The Tease of Things I Don't Need

What will emerge from the chrysalis?

Recently checking out the postings on mommycool, where the perspective is decidedly one of parents seeking a path of responsible, effective, nurturing parenting, was part of what caused a piece on children spending more time indoors to get my attention. The piece attempts a balanced view, pointing out the conflicts and concerns parents have concerning children who can sometimes present them with the paradox of children who are simultaneously spending much more time at home while often becoming increasingly removed from family life. The piece doesn't indulge the panic of some of the extreme views, and really the only element that jumps out at me as being patently misleading is this bit:

Studies indicate that children who spend lots of time outdoors have longer attention spans than kids who watch lots of television and play video games, says Frances Kuo, director of the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

...which I simply don't accept as being as true as it once was. I believe that Kuo is grouping different phenomena and looking at either too brief a sample to be substantive or too broad (and therefore contaminated by the differences in the changing nature of video diversions) of one. Watching passive media - television in particular - has definitely wrecked the attention spans of many people. However, the increasingly interactive nature of video-linked media has to have changed at least some aspects of that. Indeed, my fifteen year old has little patience for television, vastly preferring the quests, problem-solving and self-directed movements of various games if he's going to be staring at a screen.

The elaborate nature of many of the games, and the fact that, increasingly, these are interactive with other people, albeit at remote locations, if anything demands more attention from kids than television ever demanded of us. The most interactive thing television has given mankind is a broad selection of cultural touchstones, however flimsy and/or compromised they may be. A person is probably more likely to connect with a stranger these days by making a Simpsons reference than by quoting from even the biggest best-seller of the day... unless said the quite from the best-seller has been faithfully transferred to the screenplay. Never mind the blank looks elicited when making all but the most hackneyed of references to Biblical, Shakespearian or classical literature. But, I digress.

If someone wants to pose the argument that the passtime of reading continues to take a hit, I'll be much more inclined to go along with it. However, that's with the proviso that many of the kids are doing more reading and writing than the average kid of the previous generation, however increasingly specialized and frequently ungrammatical those increases may, respectively, be. Many kids routinely devour supplemental manuals for increasingly complex games, leaving said books as dog-eared within a week or two as the favorite selections of the most avid bibliophile. Reading strictly for pleasure, however, has almost certainly continued the general, downward decline seen since television became a true mass media. Kids, and people in general, tend to look for something more animated when it comes to entertainment, leaving print more as an information resource.

Coming back to the opening, I'm finding the changing nature of technology to be too much in flux for me to comfortably predict what will emerge from the chrysalis of whatever passes for the average, modern childhood in the tech-heavy world. Broad, cultural predictions - that we will become a more cocooned culture, finding less and less reason to leave the bright, physically stationary worlds we've created for ourselves - seems a reasonably safe bet for now.

Whenever I contemplate these shifts in life and living, as I've had occasion to for decades, I find some comfort in how what is coming to pass, and pointed concerns about it, are conceptually nothing new. To demonstrate that, I direct you to E.M. Forster's story marvelously prescient story The Machine Stops, first presented 96 years ago. (This appears to be the complete text.) Forster is as perhaps much more concerned with people putting too much faith in things they don't understand and losing contact with the "real" world than he is with issues of a viable culture, but I still find it amazing that the arc of civilization at and beyond the end of one century was seen so well by someone standing at the beginning of it -- especially when one considers how utterly unique in terms of technology the 20th century was.