Here Kid, Don't Talk To Me Talk To The iPad...

        

       A week ago we had some family friends over at our house in Jacksonville, as I was looking after the kids (as they were going berserk around the house) I saw their constant begging for their parent’s cellphones. It was as if they did not know how to act without it when they were not home, they were unaware of the fact that they could somehow play together without the need for a tablet or a cellphone. As they went crazy around the house one of the mom’s told me to open a cartoon so they would not disturb their conversation. As I opened a Disney cartoon they all sat patiently looking blankly at the TV screen and did not budge out of their seat until it was done. It was like a miracle just a minute ago these kids were going wild around the house and the next thing you know they’re glued onto the TV screen unaware of their surroundings and each other, as  Claudia Raleigh, a mother of three,points out in a New York Times article it was almost like a “life-saving device”.

           

          It is rather interesting how parents of this generation are choosing to raise their kids, although the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that children under two have no screen time, 38 percent of kids in America use smartphones and tablets (according to a study done by Common Sense Media). Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media reports, "We're seeing a fundamental change in the way kids consume media," Steyer said. "Kids that can't even talk will walk up to a TV screen and try to swipe it like an iPad or an iPhone." From birth we are letting children get exposed to such mediums that affect their brain development in a way that is devastating their sensory processes. Once they are exposed to such technology they expect reality to be the same way. In seconds as they press different buttons on their tablet screen images pop out of nowhere providing their brains with millions of information that they process, in this sense they expect everything outside of their technological realm to behave in the same manner, and become frustrated when it does not work that way.

            I believe we are disrupting our mental mechanisms in such a way that it is altering how we view the world around us. Nicholas Carr in his novel “The Juggler’s Brain” provides us with such information that explicates the damaging alterations that our brain ultimately goes through as we adapt to this world of technology, as he points out, “As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds the time we spend reading books… the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart.” Therefore as we instantly adapt to this new line of technology and online surfing to get what we want when we want it, our abilities to do things like thinking deeply secedes slowly. It makes our brain lazy put in its simplest sense.

       For my first two years of high school I went to a charter school in Atlanta, Georgia where our school provided us with a laptop that we were allowed to keep for a school year, therefore instead of textbooks we would carry around our laptops and instead of handwriting essays in literature class we would type them and so forth. Now that I think about it and after reading Carr’s article I presume that I hated this experience. It is painful to read from e-textbooks and it is definitely not the same as feeling the pages in your hand and looking at the words physically and not through a screen where there are a billion things disturbing you, as Carr describes it “Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the internet.” The internet and reading online diminishes the traditional sense of reading from an actual text, we are more likely to skim passages on a screen and not read them fully and comprehensibly as we would have if we were provided with the text. It is as if the information flies from your mind as you finish reading what you have to because you are so focused on such getting to the point of the article.

        Therefore as our multitasking skills do strengthen the things around us easily distract us. We get a glimpse of the studies that Carr talks about, such as the study done by Cornell researchers who compared the attention and comprehension of students listened to the lecture while on the web and on their laptops with those students who gave their undivided attention to the lecturer. Through the results we could see that those who were not multitasking scored higher on the lecture quiz than those who were on their laptops. As Carr illuminates, “The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.” therefore “when we’re online, we’re often oblivious to everything else going on around us.” As proved correct by this experiment the web has changed our average classroom, the way we receive information and the way we research what we want to know.

     We are trained to interpret the world through a technological window when we are born in this generation, therefore ultimately being robotized to structure our minds in such a way to view reality as a messed up jargon and prefer the images provided to us instantly by the devices we hold in our hands. We come to ignore the needs of our children and just shove our tablets in their hands to be busy and not bother us. We are ultimately blinded and cannot see the negative effects of what this new medium is doing to us, to our lives, and to our family structure. Therefore it is time to wake up and see what we have led ourselves into.