Swimming in digits
Benny and Dorian are normal suburban kids with a decent set of digital toys.
That is to say that at ages six and three, Benny and Dori own--and bicker over daily--a Gamecube and Nintendo64, NintendoDS, the educational gaming console vSmile, a mid-range desktop PC, an obsolete Mac running OS 8 and CD/DVD players for each of their rooms.
Our family owns perhaps fifty educational games for the PC. Most of them are in regular rotation between Son 1 and Son 2, with the baby taking the lead. (One of Dori's favorite activities is to fire up his Sesame Street game and tickle Elmo with a digital feather.)
My boys watch movies on a computer monitor and listen to MP3s acquired virtually through Real's Rhapsody service. When my six-year-old wants to find out how a volcano works, he asks me to look it up online. The three-year-old spends hours at a time playing Flash games on PlayhouseDisney.com (he prefers Internet Explorer, to my chagrin), navigating through most games himself with great aplomb and startlingly focused attention.
Now, I am the child of one of the tech industry's first programmers--Dad worked for Sylvania in 1963--and I was my own generation's version of a digital kid. I spent countless hours playing "Adventure" via my father's work mainframe, and the scream of the VAX connecting through the toaster-sized 300 baud modem was music to my ears. My family had one of the first Atari systems, and a nice set of games to go with it, which I played obsessively. Hey, I even fell in love with calculators, working a paper route with manic energy until I could buy one of my own.
But unlike me, Benny and Dori are starting out life living in this world--and their thought processes are intricately linked to their digital habits. (Benny describes using his imagination as "running the Photoshop in my mind.") They're submerged in the digital ocean all of the time.
With an online journalist for a mom, and Web designer for a dad, maybe they had a bit of a leg up in all of this. But that doesn't make their immersion any less remarkable, or profound.
Could it be that all of this online play and learning has shaped their thoughts into forms I wouldn't recognize? I may never know. But given the wonders evolving in the digital world every day, I'm willing to take that risk.
That is to say that at ages six and three, Benny and Dori own--and bicker over daily--a Gamecube and Nintendo64, NintendoDS, the educational gaming console vSmile, a mid-range desktop PC, an obsolete Mac running OS 8 and CD/DVD players for each of their rooms.
Our family owns perhaps fifty educational games for the PC. Most of them are in regular rotation between Son 1 and Son 2, with the baby taking the lead. (One of Dori's favorite activities is to fire up his Sesame Street game and tickle Elmo with a digital feather.)
My boys watch movies on a computer monitor and listen to MP3s acquired virtually through Real's Rhapsody service. When my six-year-old wants to find out how a volcano works, he asks me to look it up online. The three-year-old spends hours at a time playing Flash games on PlayhouseDisney.com (he prefers Internet Explorer, to my chagrin), navigating through most games himself with great aplomb and startlingly focused attention.
Now, I am the child of one of the tech industry's first programmers--Dad worked for Sylvania in 1963--and I was my own generation's version of a digital kid. I spent countless hours playing "Adventure" via my father's work mainframe, and the scream of the VAX connecting through the toaster-sized 300 baud modem was music to my ears. My family had one of the first Atari systems, and a nice set of games to go with it, which I played obsessively. Hey, I even fell in love with calculators, working a paper route with manic energy until I could buy one of my own.
But unlike me, Benny and Dori are starting out life living in this world--and their thought processes are intricately linked to their digital habits. (Benny describes using his imagination as "running the Photoshop in my mind.") They're submerged in the digital ocean all of the time.
With an online journalist for a mom, and Web designer for a dad, maybe they had a bit of a leg up in all of this. But that doesn't make their immersion any less remarkable, or profound.
Could it be that all of this online play and learning has shaped their thoughts into forms I wouldn't recognize? I may never know. But given the wonders evolving in the digital world every day, I'm willing to take that risk.
posted by Anne Zieger at 12:59 AM
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