Kevin Kelly shares some anecdotes about the subset of the latest generation raised with cutting-edge technology from an early age. Here’s one:
Another friend had a barely-speaking toddler take over his iPad. She could paint and handle complicated tasks on apps with ease and grace almost before she could walk. It is now sort of her iPad. One day he printed out a high resolution image on photo paper and left it on the coffee table. He noticed his toddler come up to up and try to unpinch the photo to make it larger, like you do on an iPad. She tried it a few times, without success, and looked over to him and said “broken.”
Another:
Another reader had this story. Her son had access to a computer starting at the age of 2. Once while they were shopping in a grocery store, she paused to find a label on a product. “Just click on it,” her son suggested.
The comments are good, too.
The real question is whether this will have transient or lasting effects on how the children in question learn and think. And will those effects be comparable to previous technological “generation gaps”, or qualitatively different?
ComplexMeme 