Engage me

Comments

[tamarika]

Ah - that's what I'm talking about! I haven't seen or read a healthy discussion on my blog for quite a while! I just heard from another colleague, who agreed with both of you, Susan and Donna in different ways. She wrote to me in an email:
"That was a fascinating video and I had some of the same mixed feelings that others had about it -- I think we need to be more aware that the children among us are interacting with the world differently than we did, but I also agree, that underneath, they are still children and still need caring, responsive adults to interact with them."

[Donna Falcone]

What an interesting video... I'm not sure who created it or what their agenda was. It seems pretty straight forward. "Engage Me". It seems the children are begging us to enter their world. I also feel an underpinning of fear and sadness though, and that's what drives my response here. Are we supposed to be afraid of technology, or of hiding from the technology and thus not being able to meet the intellectual needs of our children? Not really sure which way the creator was going with this.

The children I know, now in high school, are bright, articulate, funny as hell, and they love to play. But, they play differently that we used to. They interact through different formats than we used to. The human form will always crave and create new and effective ways to reach each other. "Engage Me" will always be the requirement... because they are the natives and we are the visitors to the technological world they were born into we fear it. I don't fear it as much as I did because I am witness to my own teenage sons and their friends... they are not all that different than we were, they just "interface" with the world and each other differently than we did. I believe that we are always and have always fearful of "losing" the next generation. We need to be vigilant, as were all of the adults of all of the generations which preceded us. People will always need eachother. It is always more about the people we meet than the way we meet them. As an adult who has tried to keep up, some of my best friends have USERIDs instead of names. They have changed my life. There has never been a time in history when it was healthy for children to be isolated, deluded, fooled, and spoon fed. Children of the digital age are certainly no exception, but they are also certainly not the first generation to be at risk, and they will not be the last. As long as we have parents, neighbors, friends, teachers, community volunteers,grandmas, grandpas, aunts and uncles who are dedicated to spending time with, loving, challenging, and getting to know and understand the children they love/care for/teach/live near I think ... I believe, that the human spirit will prevail. Can we be complacent? Hell no! Should we blame technology? Hell no! My sons and their peers built a huge robot with their robotics team, and programmed it with mentors from Lockheed Martin! Much of their summer was spent gathered around my kitchen table (4 teenage boys and a Programming Engineer), laptops ablaze, learning how to write programs so that they could engineer the BEST robot. Many hours and pizzas and hoagies and bags of chips were devoured in pursuit of the perfect robot! Many outbursts of hilarity and silliness and complete re-enactments of Monty Python sketches seeped through the walls telling me that this, indeed, was VERY good. It's not the ROBOTS that have taught them and challenged them and believed in them to solve their glitches and get them moving again... it is their mentors and their coaches and their teachers. It's not the other robots they are excited to "perform" for in competition... it is their parents and peers who stand in the stadiums cheering them on, creating a new place in the photo album next to little league and soccer photos. It is always the human element that ultimately satisfies. It will never be easy to "save" the current generation, or the next one and so on (but when has it ever been easy?)... it will be even harder if we let ourselves become overwhelmed by the lingo of computers or the strangeness of texting codes! The risk is not in allowing our children to have and use technology, in my opinion. The risk is allowing technology to have and use our children.

I've said enough and probably too much... thank you for sharing this video my friend! Very thought provoking.

[Susan]

It is frightening to me that there are no voices and no touching in this production...unintendedly reflective of interacting consistently with technology and not with people. Not everything that's of value happens in the virtual world and as we move children further and further from connecting with the earth energy towards cosmic energy, I fear that we are nurturing a growing nation more out of balance than we have ever known - and that we will lose touch with why we incarnated in human form.

[Kay Dennison]

Interesting!!!!! And I'm going to be good and leave my soapbox in the closet.