproductive. Yes, social media can be harmful—in some cases, very harmful—for teens. Panicking, however, does not get us to solutions.
But sometimes the conversation swings in the other direction. What’s the big deal with social media, isn’t it just another piece of technology? Isn’t social media just another place for teens to do the same stuff they’ve always done? This line of thinking, in my mind, is equally problematic.
Let’s take these in turn.
First: Social media is no big deal.
It is true that new technologies, no matter the time period, are unfailingly subject to widespread fear and mistrust.5 A common example is the printing press, the technology that brought mass production to books. As printed books proliferated following its invention in the mid-15th century, technopanic took hold. Public figures lamented the irrevocable harm to be caused by unfettered and unregulated access to information, and religious leaders warned of the moral risks of reading. The minds and souls of young people were in grave danger with all these—gasp—printed books.
When we learn of this parallel to social media, our response is often to laugh, perhaps bolstered by some sense of relief. Clearly, printed books were fine. We’re all fine. Everybody calm down.
But this misses the point. The prevailing sentiment of this analogy should not be no big deal, but rather, this is a very big deal. The parallels between our current information age and the age of the printing press are striking. And it’s difficult to overstate the far-reaching consequences of the printing press, from reducing the power of the Catholic church to ushering in the Scientific Revolution. The printing press literally changed everything.6
And social media will too. In fact, it already has. We just don’t yet know exactly how.
Second: Social media is just more of the same.
In an effort to quell the current technopanic, we sometimes minimize the power of social media. Social media, we argue, is simply a mirror for what humans are already doing, have always done, offline. Social media has not caused the issue of hate speech, for example. Humans have always been hate-speakers, and now they’re just doing it online.
But to anyone who’s ever picked up a smartphone, something about this doesn’t ring true. Before social media, I don’t remember having the option to, say, yell out my personal thoughts on finger-styling dolls’ hair, and have thousands of people hear them immediately. Or pick up the phone and, in seconds, be video chatting with a friend half-way around the world.
It is true that teens’ basic human drives, their desires for social connection and autonomy, their hopes and fears and joys and challenges, have likely not changed. But it is also true that social media does something to these classic human experiences. It makes them more public, immediately accessible, accompanied by quantifiable indicators of approval or rejection. It amplifies them. It changes them. For better, and for worse.
So, should we panic about the supercomputers in teens’ pockets? About the seemingly futuristic state of our digital world? Probably not. If history has taught us anything, it is that panic neither thwarts the steady march of technological advancement, nor solves the challenges it creates.
But that doesn’t mean social media is more of the same or no big deal. Smartphones and social media have already transformed the way we live, connect, and work. To learn to use them effectively, we need to take them seriously. If we want to make changes, to help teens use these tools in healthier ways, we shouldn’t overstate their harms, but we also shouldn’t understate their transformative impacts on society.
We need to recognize that the printed books are already in circulation. They’re shaping every aspect of our lives. And four decades from now, when a smartphone-wielding, middle-part-wearing American Girl doll is released, we’ll be living in a world we cannot imagine today.
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And by “some digging,” I mean an incredibly deep dive. If you no longer wish to be able to fall asleep tonight, I recommend you tune into this American Girl stop motion (#DollStopMotion) YouTube video, which has the dual distinction of over one million views and a permanent place in my nightmares.
She relented. I got Samantha, a “wealthy orphan growing up in 1904” because she, like me, had brown hair.
This is a real thing you can buy (in four interest-free installments of just $22.50).
These conversations are an unavoidable aspect of small talk for me, and sometimes they go in unexpected directions. A few years ago, I was at a dinner party in which I found myself sitting next to well-dressed woman about my age. When I told her I research the impact of social media on teen’s mental health, she pulled out her phone and pointed to her Instagram page. She was a fashion influencer with a few million followers. We chatted about how she got started, her new podcast, Instagram’s recently-announced decision to experiment with removing “likes.” I then asked whether it was ever hard for her to be present in her life, knowing she needed to document every moment for her followers. This may have scared her. The conversation ended soon after that.
See: novels, bicycles, trains, telephones, television, microwaves, video games, etc. Various technopanics are outlined in this handy graphic from the BBC.
Highly recommend this article, which draws a parallel between the Internet and the printing press, and suggests that it’s impossible to predict how disruptive technologies will change our lives. It also profiles historian Elizabeth Einstein, an expert on the history of the printing press, who, it so happens, took up tennis while in her 50s and won several National senior championships in her 90s.