How tech reprogramming the youth

Paolo Kernahan

I DON’T pretend to understand the dibby dibby yute. Children would rather spend hours in darkened rooms, like mould, talking to "friends" through the computer, rather than hanging out together in the sun. What manner of digital vampires has this new age wrought?

I was born on the cusp of the third industrial revolution – the digital revolution.

The predecessor of the Commodore computer, an early consumer model, probably occupied an entire office floor just a few years before. My father saw the future in this device and felt we should be exposed to this transformative technology in our most absorptive years.

The Commodore was fascinating, but there were hard limits to its capacity for excitement. It took two hours to “boot up.” Then there was an additional 30 minutes for the rudimentary hard drive to load a floppy disk with primitive, blocky games and starchy learning programs.

This early iteration of what would evolve over decades to become Skynet didn’t hold enough attraction to imprison us. Children today could never appreciate that they have in their hands more computing power than the technology NASA had at the time to put men on the moon.

I always LQTM (laugh quietly to myself) when I imagine children’s reactions to a power outage – the horror etched on their faces as the WiFi goes out, defaulting to the exhausted data. With devices rendered wholly inert, do they wander outside into the strange and quiet night, terrified by fireflies dancing in the dark, not knowing what they are?

When I was a child a blackout could be exciting. It was perfect for playing kick the pan, a modified hide-and-seek. Many among us got a cuta--e for decanting a full tin of Klim into a plastic tub to procure this essential component of the game.

One person would be chosen to man the overturned tin. That person was the seeker. He or she would have to search for the “kickers” in bushes, under wheelbarrows, under cars, etc.

Upon spotting their quarry, the seeker would run back to the tin, tap it three times and say the name of the person and where they found them. The job of the kicker was to dart out from the dark and kick that tin into the sky – as far as you could manage. Barefoot.

As children, we were “for the streets” before that term carried negative connotations. We walked everywhere, sometimes several miles a day, without being aware of how far we had gone. My friends and I seldom wore shoes. The texture of the soles of our feet was roughly the same as that of the road. Broken bottles used to watch out for our feet.

The only tree that didn’t get climbed by our gang was a grugru bef. Come to think of it, why the hell did someone have a grugru bef tree in their yard? Every other tree was fair game, even if it had nothing to offer other than the risk of serious injury.

Going to the pet store to buy fish? Ha ha! That was for rich people’s chirren. We’d go down to the river, catch a bucketful of guabine, feed them Crix and watch them die. This was childhood before the age of digital domination.

TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, streaming television, gaming, Kick, Twitch – it’s impossible to keep track of them all. The world children are navigating is one in which when you type “What is…” into Google, it autocompletes with “...Hawk tuah.”

Children who wore glasses when I was young were considered bookish…dismissed as nerds.

Not any more! According to one study, in the 1970s a quarter of the population in the US was nearsighted. In the 2000s, that increased to 42 per cent. In other parts of the world, like East and Southeast Asia, the trend is more dramatic, with the statistic of nearsighted young adults jumping from a quarter to more than 80 per cent in less than 50 years.

Researchers have attributed rising myopia in young people to increased screen time and fewer hours spent outdoors. Children today are also considered less fit than their parents were at their age; this is also attributed to screen fixations.

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly Luddite, technology is reshaping the health and social skills of the younger generation.

In all fairness, if today’s tech was around when my friends and I were children, we probably wouldn’t have spent our days frolicking in a slippery drain…and that would have been a shame.