Riding the curl of these cresting parental anxieties, Pogue confessed to his HDTV-and-smart-phone-owning readers that his brilliant and otherwise well-disciplined six-year-old is showing signs of iPad addiction, and he is trying to handle the crisis sanely. We learned that the young Pogue, though obsessed with his dad's new toy, doesn't borrow it for just any old Angry Bird attack. His obsessive craving is to play with the iPad's more creative, educational and challenging apps.

Wondered Pogue Sr.:

" Is a gadget automatically bad for our children just because it's electronic? What if it's fostering a love of music, an affinity for theater and expertise in strategy and problem-solving? Is it a bad thing for a kid to be so much in love with mental exercises? Am I really being a good parent by yanking THAT away?"

...and he asked aloud (ablog?) what we all thought about that.

Evidently this is the question we've all been hoping to be posed, since his query shot to the top of the Time's popularity queue faster than you can say, "busybody."   

The results were occasionally interesting: (1)

Predictably, some thought young Pogue in peril of permanent mental damage, and others didn't. Also predictably, since the New York Times courts a literate readership, many respondents assumed that reading ability (rather than, say, math, animation or performative storytelling) was the skill most necessary to a successful life and the one most endangered by newer types of media literacy. (2)

Numerous readers were concerned that Pogue's youngest get his fair share of live human interaction. This makes sense---theoretically. There is considerable scientific support for the notion that both unmediated experiences that engage all of a children's senses, plus human interactions not specifically programmed to guarantee their pleasure help children develop in ways no communications medium, including the alphabet, can. It was hard, however, to imagine that a parent as obviously hover-prone as Pogue would allow his child to avoid such things, so that the comments that were pushing human interaction seemed to suffer paradoxically from a kind of interpersonal disconnection.    

The big (and delightful) surprise in the response jungle, was how many commenters agreed with him that "everything in moderation" was the right thumb-rule for calibrating seductive media consumption, even for a pre-reader.

But whether responses were measured or wacky, the upshot was that iPad addicton, anticipated by industry pundits from the moment the device was launched,(3) has now officially joined "Crackberry" syndrome and smart-phone addiction in the larger "device addiction" taxonomy, cousin to "Internet addiction" and "video game addiction"--- with "television addiction" lurking in the coat room like a lecherous old uncle at the wedding of the words "Electronic" and "Media."   

All that remains is for any of these Electronic Media Addictions, of EMAs, to be formally recognized by the psychology industry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM.  So far, although the American Psychological Association has no doubt encountered an iPad addict or two, it isn't playing. Treatment, consequently,  isn't covered by insurance, although you might get some affordable help from the Online Therapy Insititute  in Second LifeTM.

Before we denounce establishment science for over-caution, however, we should recall that Western society's overblown fears of fantasy-based pleasure are nothing new. As we wrote last month, the novel was decried as corrupting and addictive as early as the 1900s. The waltz was deplored as an erotic cesspit of delirium in its day, as was jazz, rock and the boom box. Apart from the very few who get so glued to their screens that they forget to eat, sleep or stay alive, maybe this is the sort of lunacy otherwise well-tended young people outgrow, like prank calling, black lipstick or Justin Bieber?

So we're still in the question stage: How dangerous is electronic media addiction really? How seductive are the bright lights and tiny cities of our new playthings? How permanently damaging, how difficult to manage are the various degrees of immersion they induce in young people?  As broadband spreads among the bottom 40% of earners who now lack it, will stats change disproportionately? Should we be medicalizing iPad and video game addiction the way China, Japan and Korea have done? Or is the allegedly greater prevalence of Internet addiction---defined as six or more hours a day at the screen----among Chinese youth (4) some offshoot of tiger mothering, a symptom of an excessive performance pressure perhaps, and therefore a stress response that can be eliminated at the point of its creation by relaxing expectations in homes or other pedagogical pressure cookers?

Here in the U.S., an outfit called ReStart isn't waiting for the lab rats to prove that the Internet and app market can hijack one's limbic system and turn one into a fleshbot serf of the cyberealm. For $14,500, "plus other fees, potentially," according to its website, ReStart offers a residential 45 day inpatient rehab for EMAs, including  therapy and electronics-free environments, accompanied by a 12 step AA-style indoctrination.   

Most children, however, are not at risk for EMD so much as for fantasy-reality boundry blur. Regardless of the medium or the content, young people need their natural ability to distinguish pretend and actual worlds monitored, and, when necessary, reinforced. A child who lives for violent movies, as did, say, the young Quentin Tarantino, can be watchfully allowed to indulge his darkest obsessions as long as he restricts them to the virtual world and doesn't actually attempt to dismember women and feed them to rodents (as some of the print-literate members of our House of Representatives seem inclined to do). (5)

Perhaps a more far-reaching way to mitigate children's desire to flee the great world for the virtual one, offers Jane McGonigal , author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World---is to use the skills kids develop playing digital games in real life games---ones that rival the game world's grandiosity of mission by tackling---and solving---actual societal problems. Games of the sort she is designing, she claims, by offering children the experience of real personal and collective power instead of mere illusions of omnipotence, can rival even an iPad in salience. 

For now, we are best off shimmying around on David Pogue's Bongo Board of alternating concern and enthusiasm. But it will be delightful if we ever see the day when tiger parents stand over their offspring, insisting: Practice your iPad for another hour, Honey, and once you solve protein folding in the dopamine pathway of the nucleus acumbens, you can play your violin.   

NOTES