I´m not a fan of this decade. That sounds pretty silly, I guess, but it´s true. I would have gladly chosen for my children to live in another one (an earlier one, more specifically).
Some other moms and I were discussing this just yesterday, and we all agreed that living in the "Wii-Generation" makes us nervous.
Sure, this is the one (the decade) we´ve got & I guess I´ve got to come to terms with living in a hyper-technological age, but part of me just wants to complain and worry about it. And, honestly, I think we have a good reason to mourn the passing of those simpler decades.
Our children will grow up surrounded by screens. The screens of their (or their friends´) giant flatscreen televisions, the screens of their paper-thin I-Touch phones, I-pods, mini-Play Stations, computers, etc. The worst part is that we have no power to prevent this: to keep the screens out of their lives... Because, even if we don´t buy them these gadgets, they will use them at school, or at their friends´house. Everyone will convince them that they need a great collection of screens. They will communicate through those screens. I don´t think I´m being excessively dramatic when I predict that our children will socialize from a distance, as we have started to do ourselves, in this age of social networking through the internet. To say it Prufrock-style; "I have measured my life through profile-updates".
*What can we do to prevent this? To ensure that our children develop real social skills: that they be capable of maintaining a face-to-face conversation, a good old tête à tête.
I don´t want my children to live life artificially: to communicate only through screens and superficial "status updates", to play sports only "as if", with a remote in hand, from the comfort of a living-room (and I admit that Wii-ing is fun!). Building "tents" outside and going on scavenger-hunts was SO much more exciting. If it goes on like this, we´ll all go through life without ever really having to interact with one another. We´ll be disconnected, no matter how many "friends" we may have collected on our social networking sites. The future suddenly doesn´t look so pleasant at all. Not to me, at least.
What ever happened to tertulias and the like? Now it´s nothing but forums and chatrooms.
I´ve gone along with it, to some extent, but I am really displeased with these developments.
Countless articles have been published about the positive effect of these modern modes of communication on language and social interaction, but I think it has done far more damage than good. I don´t enjoy these developments at all: I don´t want to live in a world of "OMG," "TTYL," and "LOL". Why have we become so lazy?
Suffice it to say that these changes have made me a little pessimistic. Daniel & I would like to raise social children. Social and well-spoken... And I have a feeling that most of the world, and the convenience of its newest gadgets, is going to get in our way.
No comments:
Post a Comment