Love it or hate it, but technology has become an essential feature of everyday life. But is it wise for this dependency extend to kids too?
We recently published a conversation on what future smartphone features you’d like to see, when an unexpected but interesting debate began to emerge. Ian started it off:
‘We’re inexorably moving towards a future in which we will become not simply dependent upon but almost certainly biologically linked to our mobile devices. It’s the logical next step, really. All that fiddling around to see the screen when it could be projected onto your retinas and overlaid with your real-time experience will become a thing of the past, regarded as quaint and in the same way we look back at early TVs with only four or five channels. We live in a time when we all need continuous social contact and when our tolerance for delay has become severely diminished.’
Computer kids
Arguably, technology has become effective in opening access to information and broadening our communications tools. So it’s no surprise really that technology has worked it’s way in to the classroom.
In school I had computer lessons on a big boxy desktop PC, but now my younger cousins are working off of tablets. To be honest, I’m a bit jealous of that – I wish I had a tablet in school.
But as Duncan explains, there are potential pitfalls to exposing children to advanced technology like this at such a young age:
‘The problem is young people are now being provided with tablets etc in schools under the pretext that “it will make them more computer literate”. But in actual fact their young brains will be programmed to accept that electronic control and electronic information is normal instead of human interaction by their teachers to teach them real life experience because most of their teachers are “internet ready” and have not experienced all of life’s problems but live in a semi-virtual word already.’
Advancement of technology
So are we just creating generations of technology dependent drones? Or is this just an example of the advancement of our education, as Wavechange points out:
‘Maybe we should not have given children books, pencils and paper, never mind let them loose on computers or phones. If they have something that demands a telephone call they could be allowed to use their parents’ landline. I find it interesting that watching films, TV and sport are widely regarded as respectable activities but more recent technology usually comes in for criticism.’
What do you think, are we being too critical or rightly sceptical? Should children be using new technology?