Just to repeat Frontline’s Growing Up Online again, we are calling this the “biggest generation gap since rock ‘n’ roll”. Parents are seeing their children embracing technology in ways they cannot relate to. But this is a shrinking gap. As the next generation of parents were raised on the internet and Nintendo, they will be able to identify with their children and be “digital natives” with them. And the question I have is… are we losing anything along the way?
And honestly, I’m not one to talk, as a “digital native” myself:

“You were exposed to technology. I held you on my lap when you were weeks old as I composed my freelance work on an Apple II computer. Before long you were reaching out to play with the keys and on to the what now seems primitive software we got for you. By 18 months you were loading up your own diskettes.”
My Mom

But I don’t want to come at this from a biased point of view, because I understand this concept. We are dealing with our own limitations. We are advancing faster than the speed of human evolution, so as one skill comes in, another falls out.

“I compare this to the same problem as when people get a GPS. My friends admitted to me, and I admit of myself, that I no longer pay attention to where I am going. You no longer have a visual map in your head of where you are going. You are riding shot gun in your own car, and when the device freezes up, you are completely lost. You have no barrings.”
Scott Lange

In this war for brain power and attention, in this world where there is so much competing to for our time, what skills are we losing by creating technology that makes it so much easier.

We go back to Aaron Yacks’s example of his son. When they were riding in a car in a recent road trip, his son turned to him and asked to use his laptop to go online. Why could the Blackberry online and not the laptop? There is a lack of understanding of what it even means to go online.
When we live in a world where most kids are growing up “wireless”, will they even understand how information passes back and forth? Will they recognize things at technology? When every objects goes online, will they understand what it means to be offline, or will an offline object just be seen as an object that is broken?
Or am I just jumping to extremes…

“It was the same concern that was expressed with Dungeons & Dragons back in the day. There was no respect for this idea of fantasy, role-playing. People felt threatened by this new thing that would suck you in and take you away from the real world. People feared that they would take the myths too far.
But I see it as a way to exercise the brain. When my son is playing a game he can control, it offers him an imaginary outlet. He can pretend he’s driving, he can see what it looks like. And often it’s me, I find myself calling him to come play video games, and he’s already ready for the next thing.”
Scott Lange

So what will come of all this, as parents and children alike learn to love and embrace technology. I can picture it now… I’m twittering away and my husband is playing the next generation of video games, and our children are surfing the net on their child-friendly laptop. But have we lost our connection to reality, to the analog world? Have we lost our ability to read maps and to research without the crutch of Wikipedia?
For this, I can only see two things happening… Option one, we see something happen similar to the Organic revolution, the “eat local” movement. We industrialized the food system until children didn’t even understand where their food came from. You walk through the grocery store, you buy a pre-prepped dinner package. What is this? Where does it come from? People got sick of it, and the crowd created a backlash.
Will there be an anti-tech backlash from the “digital natives”, as they rediscover the value of their roots? Or will the loss of one skill be replaced with the gain of another?
Why are we so worried about “outsourcing” our map-reading ability? Our research techniques? Or even our memories? We are limited only by our human brains not evolving quick enough to handle the technology we are presented with. We only have the attention or memory to do so much at one time. How do we know that when outsourcing these activities, that we won’t be able to achieve something far greater…
When my husband and I recently went on a vacation, we also had a GPS. I had pre-researched points, had programmed them into the Garmin. All the sudden, I had no need to be reading maps while in the car with my husband. I could sit back and take in the surroundings. It freed my mind, and it freed my hands. I could twitter, I could take video of our drive into wine country. We could discuss and talk and really listen to the road trip mix. With the loss of one activity, came the gain of another.
So what will come? What is this trade-off? Can we really say it is all for the bad? Or maybe, just maybe… we will start using our minds for something greater. Let’s go back to the “fear” of the next generation, the major fear is not privacy or security or success, it’s not finding something you love. With our minds freed up, we can push ourselves in this pursuit of passion like we’ve never had the opportunity to do before.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please revisit the series and tell me what you think.
1. The Definition, what makes a “digital native” different
2. Play Time, technology is changing relationships
3. Work Time, technology is changing learning
4. The Trade-Off, technology is changing human beings
Marta Strickland