Escaping the Hypnogourd

"Technology is not your friend."
                                    ~~Eustacia Cutler

  In Piers Anthony's novel Ogre Ogre, Anthony depicts treacherous gourds.
  Each gourd has a hole in it, and, if you are foolhardy enough to look into the hole, you become trapped
within it, unable to escape, immobilized into staring at the stories playing out, the lives of the harsh brass folk inside.
  The gourd  interiors are interconnected, with brass people moving easily from one gourd into another, though the body of the person hypnotized into staring into one gourd is stuck in place until an intervention occurs.

What was Anthony thinking?

  Considering when the book was published (1982), i doubt Anthony had the  internet in mind, but it seems an obvious application
 And i would be surprised if he had not been thinking of TV.  (4/28/12: i picked up Ogre,Ogre today, reading it for the first time in like 5 years.  In chapter 4, Anthony tells us that he has computer games in mind. ) A quick Google search on "effects of TV on children's brains" yielded 130,000,000 results.  This one summarizes the common problems.
  Yet for both our spectrum and our NT (neurotypical) kids, media is the order of the day.  Do any of us know how to raise kids without media any more?  (Or plastic, but that's another story.)

Out of Autism?

  We admire Eustacia Cutler for having brought her daughter "out of autism,"  especially in a day when the routine recommendation was to institutionalize.  What did she do?
  She insisted her daughter get involved in people, in daily life.
  And we allow our kids to get caught in hypnogourds.

 Oh, it's easy.  i don't think any of knows how to raise a kid any more without TV.  i don't.  i grew up as one of the only kids not allowed to roam the neighborhood in days before the population generally worried about predators.  How can we set our kids free today?

Friend or Foe?

  Eustacia Cutler said that technology is not our friend.  It has some great uses, but we must consider it a tool, a good servant, like fire, but a bad master.
  If we treat it as a friend, it is a false one.