I went to our ISD showcase of programs last week and while it was impressive and fun, it also solidified something I’ve been thinking about and, let’s face it, annoyed by for some time.
The issue is this. I have a young child and there is little free time that he is not looking at some kind of screen. Not because he has no other interests or because I am an absent mother, but because it is the whole world to him. He can travel the globe and into outer space on it so it’s a literal allegory of the world in his hands. And if one more person gives me the stink-eye about brain damage or obesity I’m going to scream.
Walking among students—and grownups—and doing a quick count of the phones, tablets and monitors for everything from elementary spelling to in-school broadcast news programs, I realize, despite the complaints about screen time and lack of physical activity and blue light on the brain—I’m sorry people—the world is going tablet. Deal with it.
Progress has always been tough to accept, but the mobile generation is not the end of the world; it’s just another paradigm shift and we will adapt and overcome whatever problems come with it. We always have.
Remember when your great-great grandparents were afraid of cars because 15 MPH was too fast and scared the horses? Your great-grandparents hated light bulbs because they thought all the “electricity waves” would kill them? Our grandparents didn’t like rock-n-roll because it was the devil’s music? Where would popular culture be without Elvis, the Big Bopper and Ray Charles?
Three movie studios, including Disney, rejected Star Wars on paper. And Lord knows my parents hated MTV.
Today, there are more than one million apps for my iPads and we use it for work, play, information, news, shopping, budget management, gaming and loads of entertainment.
I’d be willing to bet I don’t know 20 people who still have a land line telephone. I got my first cell phone while traveling and wanted to make sure I could get in touch wherever I was in the country. My first plan was 15 minutes a month and cost me a fortune. I would love to see my face if I could go back and tell my 1996 self that I would someday be watching Game of Thrones on a Hawaii beach on a 5-inch screen that I also use to check my bank balance and call mom for $100 a month.
How many of you have stopped watching network TV or gotten rid of your cable and dish because you can stream everything you want for $13.99 a month without commercials? Have you seen the library on Netflix alone?
As soon as humans invent something new, someone finds a reason to say it’s bad. Pretty soon after that, another human invents something to mitigate the problem. Humans are good at solving problems.
My iPad already has a night time setting that warms up the screen colors at night and cuts down on the blue flash that is giving me brain damage or keeping me from a good night’s sleep.
Let’s just say that invention begets invention and we always manage to figure things out. Perhaps 100 years from now when homes and cars are completely composed of LEDs and pixels, we will be unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time and will evolve back to having second sleeps. Google it… a few hundred years ago everyone woke up in the wee hours for a while to read or sew or have grownup time. Then slept again until dawn. We’ve only been sleeping all night since jobs became shifty and we began segmenting life.
But now, we work all kinds of ways, are in contact 24/7 so there’s no universal need for 9-5 work.
The point is, embrace the change that may actually be a better version of the past. Don’t be too impatient for things to be perfect the minute they make the scene. Enjoy your phone or tablet or 80-inch television. Who among us wants to go back to rotary phones stuck on a wall, or having to spend the whole day wondering which horse was the last to win the Triple Crown because there was no Google?
Whatever problems we have with modern technology will inevitably be adapted and overcome and there will be something new for us to complain about shortly indeed.
Heck, I’m not even that old and I already think things like Snapchat are stupid. Further, I already know and accept that I may be swiping right to vote for President in the 2036 election, so I’m trying to get over it early.
