Buttons, Smartphones and Babies will change the world

“No Screen Time for kids” says a chorus of “Experts” and equate the small screens on the smartphones with the large screens on the laptops, or even with the gigantic and totally passive screens on today’s mega screens on the teves.

And passively watching the goings on on a screen is something we want to keep our kids away from, never mind that we ourselves can’t wait to watch the latest Game of Thrones. There is a difference between grownups and kids after all.

But if you have a child or even as in my case a grandchild, and if you understand a little bit about computers, you quickly realize that smartphones really have very little in common with teves. You don’t just turn them on and then do nothing.

Instead the smartphones are logical machines, or Turing Marchines as they are really called, that can you manipulate by simple commands in a way that you can’t with a teve.

All it takes is a human being, no matter how small, and a smartphone with buttons or icons. A teve is a passive tool like a radio while a smartphone is an active tool.

In the picture above, my two-year old grandchild is intently looking at pictures on Instagram. She can quickly bring up the picture app Instagram on her smartphone because she recognizes the Instagram icon on the smartphone screen.

And she can quickly leaf thru the pictures on Instagram by flipping her finger with a dexterity that fills older humans with envy. The fact that she is only two years and three months old doesn’t mean a thing, least of all to her.

She also watches YouTube videos and knows how to click on the button that says “Skip Ads ” in the lower right-hand corner of the YouTube screen. How has she figured that out? Is it Darwinian evolution run amok, or has she happened to see one of her parents do it? Nobody knows. And she definitely can’t read yet, and either way, she isn’t telling

Interestingly enough when she picked up one of her father’s smartphones recently she quickly became frustrated when nothing worked. It turned out that what she had picked up was her father’s external empty battery case, which has the same size and form as her smartphone, but she couldn’t tell the difference because she can’t read. “I can’t touch my phone” she exclaimed with wrinkled brow, “I can’t press it”.

By putting buttons on smart phone apps we suddenly make them accessible to the very young. Who know the alphabet, but not what it is for, and who therefore can’t read yet.

So what does this mean? What it means is acquisition of knowledge is pushing way down the ages. By the age that today’s really young learn to read, say around the age of three - four, they will be able to read not only yesterday’s children’s books, but thanx to their smartphones they will be able to read anything, anywhere. And by the time they start kindergarten, by the age five, they will be able to join social networks and learn from them. And by that age they will already have experienced the Button World on their smartphones for three long years.

And this is more important than we may think. When I do hackathons in high schools, we ask them if they have any question. And nobody does. At the same time I notice that everyone is texting. At first I thought that they had simply tuned out, but I then realized that the kids didn’t feel comfortable asking unknown grown-ups for help. And since they knew who the most knowledgeable kids in their class were, so they asked them rather then us unknown grownups.

What influence will the Button World have on school?

At the same time we see a similar adjustment higher up the age scale. The fact that Joe Biden, at age 76, and Bernie Sanders at 77 are both seriously competing for the US presidency, shows how the world is changing.

If he won, Sanders would be 79 when he was sworn in. And 8 years older, or close to 90 if he completed two terms. And nothing says that the adjustment in age won’t continue upwards. In 50 years the US may well have a 90 year old president and a 16 year-old vice-president, supposing that the US constitution is changed. And before you laugh, remember the Swedish environment activist Greta Thunberg who at 16 is one of the most influential and well-known environment activists in the world.

The world is changing. All it takes is Buttons, Smartphones and Babies.