Civilizing Parents in the Digital Age

Abstract

After almost half a century of the Internet being a part of everyday life for billions of people, the jury is still out on whether the coming of the digital age is a blessing or a curse for humanity. Even the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic—which has forced whole sectors of social life, including teaching, exercise, religious celebrations, and academic small talk over wine and cheese, into the virtual sphere—did not change the overall ambivalence of our perceptions of the role of digital media in social life. On the one hand, the benefits seem undisputable: They include the wide, if not universal, availability of low-cost communication; global connectivity; retrievability of immense loads of data, which can be processed quickly and efficiently and provide knowledge about societies which would otherwise be out of reach; and the freedom of sharing content, which is harder to control than any kind of media in existence, and thus more equal and less exclusive than any other.