reading too much into technology?
To my mother: “I’m old!” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/weekinreview/10stone.html?em
Mother: “You are not! Very interesting and very scary. One of the achievements of kids during their toddler/preschool years is to learn the difference between fantasy and reality. Their job is so much harder now! And I guess parents need to be vigilant and be sure to balance virtual experiences with real ones! Do you think technology has made good parenting, which was already hard enough, even harder?”
To my mother:
I think that technology has made good parenting difficult in the sense that, now more than ever, children have a fundamentally different experience processing information, interacting with inanimate - or, more precisely because so many of today’s tools are “smart” computers, non-living - objects, and communicating with other human beings than their parents have, or, according to this article, can have.
I don’t necessarily think that technology has made good parenting difficult because technology itself distorts and blurs the line between fantasy, reality, and virtual reality; nor do I think that the instantaneous communication, overwhelming (in that word, I betray my age and relationship with current technology) store of accessible information, and to-the-minute, groupthink(ed?) and crowdsourced, transient global culture offered by technology are necessarily detrimental to the development or future success of children. It’s impossible to predict with any degree of certainty how today’s technology will affect today’s children when we can only imagine the technology they’ll be working with in the future. The internet has proven its ability to fundamentally change the ways in which human beings relate to each other, both individually - think instant messaging, email, XBox Live, and the like - and, more importantly, collectively - think Youtube and its numerous, globe-sweeping memes, Twitter and its ability to almost instantaneously compile banks of intelligence or mobilize (physical) groups of people, or Google and Facebook’s surveys of users’ interests and browsing habits that have revolutionized advertising. As technology continues to change at an increasingly fast rate, the ways in which we relate to one another and to the groups to which we belong will change as well, and it’s hard to tell what skills and habits will be beneficial in a world connected by those changes.
The greatest difficulty I see technology presenting to parents and children is just an intensified version of the difficulty it has presented all along. We use the language metaphor for ability to use computers: one is either computer literate or computer illiterate. This probably goes back to the days when computer users actually needed to know code - computer language - to operate the machines. Language is not only a mode of communication, however, but an important agent of culture, reflection of culture, and creator of culture. This is why the language metaphor seems especially apt here.
The growing divide in technological know-how between older and younger generations has grown so great, and the effects of this knowledge or lack of knowledge so vast, that I’d imagine the relational problems parents and their children are starting to have might be compared to the issues immigrant parents and their children face - especially in waves of immigration like Bubba’s, where children were assimilated into a new culture with little regard for the cultural background or language of their parents.
I don’t mean to imply that today’s adults are already hopelessly technologically illiterate or that they are strangers in the places they’ve grown up, nor that adult immigrants cannot adjust to new environments, languages, and cultures while keeping close personal ties with the places from which they’ve come. However, this article does seem to point to the existence of several fundamental differences in how today’s children and older generations see the world. We seem to be in a transitional cultural period, in the United States and across the world, in which older and younger generations (notice in the article that “generation” has been reduced to denote a very short span of time) inhabit different, simultaneous cultures. We interact with many of the same institutions, have been taught many of the same principles and skills in school, and share a common “real” language.
But, to get linguistic, words are nothing but signifiers. What they signify is inexact, fluid, and at least partially subjective. The different experiences that younger and older generations have had in the external world, as affected by technology, have changed the ways that they relate to the external world and to themselves. This, in turn, has changed the fluid meanings of those signifiers. A parent and child may understand when the other says the word ”friend,” “soon,” “talk,” or any of the many other concepts affected by technology, but they will understand the word differently than the speaker intended it to be understood. As technology changes, the intended and perceived meanings grow farther and farther apart; tension arises when the shared vocabulary fails to serve as an adequate tool for the communication of ideas. In fifty years, will the future generation need new words to describe their own ideas, leaving the current English words behind to rot with their antiquated, early 21st century meanings? Will the words of today’s current languages be like all those words I learned in Latin that “kind of, but not quite” translate into English, betraying the differences in values and world views between contemporary America and ancient Rome?
Things get crazy when you think about them too much. I’m aware, of course, that some sort of generational divide has always existed between parents and children. Teenagers always have been and always will be kind of a class unto themselves. However, it does surprise me to be on the “older” side of the gap - at least technologically - so early in life. This is makes me concerned that the changes are getting faster and the gap is increasing.
I guess the lesson to learn from parent-child miscommunications and conflicts throughout history is to try, as hard as we can, to make sure future generations have at least an awareness of and an appreciation for the culture(s) of their past. History isn’t just Rome and revolutionary America - it’s now. As we feverishly build the tower of the future, we’re also building history. I don’t think that America, as a young nation and culture that is continuously redefined by the additions of other cultures, has held the history in highest regard. What’s ahead of us, though, is an increasingly global culture, and this one can have a place for history if we want it to. We may become old-timers when we’re still young, clinging to outdated traditions that are merely a few years old, but we can do our best to ensure that this new global culture is one - like many world cultures before it - that values tradition, that seeks to understand the values, the beliefs, and the minds of its ancestors even as it moves forward in radical ways.
To accomplish this, we need to understand that our words may be imperfectly understood, sometimes even radically misinterpreted, by the younger generation; and that our habits, our preferences, and our expectations may seem illogical or uninformed to the younger generation; but we still need to continue communicating, sharing everything that we have with those younger than us as we try to pick pieces from the stream of innovation rushing by us.
Or something like that.
edit: America clings to traditions often, but rarely in a way that isnot dogmatic or statically self-antiquating.
