thankfully, I don't see any reason to believe this will take off "iPhone-style".
Nobody is conditioned to do this, it was just a necessary thing for a period of time. We've already moved on.
In a few years we will laugh at people not wearing these things just like today you are a weirdo if you do not have a smartphone in your pocket. Kids will be just fine. It's the grandpas screaming at the clouds who will not be fine and excluded even more.
The train is leaving the station. You either board it or remain in the darkness and cold. Forward, forward always forward. Anybody against progress will be trampled under our feet.
but I'm at least half-certain your post is satire, so...
in decades past, one would be forgiven for supposing that, once devices that could ostensibly be considered to be Personal Computers became pocket-sized and nearly universally ubiquitous, complete with access to a global network of information, that we would've reached the culmination of the technological empowerment that the personal computer revolution promised—but instead, we got TikTok, and kids who aspire to be Famous On TikTok. that's what all of this marvelous technology has wrought: brain-numbing slop piped right into your retinas, in exquisitely high definition, practically from birth, judging by the age at which I've seen kids on tablets in public alone!
The people I know that are addicted to video games into their twenties and thirties certainly fit the bill. They're going nowhere fast.
- Wage stagnation in Nine Charts: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
- Home prices are rising faster than wages: https://usafacts.org/data-projects/housing-vs-wages
- World's richest people (0.001%) now own 11% of global wealth, marking the biggest leap in recent history: https://fortune.com/2021/12/07/worlds-richest-inequality-ric...
- Richest 1% gained $6,500,000,000,000 in wealth last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/richest-one-percent-gained-t...
- 50 Years of shrinking union membership, in one map (from 33% to 10%): https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-y...
When I was about 10 years old I wanted to make a movie (it was going to be a basketball version of The Sandlot) but my parents didn't own a camcorder and couldn't afford to buy me one so I was out of luck and never got to experiment creatively in that way. Last time I saw my brother's family his 9 year old was super excited to show me the musical she and her friends had recorded using her Amazon Fire tablet. My cousin's 12 year old has a bunch of (actually rather impressive) stop motion shorts on Youtube that he created and edited on the family's iPad.
In high school it was super time consuming and slow learning to program reading books and writing simple command line programs I could only run after being super careful installing a Linux distro from a CD in a magazine on my family's one PC cause the C book I bought was unix focused. Now my significant other's 16 year old niece is learning to program on an iPad with Swift Playgrounds, she was literally doing it sitting on the beach last time we went on vacation together. My sister's 11 year old meanwhile loves showing off the frankly ridiculous number of levels he built in Roblox just using an iPad.
Like yeah, theres definitely a lot of kids (and adults) that do not create and only consume content, and I've definitely seen all of the kids I mentioned doing the dead-eyed-stare-at-glowing-screen thing, but I don't think thats new, most kids and people in general have always been like that. And yes most devices are mostly used for consumption, but suggesting those devices limit the ability of kids to be creative just seems incorrect when I see them providing so many creative outlets that I never had access to because they didn't exist previously.