Young Generations: Obsession of Technology           

     Over Thanksgiving break, I was out to eat with my parents at a small restaurant in our town. As we were eating our meals, a family with three children around the ages of five, ten, and twelve sat across from us. I noticed that every child had an electronic device in his or her hand the entire time they were at the restaurant. The sad part about this you might want to know, is that the parents did not care one bit that these children were on them, they were too busy with their cell phones themselves! This situation made me ponder of how my generation, like the generation of these kids, is considered part of the digital natives era, people who are born into a digital society. When I was that young we played with technology, but not the point where we cant have a conversation with one another without being on the phone, let alone use it at the dinner table. My parents would probably kill me if I ever used my phone or GameBoy back then. I know people in college today can’t go anywhere without their phones, but children these days make it seem as if they can’t do anything productive at all unless they have a technological device to aid them. it has something to do with electronics. Kids in my neighborhood rarely play outside, if lucky, maybe once or twice a week. From the moment they get home, it is all about video games, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, or Facebook. When I was that age, my friends and I were always outside no matter what the weather conditions were. These kids are on Xbox Live talking with high school and college kids all over the world, which can open up doors to learning serious bad behavior.

     Now it isn’t the child’s entire fault in this situation; parents, it seems to me, care less and less about what their children do online and don’t monitor them whatsoever. My neighbor, whose 11, has an Instagram posted stuff like “Pats a fag”, and “I ball so hard motha f**kas wanna try me!!” If my parents ever saw me post that at any age, my butt would be shipped off to boot camp faster than I could say sorry to them. Parents don’t monitor their children so these children don’t understand what kind of trouble they can get in if these images and posts get put into the wrong hands. What I don’t understand is how parents let their child sit in the basement or room and play on their phone, iPad or whatever video game station for more than an hour straight on a beautiful day outside. These kids aren’t learning how to use technology efficiently and sadly I believe they could become worse at technology as some of our generation’s parents are right now.

     Another scary thing to think about is what do these children talk about to each other and search about on the web. Most parents barely know how to put parental locks on their television let alone on their laptops and children’s phones. These kids can search for anything and everything. Younger males especially I feel are more curious than females when it comes to certain things. Some of the videos my younger neighbors have showed me contain shootings, provocative language, and fights between kids their age. They laugh and joke about it as if nothing is wrong because they are just looking at it, but at that age their mind is a sponge and they don’t realize it. When they hear these new pathetic rap and hip-hop songs with music videos online of women who are seen as degrading compared to the men, these younger boys will start to treat these girls with that type of respect. I asked them what they thought about if a girl was a main character for a video game and of course at that age they both laughed, although one of them said he loved the My Little Pony video game that made me very confused because I swore that was for girls only. I asked them what do you identify girls with in video games and without a doubt I knew what their answers would consist of: prostitutes and strippers in GTA, and Princess Daisy in Mario who always has to be saved.
     All of this accessibility to technology cannot be good to their educational experience. Friends I know have a difficult time in college when it comes to focusing on their work, in middle and high school my parents made sure I got my work down before I was allowed to play video games if I had any time left in the day. It just seems that if kids these days focus all of their attention on an iPhone or Xbox, what will happen when the outside world starts to breathe down their necks as they grow, they can’t hind behind that phone forever. Not only that but by sitting online, especially video games, children get only a sense of a male gendered space, meaning most of the atmosphere they surround themselves in are focus around males. It’s time for parents to break down the technology wall children surround themselves in and get them to do outdoor activities that are not only proactive, but help them meet new people and acquire new ideas other than meeting people through voice and text online.