Remember the good old days when your mother wanted to get you home for dinner so she stuck her head out the screen door and screamed your name at the top of her lungs? Yesterday, I was too lazy to get up from my sofa, walk up the stairs and rouse my husband from a nap, so I pulled out my cell phone and called our home number knowing that the ringing would wake him up.
Oh, my! Who could ever have envisioned how much technology would change our lives?
Our children are from another world. When my son was whining last week over how long it took to download an episode of his favorite TV program, Lost, that he had missed the night before, I waxed nostalgic about how we watched television as children, if we missed a program, we had to wait until the summer to see it as a rerun.
When I was delivering a lecture to my older son about the genesis of music videos in the 1960s, I cited the Monkees television show and the Beatles’ clip to promote Strawberry Fields Forever. Dan nonchalantly reported that he has been watching those old clips all the time on YouTube. Who knew? Sure enough, anyone interested in walking down Memory Lane (or Penny Lane, for that matter) can relive the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Monkees cavorting in full costume or the 18+ minutes of Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s Restaurant.” Every single recorded moment that I could think of, I found on YouTube.
YouTube, which facilitates the world-wide sharing of homemade and professional video clips, brings in literally billions of viewers. If it’s been taped, you can probably find it on YouTube.
If you can’t find it on YouTube, you can probably read about it on Wikipedia, the free online, reader-written encyclopedia. If you are not aware of Wikipedia, which has 9.25 million articles, you should be. Your children are using it every day to research subjects from Shakespeare to baseball statistics. It is the bane of faculty, who rail that Wikipedia articles are unreliable and lack academic credentials, but they seem to be fighting a losing battle. Wikipedia is indeed helpful in solving difficult crossword clues and putting a finger on an elusive fact, but we’re trying to teach our students more sophisticated and reliable advanced searching techniques!
I attended a national technology conference last month where they issued “The Horizon Report 2008” in which the authors predicted how emerging technologies will affect how we teach and live. They bandied about scary terms like mashup, collective intelligence, and collaboration webs. The bottom line, however, was that we will become more dependent on our individual cell phones and that we must become more accustomed to living without privacy.
In terms of the cell phone, I have learned that if I want my children to answer the phone, I should text them. “U cumin 2 sup?” will get a faster response than a phone call that they probably won’t pick up. Don’t fight it. Call your phone provider and up the number of allowable text messages and then get to know your children again. The first time I tackled a text message, I got this back from my Daniel, “Mom, is that you??” It’s been all uphill from there.
The technology experts, who note that a billion plus new phones are created each year (one for every six people on earth!), foresee the moment when our cells will contain the internet, our calendars, our music, all our videos, photos and personal items. With this convenience comes the ever-disappearing presumption of privacy. As parents, it’s important to remind our children that things they do “in private” might not be so private. Phones that double as cameras can be weapons in the hands of the wrong person. It’s not something we ever had to think about as kids, but our children must always behave as if someone is videotaping their actions, because maybe someone is! We need to make our children aware of the power of this new personal media.
We first got a glimpse of this awesome power a few years ago when our children and their “friends” started posting photos and stream of consciousness prose on social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Some students still don’t seem to realize that what they and their friends post in this cyberspace diary can come back to bite them. Potential employers, graduate and professional schools all have the ability to track them down. We need to empower our children with the knowledge that Big Brother really could be watching.
It’s hard for us parents to remember what life was like before all this. It is impossible for our students to envision anything else! Our job as parents is, as always, to teach our children well (and know we love them).
If you have any questions, feel free to contact Tracy Gottlieb, Dean of Freshman Studies and Special Academic Programs, at gottlitr@shu.edu.