My son just got his first laptop. Nothing very significant about that in this technologically progressive era … except that he’s just turned one, and it’s a Fisher Price model with fat buttons and flashing lights. He’s been obsessed with my laptop, iPad and iPhone since he was able to focus his tiny eyes, and I can’t help but wonder how different his childhood will be from my own.
Growing up in 1970’s England was all about mud pies, skateboarding, hot sticky tarmac and playing in the river near my house. I used to disappear for the whole day, playing complicated make believe games with my friends, my Mum confident in the knowledge that I would return at the end of the day when I was hungry. She couldn’t phone me, SMS me, or track me on Facebook but somehow she wasn’t overly worried. My subsequent teen years, during the great decade of the 80’s, were spent huddled with girlfriends in small groups at bus stops (gossiping about the boys who would be showing off on their chopper bikes and shouting insults at us), obsessively writing my diary (I have diaries somewhere written from age 11 to 18) and feeding two pence pieces into the phone in the now iconic red phone box outside my house calling up my love interests. We communicated via the spoken word, the occasional love letter or by sending messages through friends. Now I wonder how teenagers cope with the vast number of messaging options open to them – they can poke, update, comment, tweet, SMS or blog their intentions. Do they actually ever really talk to each other or is everything contained within their strange teen-write?
I have friends with young and teenage children and it seems that the hottest debates centre around common themes – when to give in to the child’s demands and buy them a mobile phone. When to allow them to have a Facebook account. Whether to give them a laptop or not. The arguments for are persuasive – there is a need to keep an eye on the child, to monitor their movements, to ensure they are ‘controlled’. The arguments against are equally convincing – there’s a desire to retain the child’s ‘innocence’ for as long as possible, to keep them away from undesirable influences and to avoid “spoiling” them with the newest and brightest shiny objects.
What I find most fascinating, moral debate aside, is the anthropological angle. Right now there are still people in the workplace (including me – just) who remember life before the Internet. During my first ever office job in the days before e-mail had arrived on the scene, communication consisted either of phone calls (mainly to landlines as mobiles were only for the elite and very expensive), or in the form of old fashioned memos which would take a day to reach their internal destination, but which ensured that my early formative years were spent having to actually think through what I wanted to say. And if I did write something in haste, I could always go to the post room and pull it out of the outbox tray once I’d thought it through properly. Now I’ll react to something and send back a mail in the blink of an eye, and often regret the content. E-mail is instant and therefore doesn’t encourage a meticulous, thoughtful approach. Everyone is busy, the ‘to do’ lists get longer and longer, and its therefore an easy option to bat ill thought through mails back and forth which can cause a lot of unintentional damage through miscommunication or haste. As the “old generation” is replaced by those who have grown up with the Internet, I wonder how our workplaces will be affected. Sure there have been a lot of positive changes since I started work - the photocopier is largely redundant for one, and there’s no need to spend hours making old fashioned slides for presentations. Making reels for client presentations used to involve a day editing piles of tapes together. Now it can be done with the click of a few buttons – mpegs and links are instantly inserted into PowerPoint presentations. The downside of this is of course that our work is never finished. Whereas once we had to send out the tapes for editing or the slides for converting, today we have no deadline except the meeting itself, which means that invariably we end up rewriting content up until the moment we step into the meeting and sometimes even during the meeting itself. Frankly, it’s exhausting.
That aside, our “instant” information age, with its constant stream of news ‘as it happens’ means that we are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of things happening. In the ‘old days’ we waited patiently for the 9 o’clock evening news to catch up with world events. I remember being on tenterhooks every Tuesday afternoon waiting for the Top 40 countdown, when I’d get to know finally whether my favourite artist had made it to the number one spot. Today I don’t even think the Top 40 exists, at least not in its previous incarnation. Now songs are downloaded and sales are largely irrelevant and artists prosper via their tweets which are picked up by the online newpapers. Twenty years ago, there was enough news to fill two daily hour long bulletins. Today the news streams 24/7. I doubt that there is any more “stuff” happening in the world today, and suspect we have become more interested in all the trivia as well as the big news items. Similarly, today we have hundreds or even thousands of “friends” with whom we keep in constant, but superficial touch. I know what my school friends are up to on a daily basis, regardless of the fact that I haven’t seen them for 20 years or more and that they’re scattered all over the globe. I may know the minutiae of their everyday lives but actually I don’t know anything about what kind of person they have become. I am aware that my friends in Mumbai are in various bars, clubs, parlours, workplaces and even “home” at any given point in time, but I rarely make time to meet them there or have any kind of meaningful discussion with them.
There is no doubting that change is good. But part of me worries that my child will miss out on the simple pleasures which I enjoyed growing up. That he’ll become obsessed with his phone, with his laptop, and have little time for communication beyond that and that he’ll turn into a hyperactive workaholic as deadlines become ever more ridiculous in the workplace. I suppose it’s no different from my secrecy with which I shrouded my own teenage life and the pace at which I’ve always worked, internet or no internet, but I’m already wondering when he’ll ask for his first “proper” laptop with internet connection and what my answer will be.
