Flights of fancy will inspire kids to soar

As children in the 1970s, my sisters and I would once a week head across the road in the early evening to our neighbour's house to watch an hour of TV.

It was terribly exciting, but also bitterly disappointing when that week's episode ended as I had to wait a week for the next instalment. Binge watching was decades away.

In the '80s, my maternal granny bought us a TV set for R400 with her bridge winnings - she was very good - but even then there was limited programming that began only in the late afternoon.

A revelation was the introduction of video - VHS or Betamax - with which I would tape music videos to replay endlessly.

story_article_left1

When I started working, computers had black screens with lurid green text. There was no e-mail; instead there were reams of shiny paper that lay in a messy heap on the floor below the fax machine until someone came along to look at what had been sent.

Fast-forward to today: my young children are likely to have already had more screen time - even factoring in no TV during the school week, no iPads and scant computer time - than I had as a teenager.

There have been endless debates about the consequences of all this exposure for children, but it's here, and for youngsters the time spent on tablets, smartphones, computers and watching movies means their experience and perception of the world is already entirely unlike my own, and even further removed from their grandparents' generation.

And that will spark new technology, which many of us cannot yet comprehend, as if their almost constant exposure to screens and the content accessed through them has rewired their brains.

Augmented reality (superimposing computer-generated images on the real world) is being developed by companies such as Facebook. It sounds implausible. But I shouldn't weigh in on this because if you had told me in the '80s about social media I would not have considered it credible. But here we are.

So what are the consequences of all this change?

Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, in an article "Is Google making us stupid" in The Atlantic, said: "And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.

"My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski."

It's akin, perhaps, to the assembly line which reduced people, who once had the skills to build a complete machine, to work on only one aspect. Has social media reduced us to skimming the surface, picking up bits of information here and there and not connecting the dots? Perhaps.

story_article_right2

But Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, in an article "Mind over Mass Media" in The New York Times, said new forms of media had always caused alarm. The printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and TV were "all once denounced as threats" to consumers' brainpower and moral fibre.

For example, PowerPoint was accused of "reducing discourse to bullet points". But "if electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying."

Pinker said new media had mass appeal for a reason: "Knowledge is increasing exponentially ... Fortunately, the internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart."

And children's and teenagers' fantastical imagining today will in some shape or form become the inspiration for new technologies in decades to come.

Enslin-Payne is deputy editor of Business Times