Kids insights into tech
Well, after a long pesach hiatus from blogging, where I spent time with the kids Baking Matzas, doing the pesach Seder and running around, I thought my first post should combine work and kids.
Over Pesach, I was driving with my family to a kids park in an orange grove near Caesarea 30 minutes north of Tel Aviv when my 10 year old son turned to me and said "GPS in cars is really dumb. I am not going to get a GPS." I noticed that he was peering into the car next to us, looking over the guys PocketPC based GPS navigation system.
I said, "Why is GPS such a dumb invention." His retort "Because people lose their sense of direction because they depend on the GPS and then they get lost."
I said "Maybe, but that is what they have the GPS for, so they do not get lost or they can find places that they do not know." His response "Well, people lose their GPS and sometimes the GPS systems are not updated and get it wrong so you need a sense of direction."
At first I was stunned that my tech friendly, online-game-playing, MLB.com consuming child would have such an anti-tech view. Then I thought about it: The Mind is a muscle like any other. If you do not use it, it stops working right. You need to exercise all of its parts, including the "directions" one. GPS causes that to whither.
Over the last week, I have begun thinking about this in terms of much of our interaction with technology. What is the price we pay for every gadget or service that pops up? Oh, and what happens if that tech or service is not available. My son is not a luddite after all, just very focused on staying on his mental game.
Over Pesach, I was driving with my family to a kids park in an orange grove near Caesarea 30 minutes north of Tel Aviv when my 10 year old son turned to me and said "GPS in cars is really dumb. I am not going to get a GPS." I noticed that he was peering into the car next to us, looking over the guys PocketPC based GPS navigation system.
I said, "Why is GPS such a dumb invention." His retort "Because people lose their sense of direction because they depend on the GPS and then they get lost."
I said "Maybe, but that is what they have the GPS for, so they do not get lost or they can find places that they do not know." His response "Well, people lose their GPS and sometimes the GPS systems are not updated and get it wrong so you need a sense of direction."
At first I was stunned that my tech friendly, online-game-playing, MLB.com consuming child would have such an anti-tech view. Then I thought about it: The Mind is a muscle like any other. If you do not use it, it stops working right. You need to exercise all of its parts, including the "directions" one. GPS causes that to whither.
Over the last week, I have begun thinking about this in terms of much of our interaction with technology. What is the price we pay for every gadget or service that pops up? Oh, and what happens if that tech or service is not available. My son is not a luddite after all, just very focused on staying on his mental game.
posted by Michael Eisenberg at 11:28 AM
10 Comments:
Think of phone numbers. Nowadays, they are all programmed into your phone address book. Lose that, and how many numbers can you dial from memory? I know I can't even remember my wife's cell phone if I needed to...
>how many numbers can you dial from memory?
most of those that I knew prior to buying my own cellphone (a long time ago).
None of those that came after.
you raised one smart 10 yr old.
i was having sort of the same thought process over yom tov. I was having a discussion w/ someone about students learning judaic studies from digital texts instead of from print. and i raised the issue of what would happen on shabbos or yom tov when technology is not permissable. Would the Rabbis allow computers to be used on these day 50+ years from now?
(212) 724-7315
Does that ring a bell? Or something like that...
:-)
Happy "Isru Chag" (well for us at least...)!
You have raised a smart kid, but I think he's missing one point. It's ok to not exercise parts of your brain that aren't needed, so that you do exercise the parts that are.
You don't exercise the part of your brain telling you how to grow food in a field, hunt for animals in the forest, or hitch a horse to a buggy....all muscles that we needed at one point.
And that's ok. Like outsourcing frees up a company to focus on its "core competencies" by eliminating work that is better done more cheaply elsewhere, the brain energy is limited, so aren't we better off thinking about bigger, more challenging issues than how to get from Jerusalem to Caesarea, when a GPS can do it for us?
It would be interesting to know what your son might make of Zlango's "Icon Language"
Jeremy -
You raise some evolutionary food for thought. I need to spend some time thinking about that,
Anonymous -
To be honest, I did not show my son Zlango before the investment but I did show my daughter who loves it!
Elie -
You make a funny comment by posting my childhood phone # below but you got me thinking I also remember lots of numbers from my youth still but I do not remember the numbers of people I call frequently today. Numbers that are plugged into my cell phone speed dial seem to stay there.
Oh, and happy birthday.... That is still in the old noggin.
Jeremy,
Your examples are not comparable. There isn't a specific "part of your brain telling you how to grow food in a field, hunt for animals in the forest, or hitch a horse to a buggy." In fact, the skills needed for those activities (rough motor skills, attainment of procededural knowledge, hand-eye coordination) are still practiced today, albeit in different ways. Sense of direction and the attendant use of spatial memory may be something that we only practice by navigating.
This is saying nothing about the specific contents of one's spatial memory - i.e. the places a person is familiar with.
A subtle distinction arises here, and this connects to the cellphone comment made earlier. It is one thing to claim that by storing information outside of our heads (e.g. numbers in a cellphone, or driving routes in a GPS) we lose access to that information when we don't have access to the storage device. That's a no-brainer, and in such a case, you just weigh the value of having that information easily and securely stored against the inconvenience resulting from when you no access whatsoever to that information. The much stronger claim we're talking about here is not about the contents of the mind, but its abilities. And that one is difficult to gauge.
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