I finally got around to reading an article that was placed in my Instapaper queue in November. It was a 4,000+ word piece titled, “Growing up Digital” and it focused on today’s youth and the pressures that technology is putting on their lives. For someone who has two sisters (10 & 13 years old), I was interested in this piece. My fears were realized though when the authors really failed to convey many of the problems that I see. This was a story that reported problems that affected us and not a good analysis on solutions with very little speculation of what the future holds. Either way, it’s worth a read before you read this blog post. Be warned, it is a long post and anyone that frequently uses the Internet will probably shy away from reading it (as the article states).
I believe there is an advantage to technology.
This is something I wanted to state right off the bat. Technology has enriched our lives but, like many other things, we have taken advantage of it. A single computer can act as your professor, parent, library, doctor, video game, tv, cinema, jukebox, recipe book, newspaper and yes, it can even be used for sexual gratification. This is the modern day computer and these screens can be as large as 60 inches and as small as 1 inch. The screens are everywhere from the refrigerator to our cars.The generation born in the 90s and 2000s is suffering from screen overload. I don’t think anyone will deny this. There’s a rule of thought that the screens of today are no difference than the screens of the 90s where the national health council showed advertisements encouraging parents to reduce TV time. Today, y ou turn off the TV and your kid picks up their cell phone.
There is a mentoring element to parenting that was ignored in the article. There’s the concept that you don’t give the kid a 60 inch television in their room, a super fast lightweight laptop, the latest Xbox and an iPod touch.These devices are pricey but also serve as an increased distraction for our youth.Your kid needs to be connected to you? Okay, get them a phone that only has voice and no SMS capabilities and yes there are cell phones without SMS. If you want to text your kids, give them a text message plan that only allows for 200 prepaid SMS messages a month. That’s it and that’s all. My 13 year old sister has a dumbphone that’s pre-paid, she doesn’t have email or a Facebook account and when I bought her an iPod for Christmas, she got the previous generation iPod wich a click wheel. She doesn’t have any touch screen devices in her life, she has no private computer and no video game machine and no television in her room. She begs me and my parents constantly for a Facebook account but only does so in between reading books and writing short stories.
My sister is living the life of a normal kid. She enrolls in typing classes, understands how to use the web but doesn’t spend more than 15 minutes a day in front of a “personal screen”
On that note, I believe there is a HUGE difference between Personal and Shared screens. The rise of personal screens began with the Game Boy in the 80s and, the price of headphones dropped allowing for kids to cut themselves off from the world. This has a negative impact on our society in ways we haven’t even realized since the next generation is growing up worse than the current, we’re focusing on that one but the headphone generation of the 70s and 80s has been affected too. Private screens are the most popular now compared to shared screens like televisions and theatres. I believe that kids that grow up having only shared screens even if that shared screen is the in form of a family PC in the living room is important for development of real world social skills, learning, good behavior (not doing things they shouldn’t be online) and will keep them focused. Playing outside or doing home work are my sister’s only options so my parents aren’t begging her to stop playing Xbox or texting her friends. This is how kids should be raised no matter how much technology becomes a part of our lives. Just because we have self-driving cars, it doesn’t mean we have to be staring at our smart phone. Reading a book or talking to a friend on the phone or just enjoying the scenery is still an option.
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I see a lot of articles on this lately and talks about how this is ruining kids and the next generations. I don’t think anyone but us care and when we’re all doing it as adults as well (brief pause to ask parents out there. how many times were you staring at your phone while your children were talking to you? You’re guilty of it too). Hell, even the NYTIMES needs our eyeballs to read their articles on computers so they can deliver display ads to us. They have a vested interest in the next generation LOVING online content.
Who doesn’t want this kind of control. I’m no conspiracy theorist but c’mon. Every big company and government agency would love to have us completely transformed into mindless consumers who feed off of our screens for the effort of more display advertising, less crime, more dependence on “the grid” and less dependence on the land and each other. When you can get EVERYTHING from a screen, why leave your house?
This is the future that everyone wants and we vote with our wallets each time we buy a smartphone and do a search using Google and buy a digital copy of something and not a physical copy.
When the 30 somethings of today become 90, the transformation will be complete. Those that are 80 (around the year 2060) will be completely digital and live in homes full of screens and will work completely from home, the blue collar and farm culture will be diminished to those that we call “less fortunate” the class systems will be blurred and government dependence will be at an all time high. The local economy will be a joke. You’ll buy local but only because you never leave the house. The local guy printing books or selling CDs or making furniture just can’t compete no matter how high gas prices get. Things will be radically different.
