Our first interview is out 🎉
I’m thrilled that Deepti Doshi, Co-Director of New _ Public, was brave enough to be my first guest. It is fitting that Deepti kicks us off because throughout her career she has focused on building community and social trust — two things that shape how we show up in the world, and how we engage with technology. Ironically, community and social trust are two things that social media claims to strengthen, when the reality is that social media has eroded both community and social trust.
And a huge thank you to Anoush Tatevossian (from The Future Society) who joined me as a co-host for this inaugural interview, giving me courage that only a friend I’ve known for 3 decades could give me.
✨Highlights
“… yes, we do need to be really thoughtful about kind of the exposure our children have to phones and screens and social media. But I think we also need to be reflective and deeply understand how it’s affecting us in our parenting.” - Deepti Doshi
“Because if they can’t go out on the streets on their own, then they need to stretch their creativity by finding YouTube…”- Deepti Doshi
“It’s not their fault that they don’t have the same kind of degrees of freedom that maybe we had growing up […] they become the data points of our loneliness epidemic because we’re not creating the context for them to build the relationships in the community that would be really healthy for them.” - Deepti Doshi
“We are now like mainly dual income families, you know, where both parents are working. And in the absence of that kind of supervision, I think we need to then be reflective of like, we’re outsourcing that supervision sometimes, maybe it’s to a babysitter or summer camp in some cases, but some cases we’re outsourcing that supervision to the device. For me, I’d rather outsource that supervision just to the neighborhood.” - Deepti Doshi
“I’ve started to notice, especially as I observe sort of kids in proximity to us, that they are mirroring their parents’ behavior in a lot of ways. And I think there’s a lot in here that I think we as parents need to also unpack about our own sort of reliance on either social media, but also just our devices.” - Emily Tavoulareas
“… there’s something about both the impact of these mediated experiences on us and what we’re consuming and how we view the world, but then also our ability as parents to engage with the world the way we want our kids to. And if we can’t engage with the world around us, how are we expecting our kids to do that?” - Emily Tavoulareas
“… my friend at one point said to me, the reason why I love coming to your house is because your bathrooms are never clean. And I took that as like a compliment that like our dirty toilets inspire her to also like keep her bar low too, you know? It like then makes it easier for her. And so it makes it easier for me. Like I don’t think about the toilets before people come over.” - Deepti Doshi
“… okay, so my kids are coming of age in the AI era, not the social media era. So what are the things I have to instill in them? They are not even about boundaries and communication and social media. It’s what are the traits of a human being that I have to instill in them? Because 10 years from now, that even may be in danger, right? So one of those very human values is the thing of interacting with other people physically is important to us in our family.” - Anoush Tatevossian
“I think it’s important that we give our kids the credit and the confidence, like they can understand the system. Like I think we need to talk to our children about the system. I was like, look, like, this is why I’m scared of chat GPT. This is why I ask you to do it in front of me. It’s not because I don’t trust you, it’s because you’re talking to a machine that is not in your control.” - Deepti Doshi
“… we had a rule that you could do Minecraft, but you had to do it with a friend over. So that it was like, was not a isolate, it wasn’t an activity you did on your own, you had to do it on one screen with a friend over. So that means you had to be talking with your friend and negotiating with your friend about the world you wanted to build and where you wanted to kind of use your money and what you wanted to use your fire for. That has been a way to teach him that these are tools. It’s like a tool to play with your friend. It’s not in and of itself the thing to do. It’s a thing to do with your friend, because you want to be.” - Deepti Doshi
❤️ Deepti closed our conversation with this…
“I don’t know, we need wine, we need cheese, we need to get together, but this was, it really was because it allows us to engage our multiple identities, you know, our identity as parents, as professionals working in tech and thinking about it, and also as like friends and community members. Like there’s a reflection here around friendship.”
I couldn’t agree more 💕
And a question for you, listeners:
Now excuse me while I commit this quote to memory, so I can remind myself as I try to do something new. (Seriously, I recorded this back in August and it’s taken me 2 months to muster up the courage to hit “post”…)
