Pokémon Go Dangerous? you should read this.
Currently on a friend’s Facebook thread, one person is actively commenting that we need to restrict kids’ access to Pokemon because of the dangers, including that “kids are going to start falling off bridges” n shit.
Cringe. That perspective again.
I withhold directly addressing this person’s thinly-veiled and ultimately misguided auto-pilot voice crying ‘technology is destroying our lives’. Look, that’s not how it works. Because, human adaptability.
I think it’s much more important to talk about the implications of this perspective.
Because a better lesson than spending the rest of this article teaching you how to survive in a Pokémon era — surviving is just so, 2015 — I’d rather teach you a framework for how to win at life.
Kids by biological design will pick up, master, and bend technology to exactly how they want. They will be absolutely fine!, so long as you don’t censor them from developing an accurate assessment of the current environment just because you as an adult resist it in some way and hence block them (whether literally, or mentally by putting shame or taboo around something) from the mental access they need master their environment by exploration.
This has everything to do with mental frameworks.
Kids come readily primed with all the cultural signifiers to take on today, AND they are curious open sponges for what’s around the corner. It’s an easy mental connect.
As an adult you have the mental framework you mastered for your coming of age, and you probably have a few frameworks imparted by the adults who raised you. Frameworks are simply reads on the cultural climate and give you all that you need to know to survive in today’s environment. It’s pretty akin to which Operating System (OS) version you’re running. So, to set yourself up for success for the imminent future, you need to add on the framework for the most forefront read of today’s environment.
The reason I’m framing this initial comment about Pokémon Go / Augmented Reality, etc. in this way is this: It’s 1000% more critical for you to be able to take on a bird’s eye understanding on how to move with societal and cultural changes (or progress.. depending how you view it), than for you to zero in on making something a symptom of a problem you manufacture.. where both readings are off because your framework is fundamentally off.
We don’t have to go far to see how the “systemic problem” viewpoint plays out time and again. How’s it going for kids raised by parents who were anti-radio, then anti-TV, then anti-Internet, anti-Facebook (social media)? Note that not having a television in your house is quite a bit different from preaching that television is going to destroy the fabric of human society and connectivity. It’s always the same message by the way.
The consequences are also always the same. When you teach your kids that something that already IS is something negative, you curtain them off from mastery of whatever that IS is. That IS already is, so really — what are you doing?
To that person writing about kids being more likely to fall off bridges. The American model has always been to put up more fences, more signs, more policing. In other countries — they don’t have fences blocking off every tall ledge on a mountain. Are they falling off all the time? Are people who live in rural villages falling off all the time?
I get it. When life moves too fast for us to keep up, in fear we shut down want to put on the brakes. However the only way to form proper boundaries around something is through a neutral perspective and being able to really dive in. If you dive in at a skewed perspective, you’re boundaries are gonna be off too.
You’ve seen the films where someone wakes up from a 10 year coma and has to wrap their head around reality today? They’ve got a lot of cultural adjusting to do. That’s deadweight. That’s lost time.
Their baseline frame of reference for current reality is off.
Because you have a choice, and because your kids have a choice. Know this: going down that road has never paid off. Said differently, the danger is that you’re creating and saving all your files on Mac OS Leopard n everyone is on El Capitan and gearing up for the OS after that.
FYI — And the issue is not really about technology, cause right before technology it was religion. All in all, be wary of SHIELDING fueled by intention from the wrong place.
Humans, as we are animals, have an extraordinary ability to make sense of our surroundings no matter being born into Stone Ages on an ice mountain, medieval dark age, now, or if a baby is born on a space shuttle. Gloria Gaynor already told you, “I Will Survive”.
Pokemon is just the beginning of the age of Augmented and Mixed reality. better to be a well informed parent so you and your kids can make the smartest decisions for yourselves, and so your kid has the best foot forward with the mental seeds and ideas needed to perform well in the future.
Does this make sense? If you have more questions about how cultural formation of the mental landscape of current reality works, feel free to PM me.
