I was sitting on the plane. Had both my Android phone and my iTouch on my lap. Was texting with the phone, had used my iTouch boarding pass application to get on the plane and was playing a game, when  I remembered I needed to look at something on my laptop. I had downloaded an online book to do some research, and had a thought that just couldn’t wait. To the guy next to me, I must have looked like a technology explosion. I am a gadget freak, and I have been in technology literally most of my life. I learned to program when I was 10 by typing in hundred page game programs.

It’s probably no surprise my kids have as much or even more technology. Also probably not a surprise, they love it and would probably play with it all the time if they could. In fact, I ran across this article from the Kaiser Family Foundation http://www.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm that says that kids 8-18 are on this stuff for 53 hours a week on average.

I was thinking about the parallel to my early life. The tech of my juvenile years was TV, all four channels of it, and I was allowed 30 minutes a day. Period. My mom said I should think about it this way, “TV is like dessert. A little is fine, but it can’t be all you eat.” Today more than ever it is all we are eating, and it’s all over the news. Strangely enough consumption of predigested media is pacing consumption of easy but none-too-healthy foods. We can see the impact of the eating habits, but what impact is the kids’ media consumption having?

I found a couple of folks that have been studying it, and there is a great article that talks about the cultural impoverishment of America and talks how crucial skills are not being developed http://archives.secretsofthecity.com/magazine/reporting/features/death-and-life-american-imagination

I’ll let you read it, but here is the quote that frightened me: “We’re engaged in a huge experiment where we’ve fundamentally changed the experience of childhood,” said Ed Miller. Currently a senior staff member for the Maryland-based Alliance for Childhood, Miller has a long history in education as a professor, policy analyst, and former editor of the Harvard Education Letter. “We don’t know what the outcome is going to be. We’re robbing kids of their birthright: the access to free, unstructured play of their own making.”

The challenge we face is that this stuff is here to stay. We aren’t going to reverse this tech revolution. I wouldn’t want to. But we must figure out how to give our kids critical thinking skills, and imagination, through these new technology channels.

 RLC
Co-Founder and CEO
Technology Guy
Dad of Three