Yesterday, I heard the mother of two young kids talk about how her kids played with European-made toys, and educational games, and anything electronic or beeping was banned from her house or had the batteries removed.
After I put her on a mental "no fun at parties" list, I found myself thinking about those kids, and the difference between them and my nieces, whose playroom is full of stuff that beeps and whirs and responds to button pushes, often to the point where I feel overwhelmed by it and say "hey, how about these stuffed animals? Or a book?" So it's not like I don't understand where that mother was coming from. But at the same time, I'm awed by how normal smart devices are to my nieces and small cousin.
To these kids, most of the things that AT&T promised in those "You will" ads a decade ago, the ones that seemed wildly futuristic back then, are just the way the world works. Of course the car tells you how to get where you're going! Why wouldn't it? And of course there are toys where you push a button and it says a letter or a number or a word. I've seen all three kids figure out how to work complex stuffed animal interfaces (push this button for a lullaby! push this one for a morning song!) well ahead of the adults in the room, and look absolutely delighted at their accomplishments.
It seems to me that in trying to protect her kids from the supposedly brain-rotting effects of toys that do some of the work of play for you, not to mention protecting herself from the godawful noise, that mother I heard might actually be hampering her kids in a way, by keeping them from developing an interface literacy that's going to be second nature to all of their peers when they get to school. It's like the kids I grew up with whose parents wouldn't have a TV in the house -- except, instead of not getting shared-reference pop-culture jokes, those kids won't get interface conventions that will be as obvious to their peers as breathing. Assuming we make it that far, of course, the makers of the smart devices of those children's adulthoods will presume that deep interface knowledge, and build on it, and surround them with it, and there won't be someone there to take out the batteries.
(Of course, I don't think that's a problem these obviously well-cared-for and thoughtfully-raised children won't be able to live with, and parents should make their own choices about raising their children. Standard disclaimers apply!)
Living in the future…
...means ending Thanksgiving Day by watching a video of Arlo Gurthrie performing "Alice's Restaurant" on his freakin' MySpace page.
Happy tryptophan, each and every one.
Work-related posting
I am probably required by the Laws of the Intarweb to note that my employer has finally succumbed to the inevitability of rhyme and launched the frogblog. Not much content there so far, but it's already attracting some surprising commenters.
The good ended happily… that is what Fiction means
Big ups to header-quote-provider Richard Powers, whose new novel The Echo Maker won The National Book Award for fiction last night.
I have a copy of The Echo Maker, bought at a Borders in Chicago with the Zombie Queen and King last month, still in my suitcase. I'm looking forward to sitting down with it soon. Ahead of it on the reading queue? The End, the last of the Lemony Snicket books, and Rory Stewart's The Places In Between, bought at the Powell's mothership in my new second-favorite city, Portland, OR. (Also bought at Powell's: the awesome David Chinitz's long-awaited T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, which does me the great honor of citing my paper on Eliot's interest in, and criticism of, mystery fiction.)
After the elections
As regular readers of my non-posting know, I've spent a lot of the past year traveling to do user research.
Part of what all that travel does to you -- or, at least, to me -- is make you value the specificity of your own local life all the more. At my coffee store, this past weekend, not only did the guy behind the counter know what I get and how often I generally come by (Vienna Roast, every other week), but he handed me a box of tissues as a way of gently telling me the cold was making my nose run.
But that also means you value the specificity of other people's local lives, too. And so it was especially heartening, I think, to see the election results come out as clearly a national trend as they were. We're different in a hundred thousand subtle and endlessly fascinating ways, but in the end, there are some things Americans can agree on, and that's just got to give you hope.