PLAN:
1.Can we imegineour life without phones?
2.The smortphonification of today’s youth
3.Rekomendation for parents to approach kids in texnological devices’world
TEXT messages have overtaken our lives.
Whether it’s a friendship or a new potential love interest, it seems we have become slaves to our phones. We use the time it takes for someone to text you back as a barometer for how interested or important we are to them. The grace periods of the 90s have been tossed out with the home phone.
Forget giving people time to process emotions, forget about switching off and down time and me time, we want you to text back pretty much now and we won’t accept anything less because that’s what we deserve.
It can take me two days to respond to my mum but she is one of the most important people in my life. I tell myself that if it’s important she’ll call. But sometimes when I don’t respond she says I’ve forgotten her. It’s not true. I’m busy, caught up with life and I’d rather just go over to Mum’s for a cup of tea than communicate with her via a screen.
Only ten years ago things were not like this. People rang each other on their home phones, possibly left a message on an answering machine. Today we feel indebted to respond. We don’t want to offend. We may have switched off for the night, maybe watching a movie, but that doesn’t matter because we put responding to the text before responding to our own needs. You don’t feel like responding right now but you feel like you have to.
I’m guilty of it too, not only with love interests but with friendships or even professional relationships. If I have an uncomfortable encounter and I text but don’t get a response, in a few hours I’ll be worried and declaring they have a problem with me.
Why do we feel disappointed if we don’t get that instant response? Don’t we have anything better to do with our time than waste it worrying about a message?
The attitude seems to be: “He is a snail if he hasn’t responded. Move on.”
“Communication is important to me. I need a guy who’s texting me all the time. So I can feel worthy, loved, adored.”
We didn’t need this level of communication when there were no mobile phones so why do we need it now? Is it communication that we are demanding or validation? Communication or pacification?
Emmy-award-winning comedian Louis CK holds no bars when it comes to expressing his disdain with mobile phones. In many of his sketches he talks of how mobile phones have affected our lives and the way we interact with others, and the dangers of what they are doing to our children. Rather than appreciating the miracle of what phones can do, instead we complain about the speed in which we receive a response.
Phones have taken away our empathy for others. We don’t give people space. We all have one in our pockets and this really puts the pressure on. We are operating at a heightened state of anxiety, where we wait in anticipation of the next message. Will it be good or will it be bad? Validation or criticism? And if the message isn’t one or the other than we can spend all day dissecting which it is.
I take my phone everywhere. To the gym, to the kitchen, out with friends — it never leaves my side.
I justify my decision to do this by telling myself it’s for safety reasons. Or what if someone needs me and it’s a life or death situation? What if I get abducted? I can’t fathom the idea going for walks down the creek without it like my friend does.
But is the life or death cushion the reason we carry them everywhere? At what cost? Our sanity? The line needs to be drawn somewhere.
“I think these things are toxic,” Louis CK said, “especially for kids. You need to build the ability to just be yourself and not be doing something, that’s what the phones are taking away. It’s that ability to just sit there. That’s just being a person...”
And he’s spot on. We miss out on moments with friends and family rather than enjoying life because when your phone beeps you’re taken out of that moment and you’re somewhere else.
That’s why I don’t give my child my phone to play with. If she’s bored, so be it. What’s wrong with just sitting and being? Why are we so afraid of it?
It’s OK to go for a walk without your phone once in a while. The world will not end.
According to the Daily Mail, “researchers from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest this year found that youngsters are becoming so devoted to their devices that they are exhibiting the type of attachment behaviours usually reserved for a child’s interactions with their parents”.
Louis CK said it’s our fear of realising we’re ultimately all alone that has us turning again and again to our phones.
“That’s why we text and drive... everyone’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life, and ruining their own, cause they don’t want to be alone for a second...”
So I’m going to start going out without my phone. And if I’m abducted, so be it.
Koraly Dimitriadis is a freelance writer, actor, performer, theatre and film maker and the author of Love and F**k
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Your children are slaves to their smartphones
Today's teens and pre-teens are overly reliant on technology, lazy, self-entitled, and are the worst read of any generation.
jason-perlow
Written by Jason Perlow, Senior Contributing Writer on June 5, 2013
Today, my ZDNet colleague James Kendrick wrote a piece named "The Smartphonifcation of today's youth".
In it, he discusses why today's children are "the most advanced" of any generation before it, and how they will grow up with constant information at their fingertips, because they will have always known the ubiquitous smartphone and the trappings of other related mobile technologies such as tablets and high-speed wireless broadband.
