New Technologies - Good Or Bad?

Technology is rapidly progressing. When you think about it, it's kind of scary. Recently, I've been forced to use an older phone, an iPhone 4S, due to my more up-to-date iPhone 5S breaking. I felt like I was stuck in the stone age. When the new iPhone 6S was announced, my anticipation for September 25th, the release date, skyrocketed. Now, I have the new phone and love it. This got me thinking, with the rapid progression of technology and simple, mundane tasks such as checking the weather become more and more easy and fast to complete, is this rapid growth necessarily a good thing?

When I think back to my early childhood, I remember playing outside with my friends, for the most part. The only technology-based activities I took part in were playing an online MMO game for kids, called ToonTown, chatting with some friends on AIM, and playing CD-ROM based computer games (on a side note, my favorite one of all time was this Tonka Truck video game that had this cool controller-type object that attached to the keyboard with lots of cool levers that corresponded with different tasks within the game). Other than that, most of my earliest memories involve playing with physical toys, or outside in the backyard with my friends.

Thinking about how kids today will remember their childhood, it’s kind of upsetting. Kids today, who are growing up with iPads and the like, are not going to know the annoyance on having to yell “CAR” while playing catch in the street. They’re not going to know the struggles of having to climb underneath cars to retrieve that ball that rolled under it. They’re not going to know the struggle of chasing a ball down a hill to catch it. They won’t understand that perfect time of day on a Saturday evening when the sky is orange and the weather is perfect. They will only know the struggles of not having a wifi signal, for example. They’ll only know the struggle of not having enough data to stream Tyler Oakley’s latest upload. And while both my generation and this generation experience struggles relating to their activities, at least in my generation, we were laughing with friends having a good time. Thinking ahead to the future, one could only imagine what struggles they will have to endure.

While all of this growing technology is great, it’s good to stop and think every now and then how it’s affecting the current youth. While there are a lot of educational apps and technologies out there, they are on the same platform as all of the games and other distractions, which makes it harder for children to learn to focus. Some interesting questions arise when thinking about this topic. Should an age limit be put on certain technologies? Should these age limits be put into effect, will they be viewed by this generation in the same way as the drinking age is viewed by my generation? Will this open up a whole market/reason to get a fade ID?