_____'s Children

I had a long chat on the bus home with an acquaintance schooling at NIE. He was telling me about how difficult kids were being these days, and after we had ruled out the possibility of nostalgia coloring our vision, we concluded that changes really might be occurring due to some relatively recent society-wide changes in culture.

One of the things he told me was that the kids were so rowdy and uncontrollable at times that they could even chatter among themselves though he was standing in front of them. That seemed like nothing out of the ordinary, but what we discussed after got me thinking.

He told me that a lot of the (richer) schools were investing heavily in IT and media technologies for the classroom. Beyond that, the daily lives of kids are now saturated with computers, smartphones, and tablets. Apparently the kids that he taught (not sure how representative they are) had real problems concentrating on textbook formats; studies are also suggesting that the attention span of today's kids can only be effectively maintained using digital media.

Going past the stage of vague (though valid) accusations at modern parents for lack of involvement/disciplining... I can't help but feel that this has got to be true... Digital media provides intense stimulation, and I just can't imagine kids willing to go back to books after being exposed to it at an early age.

It makes me wonder about the future of the purely textual book. And it makes me wonder about how our society is going to evolve in the near future. Is it necessarily a bad thing that children are being drawn into these artificially constructed worlds? There's a lot of valid things to be said about over-reliance on technology and the negative effects (psychologically, or in terms of relationship formation) this could have on a child who overindulges (after all, in most virtual worlds, you are pretty much the unstoppable center-of-the-universe). But separate from these admittedly justified worries is the possibility of the kind of future we see in the movies: kids communicating a wealth of information through visual symbols rather than through words.

I love written stories and the English language, but I can't help but wonder what place it will have in 5 years time. To what extent can people be shaped by technological innovations? To what extent should they be shaped? And to what extent do they remain the same?

‎"How do you expect kids to listen to their parents when Tarzan lives half naked, Cinderella comes home at midnight, Pinocchio lies all the time, Aladdin is the king of thieves, Batman drives at 200 mph, Sleeping Beauty keeps sleeping, and Snow White lives with 7 guys. We shouldn't be surprised when kids misbehave - they get it from their story books." -Someone