The incidence of parents or caregivers reading to children at home today seems to be less frequent than as recently as twenty years ago. Today, parents hardly read at all, let alone to their children. The pressures of sustaining the lifestyle of the Jones’s necessitate many couples to adopt a dual-income strategy, with or without children. If they are present, Children are left in the comfort of the living room, with emissions from television and, more recently, personal computers and handheld electronic games. The present and future generations seem blissfully unaware of the daily trade made for comfort and passivity – the silent debilitative effects of myopia, and the more expressive (but just as) insidious symptoms of epilepsy.
While this may sound a trifle alarmist, it is of concern to few, except to political parties quick to exploit public sentiment, and radical social commentators such as yours truly. The transmission of time-honoured fairy tales from elder to younger generations has, over the course of one mere century, morphed into a deluge of visual garbage and other miscellaneous trivia from sources of irrelevance and irreverence to passive captives, through the values-neutral (though some may assert that ‘ammoral’ would be a better term) medium of television. Predictable plots and almost as predictably graphic depiction of violence pervade the consciousness of mankind, from the cradle to the grave.
Our children are denied the memory of parental nurture; these have effectively been uploaded onto web pages, archived to CD ROMS, and consigned to television programming staff. Yet modern technology fails to back up the essence of story telling: face-to-face human interaction. Although programmes such as Sesame Street, Jay Jay the Jet Plane, and Bush Tales aim to provide some form of values education, these are the pitiful minority compared to the superficiality and mundane cycles of violence and inane plots of animations such as GI Joe, Pokemon, and Power Rangers.
Allowing young children to interact with machines is in itself not a negative phenomenon. Skills such as differentiating between a right-click and a double click of the mouse are undoubtedly useful. However, time spent on electronic playthings (especially television) at the expense of social interaction endangers children as it reinforces the fallacy of equating independence with isolationism. Throughout nature, especially in the case of mammals, the need for survival has highlighted the role of transmitting learned behaviour from one generation to the next; cases of survival through agoraphobia are a rarity, if these do indeed exist.
In a world of cut and paste, creativity is slowly but surely draining out of society. Indeed society today values creativity in cutting and pasting for the masses; original thought is left to the aristocrats, those deemed ‘lucky’ enough to get a break, and those deemed ‘crazy’ enough to risk losing a life of comfortable sterility. The death of the fairy tale begins with the suspension of the vibrant imagination inspired through social interaction in favour of the lifeless conformity as led by the characters of the Sims computer game. Taken to the extreme, technology’s Xerox machines extrapolate to a world where one mind is a replica of another, each responding to stimuli with the ‘right’ answer. Have we forgotten that those who possess sufficient human technology create social machines to manipulate those who have long sacrificed theirs?