While James is correct that this generation of children has unprecedented access to technology, I think portraying them as the "most advanced" is looking at today's kids through rose-colored glasses.
Indeed, today's teenagers and pre-teens have smartphones and tablets, they have their choice of "social" networks and apps that plug into them, like Instagram, Vine, and Pinterest, they have texting, all forms of instant messaging, and their choice of search engines and intelligent agents such as Google Now and Siri to spoon feed them any information they want.
But more advanced? Give me a freaking break.
If anything, today's privileged teens (and I italicise privileged because not all teens who live in North America have smartphones with data plans, nor do most in many other countries) are far too reliant on their mobile technology, and most would have no idea what to do with themselves if they were to be parted from it.
Smartphones and tablets are a drug that they cannot easily be weaned off.
If you don't believe me, see what happens when you go on vacation to some spot that has little or no Wi-Fi or 3G/4G connectivity, or where it's so prohibitively expensive that parents who bring their teens along decide not to purchase that connectivity for them.
It's like witnessing a mass withdrawal scene out of a 1970s methadone clinic. Or watching one of those Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes when the Borg drones become severed from their communications link to the Collective.
I got to see all of this first-hand back in December 2012, when my wife and I went on a seven-night Caribbean cruise on the NCL Epic.
This massive vessel, which can accommodate over 4,000 passengers, had hundreds of families on board, many with teenage and pre-teen children, who brought their smartphones, hoping they would still be able to text and access their usual social networks and apps and whatnot.
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The Epic, in fact, like most modern cruise ships, does have Wi-Fi and internet access, but it is so prohibitively expensive that most families chose not to pay for it.
So what did these kids do? Well, the ship did have entertainment options — it had a club for kids that includes their own disco and video-game arcade, a giant water park, as well as activities specifically geared for teens and pre-teens.
But more often than not, I found many teens and pre-teens lying around deck and looking bored out of their minds.
Frankly, if there wasn't an ample supply of consumable alcohol, and if they weren't engaged in other (ahem) activities in their respective cabins, most twenty-somethings would have also been bored out of their minds, because they have all the exact same trappings of today's teenagers and pre-teens, having grown up as the Barney the Dinosaur generation.
The Dora and Blues Clues generation that followed aren't fundamentally different in their basic ideologies of extreme self-love, self-worth, and self-entitlement.
I consider them to be more like Shia Barneyism.
Now, don't get me wrong; I'm in my mid-40s, but I also love my gadgets. I own far more smartphones and tablets and laptops and computers than the average person does, because I write about technology. I am a technologist. I drink technology like mother's milk.
And if you mess with Fred Rogers, Big Bird, Snuffy, and Cookie Monster, I will bust a cap in your ass.
But guess what: When I go on vacation, do you know what I like to do more than anything else? I like to veg out. Hand me an ice-cold bucket of Blue Moons or Presidentes, give me a hefty paperback book, and throw my big fat ass in a jacuzzi. Mix up with going to out eat. Repeat as necessary.
Now, interspersed between this beer drinking, eating, and reading (oh, yes, the reading) is this thing called basic human interaction. You know, talking to people. It's much cruder than say, TCP/IP or web services APIs, or texting, but it gets the job done.
Using tablets, mobile devices and video games as a source of parental relief is going to have many unintended and undesirable consequences.
Observing the behavior of others when they are on vacation is a particularly interesting sociological exercise, because I have found it is a very good indicator of what people are like when they are not on vacation, and how their real personalities tend to manifest themselves.
If anything, it amplifies their personality because they they attempt to assert themselves in unfamiliar environments.
All this being said, I cannot entirely blame this generation's over-dependence on technology strictly on themselves. The balance of this weighs on the parents.
Yup. You heard me. You. All the things that drive you crazy about your children are your fault.
By the way, I have no kids. This is out of personal choice, and because I know my kids would probably be the most spoiled brats to walk this earth, and I'd very likely be an absolute tyrant of a father knowing my own personality characteristics.
While I do a lot less of it than I used to when I worked at IBM, I still do my fair share of business travel, and a lot of that happens on airplanes. Many of the flights I take are three or four hours, sometimes as much as six if I'm visiting the Redmond mothership.
And there are always young children on these flights, and in airports during multi-hour layovers. And they are cranky. They misbehave. They frequently don't listen to their parents when told to calm down.