I’m not complaining about this future or saying it’s bad. I’m neutral on this. I believe things shouldn’t get that extreme but I also don’t see it happening any other way. I live the best way I know how and keep a terrific balance between digital and real life worlds. I rely on he cloud but also keep backups on an array of hard drives. I appreciate how cheap food is now but still buy local and cook every meal at home. I still talk to my friends via telephone via a land-line and have moved away from real-time sharing of my life and moved to a curated system of higher quality text and photo sharing…this is how I live but it’s not how my friends and their children are living.
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Don Tapscott, author of “Growing up Digital” (the book) wrote an article in response to the NYTIMES piece in Huffington Post explaining some issues with the article. To him, this next statement made sense but I have a response to it. Don wrote:
To begin, there is no actual evidence to support the view that this generation is distracted, performing poorly or otherwise less capable than previous generations. In fact the evidence suggests that on the whole, this is the smartest generation ever. IQ is up year over year for many years, university entrance exam scores are at an all time high and it has never been tougher to get into the best universities. Furthermore, volunteering amongst high school and university students is at an all time high and in the US the percentage of kids that are clean in high school — i.e. they don’t do drugs or alcohol — is up year over year for 15 years. This is a generation about which we can be enormously hopeful.
So the kids have higher IQs, don’t try alcohol and volunteer more? Sounds like we’re raising 40 year old religious fanatics than kids. I thought kids were supposed to try alcohol and laugh about volunteering and only a small few really cared about SAT scores. I thought I was an overachiever in school but these kids sound pretty freaking boring. Hey, I respect what he wrote. I get what he’s saying. Volunteering and living drug free is great but that’s not how teenagers are and I don’t believe a 15 year old who has high IQ results and gets accepted to Harvard to be the backbone of America even if she does spend her weekends picking up trash on I-95.
Everyone is missing the point. We are sculpting a group of boring, wound up “adults in 15 year old bodies” who lack social skills and prefer screens to sex and drinking by the beach. We’re creating a generation who chooses to overshare online with passive aggressive comments about the person their on a date with while sitting across the table from each other. We’re raising a generation who won’t miss booze and partying when we give them the option to jack into the matrix and update Facebook with their minds instead of their thumbs. Those 10 years under me will go “really? I can update Facebook with my mind? HELL YEAH!”
We are not raising the next generation of entrepreneurs. We’re raising sheep and the school system that’s forcing them to file into order and follow the rules and giving technology to them as an outlet of self expression only makes them reliant on that technology FOR LIFE and the advertisers eat it up.
I imagine a future where 5 family members watch the same movie at the same time on their iPads sitting on the same couch all wearing headphones. Sound dumb? Really? Look at any modern family road trip in 2011. The parents sit in the front seat with the GPS talking to them and a 90s rock song on the radio. The baby watches Elmo on her iPad and the kid plays an iPhone game or textes their friends with headphones on. Dad has to talk over all of the noise to ask if anyone wants to stop for food and they’ll consume more calories and starch and sugars than anyone needs in a day on that single happy meal at McDonalds and do it while staring at a screen while not even focusing on how the food is being ingested.
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Finally, the article I read goes into programs in schools that the kids do love. These are programs where the kids are creating content like audio production, filmmaking and video game design. Writing is popular as well. Take a look at how I live. I create content for those that consume. This is the case for the modern work force of today where one person creates something for 100 others. The farmers are in a 1 to 1,000 ratio of one farmer feeding 1,000+ people or a blogger writes for 500 people or one celebrity entertains millions. T’hat one to many ratio has enabled our modern society to shift from hunter gatherers to how we live today.
The author of the post remained hopeful that kids do have an outlet and are interested in things as long as it involves creating content using screens. I can see the advantages of this but I can also see the disadvantages. Who is going to do everything else. Entertainment is a HUGE part of our lives but I guess we’ll just outsource everything to immigrants and other countries. China builds our products, Mexicans build our homes and a select few of overachievers go on to Finance and Medical but even then, Asian Americans and others are taking those jobs too. Politics aside, I don’t believe anyone is “taking” American jobs. We’re giving the jobs away and not a single American is complaining about not having to dig ditches or run numbers at a financial firm.
We do little work and have a lot of entertainment. In society 50 years ago, I don’t think my article would have the sort of distribution nor would people have time to read it but it doesn’t mean I’m happy with how things are going.
The world doesn’t need 50 million sound engineers and filmmakers. The world needs workers but I guess even my job in marketing will go away one day to just a few tweets. I do work in social media but even I think it’s over complicated to what is next. One day, display ads and user to user word of mouth via a matrix style grid will be how products are sold.
…I wonder what we’ll do when the Internet goes away which is inevitable.