This line of thought is pretty common amongst a certain class of modern HCI researchers. See for example a tweet from Bret Victor a few days ago: https://twit

This line of thought is pretty common amongst a certain class of modern HCI researchers. See for example a tweet from Bret Victor a few days ago: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/560519372641677312 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/560519372641677312 Or this article by Alec Resnick: http://alecresnick.com/post/84756789325/from-bicycles-to-treadmills http://alecresnick.com/post/84756789325/from-bicycles-to-tre... Their argument can be roughly summed up as "We were on the right track with the constructivist approach to HCI in the 70s/80s, but capitalism ruined everything and now we just watch Kim Kardashian on our tablets". There's of course some cynical truth in there- I also spent my grad school years reading Papert and Piaget and Kay and Resnick (Mitchell, not Alec), and I also find their vision of personal computing very enticing. And in many ways I orient my work to fit within the frameworks they built- I have nothing but deep respect for them as academics. But I don't buy the whole "tablets and phones are just mind numbing dumb entertainment devices". In the past 5 years, I have seen: - my younger brother start an internet radio from scratch from a bedroom at our parents, that rose to thousands of listeners - my grandmother use the internet to communicate with her geographically distant friends and family - teenagers making short movies in their backyard, or learning how to compose music - kids discovering themselves a passion for photography, able to retouch photographs without needing access to a dedicated dark room, all with a hundred dollar device (when I was a kid, a hundred dollars barely got you a walkman). - illustrators empowered to work from their home and make a living by working with clients many thousands miles away - and many, many more. None of that would have been possible even 15 years ago. Our tools are much, much better - Garageband and Photoshop and iMovie and Fruity Loops and others offer the means to do things in your bedroom that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars and required hundreds of square feet of free space a few decades ago. Sure, you have some purists that might argue that Instagram is to a dark room what a McDonald's burger is to Kobe beef - but I take issue with that as well [0]. Naturally, there are people who only use these devices for watching movies and playing games. That's absolutely fine, and I'm not sure why computer scientists like to take such a haughty attitude towards that. Not everyone spends all their waking hours working on their next masterpiece; and in fact, even the people who produce masterpieces spend idle time doing unproductive things just on par with reading Reddit or watching silly YouTube videos. Are computers the best they can be? Far from it, and many of us work very hard at it (including the people I quoted earlier). But the attitude that we are now in a tarpit of mind controlling devices and that the golden days of computing are behind us is deeply wrong. We have come such a long way. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8856780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8856780