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Your Undivided Attention

What Can Technologists Learn from Sesame Street? With Dr. Rosemarie Truglio

Your Undivided Attention

Center for Humane Technology

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4.81.9K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this episode of Your Undivided Attention, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin speak with Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, the Senior Vice President of Curriculum and Content for the Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind Sesame Street. What happens when app creators consider what lifelong human development looks like in terms of the tools we make? And what philosophies from Sesame Street can help us steward the power of AI and social media to influence minds in thoughtful, humane directions?

Transcript

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0:00.0

A November 10th, 1969, the first episode of Sesame Street aired on PBS, and it was

0:13.5

unlike anything that had ever been on television before.

0:16.2

It was a collaboration between educators, psychologists, comedy writers, TB producers,

0:21.1

and puppeteers like the great Jim Hanson, who were all working together to create educational

0:25.7

content for children.

0:27.2

Television is such a huge influence on children.

0:31.5

There's family over the church or the school and television, and as an industry, we don't

0:37.7

generally face up to that responsibility, and I was delighted to be doing that sort of thing.

0:44.0

The creation of the show was laid out in a brilliant HBO documentary that I've now seen

0:48.3

three times, called Street Gang, how we got to Sesame Street.

0:54.8

And at the heart of it is an exploration of what's possible when next-generation technology

0:58.8

is used to mainly for the next generation.

1:02.0

I'm Isaraskin, and I'm Tristan Harris, and some might say that television is itself

1:07.4

the problem.

1:08.4

Neil Postman actually said the problem with Sesame Street is that it takes television

1:12.2

seriously even though as a medium, it is bad for education.

1:17.3

But even so, what Sesame Street is exploring is the upper bound and upper limit of how

1:21.7

do you do television in the most developmental way possible, which has lessons for us in

1:26.1

how we think about social media and even artificial intelligence.

1:29.7

So today on your individed attention, what happens when creators consider what lifelong

1:35.0

human development looks like in terms of the technologies and mediums that we make?

1:39.7

And what philosophies from Sesame Street can we take away to inform how to steward the power

...

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