My dad is hilarious. He knows that I despise Ke$ha—as any self-respecting person over the age of 12 with any taste does. Sorry, Ke$ha fans, but if you’re reading this blog and you’re someone I know, you must be listening to her in secret and therefore I can’t be accountable for hurting your feelings. She sucks big time. I didn’t know that anyone could suck more than Lady Gaga, but I was wrong. Anyway, I was pulling into my driveway and jumped out to get the mail. I’m flipping through the pile. Netflix, bill, bill, junk, junk, and one from the “Ke$ha Fan Club” in Ocala, Florida. It was Girl Scout cookie money from my dad. I laughed hysterically.
So I’ll back up about an hour. I was on the elliptical at the gym and I caught something interesting on the news. The headline was “Kids Learn Smartphones Before Shoelaces.” They said that kids as young as 2 are learning how to make a call from a smartphone. Are you kidding me? Why? For what reason? Who are they calling, Big Bird? Carson loves to play with my phone, but I don’t let him because he erases contacts and gets on the Internet which I don’t pay for so it’s like $90 every time he gets hold of it! He can’t read and he isn’t interested in calling anyone. He is using his imagination, imitating me, and he thinks the lights and buttons are cool. That’s pretty understandable.
The poll was based on children ages 2-5 years, 2200 mothers with Internet access were questioned. Based on the information that was given to them 58% of those kids knew how to play video games and only 43% knew how to ride a bike. That didn’t surprise me as much as some of the others because of V.Smile, which is a toddler videogame. More of those children knew how to play with smartphones (19%) than how to tie their shoelaces (9%). More kids knew how to open a web browser (25%) than swim alone (20%). I find this disturbing on so many levels. First of all, the obesity epidemic in this country isn’t just being imagined, it exists. Also, it’s bad enough that we adults are aware of the fact that we have become dumber and fatter since we’ve had every technological advantage, but now we’re robbing our kids of a good old-fashioned childhood! Smartphones? Yes, they are. They are smarter than us. Our phones know our mother’s phone number by heart, but we don’t. If we lose our phone we have to wait for people to call us back. How ridiculous is this going to get? Do you remember when you used to have a factoid or someone’s name on the tip of your tongue but you couldn’t remember? It was frustrating, but what usually happened? Eventually you would shout it out loud—sometimes to a person who had no idea what you were talking about-days later. Well, we may have been suspected of having Tourette’s for the moment, but at least our brains had to work. We don’t have to do that now. I’m not saying I don’t Google things that are on the tip of my tongue, I do, but I do wait a little while to see if my brain can remember on its own. I’d like to know my name when I’m 80 so I exercise my brain occasionally. What’s funny about this is that our brain WORKS like a computer, saving and storing information, it’s just on dial-up and that’s too slow for us these days.
I saw this special on MSNBC a week or two ago about how people think that they can multitask but that it’s actually not possible. (This debate is hot right now with the texting and driving issues, etc.) They did an experiment on a college campus and it illustrated how well we multitask. If I remember correctly (I won’t Google it, ha-ha) they had a clown walk around on stilts and act goofy. Then they asked the kids who were walking around texting if they noticed anything out of the ordinary. None of them saw a clown. The ones who were looking up, of course they looked in the clown’s direction.
I realize I’m not saying anything new. It’s a big debate right now and maybe we’re all noticing how strange things are getting, but I don’t like where we are headed. I fear that our kids are going to have a hard life because of the bad habits we’re displaying. Well, our bad habits, the overwhelming and overabundance of technology, and Ke$ha’s horrible music. We’re going to have kids who know how to download crappy music on their smartphones but that don’t know our phone number.
I think that ending with this is perfect:
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