Are Children Using Technology Or Is It the Other Way Around?
Lisa Guernsey's Slate article is the provocation for today's post. I was most struck by one paragraph in Lisa's article: I love that they are creating things, talking about their creations, and planning ahead for new projects. But I hate that the real thing—their Legos, the cardboard boxes saved for building forts—can’t hold a candle to Minecraft in capturing their interest.
As today's youth, no, today's young children engage technology, virtual worlds in place of the real world, what might happen to how they think, relate, create, solve, feel? At a family gathering, one of my younger cousins pulled up his iPhone to share a real-time representation of the night sky. My uncle pointed out that we could just as easily see the night sky, simply by looking at the actual sky. My cousin responded with, "but this is real, it really is real, it is real-time." My cousin's reaction is provocative. What is real? What is reality? When the virtual world is beginning to represent reality in its many abundant forms?
As social networking takes over face-to-face conversations, Minecraft environments invite problem solving in place of real-life situations, what do today's children believe and know about reality? And as they spend increasing number of hours immersed in the virtual world, their primary contact with the real world being the surface they are sitting on, the keys at their fingertips and the smells in the room, how does that begin to alter their sense of the world?
What new senses are these children developing? Add to touch, see, smell, taste and feel a few others like knowing how to sense emotions based on emoticons. What skills are they developing? Fingertip control becomes more important than handwriting, yes. But beyond that, how about creating, navigating social groups without seeing anyone face-to-face, holding conversations, long ones too though all in tiny byte sizes? Or, the ability to find known answers in a jiffy with a single search, without needing to theorize, research, discuss, experiment and read?
Immersed in virtual worlds, it is easy to believe that humans, young fledging humans have complete control over the virtual world they interact with. I wonder though. While the users of the virtual world, control its events, the virtual world is altering how users sense and navigate the real world. Long gone are the days of a keen eye-sight to spot a cheetah in the dark, agile feet that got you only 5 feet from a distracted panther or smelling the air to fortell weather. But now, we are letting go of seeing faces to understand emotions, handwriting, mental math, dinner time conversations and handcrafts for Minecraft.
Only time will tell how technology will shape humans. The question is how, not if, not when. Perhaps a Matrix-like reality while borderline fantastical and seemingly faraway is already taking root, because today, our children are better at using their fingertips to make their virtual avatars climb trees than they are at climbing a real tree.