Ghost Of The Machine

Apple is running a TV commercial showing a child doing all sorts of things with her iPad, ending with a neighbour asking what she's doing with her computer.  The child responds by asking "What's a computer?" I suppose the message is that the iPad is so unlike a conventional computer as to be unrecognizable. But I'm thinking that it's still pretty inconceivable that a kid would not have encountered a computer at that age, so the message I'm getting from it is that if you give your kid an iPad, your kid will be an idiot. I can't be the only one thinking that the child-actor's line delivery is particularly wooden, presumably because it's so unbelievable. She's probably wondering to herself why these adults find it so important that they see a distinction between computers with keyboards and computers without.

I don't really get it either. But there seems that adults have a big fascination with kid's not knowing what obsolete technology is. Although the trend has subsided a bit, I can't count how many links I've seen passed around Facebook of videos of children perplexed by VCR's, Walkmans, phone dials, etc. First of all, I don't really know what the attraction is. I try to avoid seeing evidence of my age, but apparently some people can't get enough, like being unable to avoid picking at a scab or something.

But I also wonder about some of these kids. Just because you've never used something personally, you still get introduced to things a number of other ways. Usually that would be your parents and the media. I never had to place a call through an operator at a switchboard, but I saw them in movies. I never bought any records, but my parents had them. At some point it did occur to me to ask my parents why they had all these flat boxes with pictures of Elvis on them, as well as who this "Elvis" person was.

The fact is that we're all subjected to old-fashioned technology throughout society. Many people have noted the oddness that the 3.5" floppy is the universal symbol of saving a file, even though they haven't been used for years. And as I was thinking about this post, I came across this comic on that very idea. Old fashioned ideas often become symbols. I'm typing this entry on a web page that uses a picture of a bell to represent "notifications" even though bells have just been Christmas ornaments during my lifetime.

And also, you might be surprised how many things that are still in used in society that kids don't understand. I remember as a young child thinking that it was turning the steering wheel back and forth that made a car move. That wasn't because cars were obsolete, it was because this is a complicated world, and it takes a while to learn all about it. I was too distracted by learning grammatical structures and object permanence to learn the details of current technology. We all end up learning about a lot of the culture that came before us. You'll probably find that even kids have learned a lot about what came before them, eventually. Some kids are faster at picking it up, and some are slower. I've always assumed that they single out the latter for those "today's kids don't know what a flip-phone is" videos. Those kids are easy to find; they're the ones with iPads.