A Profound Joke

A friend of mine emailed me the video below yesterday, and though I guess it's meant as a kind of joke (It's on a website called "Stupid Videos"), I think it actually says something pretty profound about the technology gap between adults and children. Watch it, and then I'll talk about it...



(I can't see the video.)

I think the point the video is making is pretty clear: Children today don't see the world with the same eyes that adults do. I'm pretty sure most people already knew that, but this video shows us that the difference is pretty profound. The children in the video understand computers and how to manipulate them BEFORE they understand how to read a book. We forget, because they've been a part of our lives since we were children, that books are a form of technology, too. Their use is not an instinctive thing, built into our DNA. They're a learned technology. And apparently, books are harder to figure out than an iPad is. If that's not the case for you, it's just because you've had a longer acclimation period to books than you've had to technology.

I used to wonder what it was like for old people who grew up without electricity. Those people, I used to think, grew up in a world without light bulbs and radio and TV, and in a world without telephone poles  and electric lines strewn all over the landscape, and they watched this new thing come into their lives and change it so profoundly. Now I know how it feels. We're being changed just as much by computer networking. It didn't exist when I was a kid, and now it's everywhere, and we look at people who don't have Internet access in their house the same way people in 1960 looked at families that didn't have electricity. And though they're not as much of an eyesore as telephone poles, how many cell phone towers have you seen spring up in your lifetime?

I'm off task a little. I want to get back to that kid above. Or more importantly to me, I want to get back to MY kids. I've seen this technology gap in my kids, too. The first time I ever got out the ole 33 1/3 RPM record albums to play my kids some Beatles and some Michael Jackson, my older daughter, who was about 3 at the time, jumped up and down and screamed, "Wow! What a big CD!" This is the same daughter who learned to use a computer mouse when she was two years, three months, and 8 days old. I know exactly how old she was because she learned to use the mouse the day before my younger daughter was born. My wife was 9 months pregnant and not feeling well (Uh, she was in labor, but we didn't know that at the time!), and she asked to be left alone for a little while, so my older daughter and I went to the nearby mall for a while. We came back with a stuffed elephant from the Disney Store (not important) and a piece of software called Jumpstart Toddler's (important).

I installed the game on our computer and sat my daughter down in front of it, and in 30 seconds (no exaggeration) she'd figured out how to use a mouse. The software had a game in it in which the cursor on the screen was a dog bone, and in the corner of the screen was a talking dog who said things like, "Ruff! Ruff! Oh, I'm sooooo hungry! Can you feed me my boooooooone?" My daughter loved animals, and she wanted to feed that dog, so she figured it out without a problem. And after that, the sky was the limit. And that same daughter who, way back in 2000 referred to an LP as a "big CD," no longer is even interested in CD's. Everything's digital now, and if I gave her a CD of a favorite artist, she'd stare at me like I would if someone gave me an 8 track cassette. She wants iTunes gift cards! This morning she asked if she could load some of MY music on her iPod, and I looked at the computer and said, "Okay. Uh, I think I can figure this out..." I don't have my own iPod--I use my Simbian cell phone as my MP3 player--so this was all new to me.

I randomly clicked a few things on the screen before I heard my daughter sigh in disgust and say, "Dad! Just move and I'll do it!" And she did. She jumped in front of the screen and deftly started clicking buttons and in about 30 seconds said, "There! It needs time to synch, but I'm good to go."

She and my other daughter have grown up in this world of technology. It's not something they had to learn about later in life. It's as natural to them as it is for us to flip a switch and expect yellow light to come out of that glass orb in the ceiling.

It's a different world when we were growing up. I didn't grow up without running water in the house, and I didn't have to walk both ways through snow to get to school, but I WILL be able to tell my great grandchildren when I'm older, "When I was a kid, we didn't have the Internet! If you needed information on something, you had to use these things called books to look up things! And if the book you wanted wasn't around, you just didn't know!"

Something I can look forward to...