To placate them and to keep them from becoming entirely disruptive to other passengers and travellers, more often than not I have seen a parent use an iPad or another tablet or other mobile device as a substitute babysitter so the parent can get some sleep or time away from the child.
Now, I don't know if it's because this generation of kids is particularly hyperactive, or that we have more than our share of autism spectrum disorders due to unknown environmental factors, and/or the current generation of kids are just plain spoiled rotten, but I have to think that using tablet, mobile devices, and video games as a source of parental relief is going to have many unintended and undesirable consequences.
It's interesting when you see what kids do with tablets versus what adults do with them, particularly on planes. Kids like to play games. Parents and business travellers like to watch movies, browse the web, and read books.
Rarely have I seen a teenager or a pre-teen pick up a tablet on a plane and read a book. More often than not, the ones with the Kindles are college students.
So indeed, today's children are more "advanced", if we agree they are the first generation to embrace the Version 1.0 David Gelernter "Lifestream", which I believe is quickly turning our society into one dominated by attention-deficient nitwits.
I'm certainly not suggesting that we take smartphones and tablets away from our kids. If anything, the smartphone has given the modern parent a better communications and location mechanism than any generation of parents have had before, giving them increased peace of mind.
But we have to remember that smartphones and tablets and other forms of digital interaction are no replacement for real human interaction, as well as traditional forms of learning.
And if we continue to become "advanced" as Kendrick posits, all we will be is a bunch of unlearned and uncultured automatons that are socially backward in all manner of social interaction by comparison to their "inferior" technologically deprived forbears, who read avidly, who conversed face to face, and appreciated the simpler things in life.
Are today's children really more "advanced" with access to today's mobile technology, or is it also retarding their developmental and social skills? Talk back and let me know.
If you're looking to buy a tablet for a kid, you're probably aware of how difficult it is to find the right one. For example, you don't want one with unreliable battery life or one that can't sustain the challenges of a child handling it. After trying (and hesitantly letting my kids try) several brands of tablets, I've finally landed on the right one for my youngsters: The Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids tablet.
Also: The best kids tablets you can buy
Buy the Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids tablet
$139.99 at Amazon
First off, is the Fire HD 8 Kids the best tablet ever? Definitely not, but it's the best tablet for my kids at their current stages of life.
The Fire HD 8 Kids tablet is a well-built, entry-level tablet that comes with a sturdy kid-proof cover and features useful parental controls. At the center is an 8-inch high-definition touchscreen that's able to operate for up to 13 hours per charge, supports USB-C, has dual speakers, and comes with either 32GB or 64GB of internal storage that you can increase up to 1TB with a micro SD card.
Also: How to trade in your old devices for Amazon gift cards
All Fire Kids tablets include a complimentary, one-year subscription to Amazon Kids+, a service that typically costs $48 a year for Prime customers and $79 a year for everyone else. This subscription unlocks thousands of books, videos, games, and Alexa Skills. Even if you already have a Kids+ subscription from an older tablet, when you activate a new Fire Kids tablet, Amazon will renew the service by another year, which is great.
What age is the Amazon Fire Kids tablet good for?
Amazon has optimized its tablets' operating system, Fire OS, to make it more kid-friendly, no matter the age, with the option of parental controls for things like setting screen time limits and filtering by age-appropriate content.
For example, Fire OS lets you customize the appearance of the tablet's home screen with a "Younger" or "Older Kid" theme. The former favors larger icons and images to encourage natural exploration, whereas the Older Kid theme is best for kids that can read and is more similar to the software experience on Amazon's non-kids tablets. All of this is to say that the Fire HD 8 Kids tablet should be usable for most age groups, from toddlers to adolescents.
Also: Best Amazon tablets you can buy
A child interacting with the Fire HD 8 Kids tablet.
The parental controls make it easy to customize the tablet experience for different ages.
Parental controls can be accessed from the Parent Dashboard which, by default, is locked with your Amazon password or a 4-digit pin. Fire tablets connect to your Amazon account so you can also change the settings remotely from your phone using the Amazon Kids+ mobile app. You can change themes and age filters, add or remove apps, and even view historical data of what your child has played on their tablet.
Also: Good news, parents: YouTube Kids has a screen limit setting
It's worth noting that there is no YouTube Kids app available on the Amazon Fire Kids tablets, though there are some third-party apps that you can use to access the service. If your child is one who enjoys watching videos online, they'll have access to Amazon's content library or web videos through a browser, provided that you've enabled web browsing through the Amazon parent dashboard.
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