Wired 101

Youth once meant creativity beyond the boundaries of the comprehensive. Now, it goes only as far as the phone’s cable allows.

If you are lucky enough to have experienced even a few years of the “pre-tech” era, you are most likely familiar with the satisfaction of engaging in activities like running with your friends, playing card or board games, hide and seek and all those hobbies that have a nostalgic place in your heart that touches your nerves every time you bring them to memory.

Have you dared to pay a visit down to your local playground or park to observe how today’s kids spend their own golden times of careless joy? No; and even if you have attempted to do so, it is almost certain that this would have led to a failure.

Why?

Simply because parks and playgrounds are no longer their target locations. Instead, they find comfort in some friend’s house — or their own — where a couple of smartphones and tablets surrounds them in a room with four walls are all it takes to bring them “joy”.

From a third-person perspective, this sight would be inconceivable to those who lived their early stages of life in the great outdoors, with trips, visits and other adventures that made their fantasies’ vast scale even larger than before. Still, the bad news is that this is the actual reality in which those kids mature. What’s even worse is that the kids themselves are completely fine with this.

On first thought, it doesn’t seem like their own fault since they grew inside the cocoon of technology, which feels completely natural and ordinary to them. However, it is common knowledge that children have a tendency of wanting to be part of an adventure; of a mysterious journey. In actual terms, such desires can be fulfilled with activities as simple as a plain sprint on the back yard, or a walk around the neighborhood’s creepiest looking house with a couple of other young partners in crime. Even something so fundamentally simplistic can provide them with enough mental supplies filled with magic fantasies to last them throughout their whole lifetime. The parents may see an old and empty house; the kids see a palace of terror waiting for its mystery to be unraveled by brave travelers like themselves.

No matter how many new i-tablets are launched and how many updates their apps and games get, the children’s true desire of going offline and experiencing the world that lies before them will never fade away.

Besides, if not now, then when will they get those mental supplies of careless joy that they’ll carry with them ‘til the very end of their life? What’s certain, tough, is that they won’t get it by staring down at a intelligent machine filled with unintelligent content.