Tuesday, March 30, 2004
The technological generation divide
There was an incredible post on Mamamusings today about parental censorship and child safety. I live in a fairly technologically advanced household, and always did growing up. I certainly learned faster about technology than my parents did, but there were and still are many things about computers that I learn from them. Even so, the post on Mamamusings is dreadfully important, at least for those of us who are or stand to become parents in this technologically speedy digital age.
How does one stay ahead of, or on top of, technology enough to not be outfoxed by one's children? That's not to say that good parents always know more about things than their kids do. In fact, I hope my kids--when they come far,far down the line--come to know far more about something than I do. As the blog says, though, there is a delicate balance to strike between being too in their face and encouraging the useful involvement in the new media. Parents, obviously, are increasingly going to have to be able to negotiate these waters, and it seems these waters could become increasingly foreign to navigate as our kids learn more about technology than we do.
I always teasingly say I'd like to be able to out-play my kids at video games. This is likely to be impossible, even though I've had years of training in my own childhood and young adulthood. The technology our children will be immersed in is going to be markedly different than the ones we grew up with, and though we can hope to remain literate in it, there's always likely to be a technological generational divide. It all makes me wonder if there's some essential--if not implicit--similarity between the technological and the youth cultures, and if the two are moving closer to merging. Both are fast-moving, and fast-changing; both involve the constant awareness and absorption of new things; and both on some level resist stability as a lack of progress.
It also seems that technology poses a generational divide even in literacy. There are totally new languages developing and standardizing beneath the computer programs we use every day. We've already established how youth are on average more technologically literate. I have no doubt that one day many of them will speak and write in languages their parents do not even know. Sure, this happens in school all the time, when our children learn languages neither their parents nor any of their ancestors ever spoke. I think, though, that French and German and Spanish open up fewer places to find trouble (wittingly or unwittingly) than deep technological literacy--and that's part of the intriguing and puzzling dilemma behind Elizabeth Lane Lawley's blog post.
I'm trying to think of other technological innovations that introduced such new questions to parenting. One of them, undoubtedly, was the affordability of the automobile. Cell phones seem to have the possibility to make parenting easier, if anything. I wonder what the next technology will be to change this landscape.
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