Meet the Family That Shuns Technologies Introduced After 1986
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Person 2: "I have an ever better idea! I'll write a short article about it as if you're making some big statement about our over-reliance upon technology that in no way considers what you're actually doing in a thoughtful way! Like how you're losing work which translates to less money and might impact your children's abilities to attend institutes of higher learning, or in a bad economy could cause you to lose your home or worse! Or how you might be negatively impacting them socially! Not to mention making them less able to operate in a global economy which, like it or not, basically requires low-level understanding of modern technology! Because, y'know, iPads are all, like, annoying and stuff."
Person 1: "Gnarly!"
[Fin.]
... make them do it exactly how we did it. Because that's clearly superior to all this goodarned whipper-snapper fandanglin'.
Slight tangent:
"The 1950's was the last time in our history people had any taste in clothing" - Patton Oswalt.
In an ideal world, we'll all dress in 50's - early 60's fashion. Computers won't look, sound or even interact with us like computers I.E. they should be invisible and only have their presence known when we have a guest at the door or an appointment. For this, they should remind us with the soothing voice of HAL9000.
Facebook shouldn't exist and news came in the daily papers made of e-ink. My chair would still be made of wood. In fact, "Things" would mostly be made of wood (new-growth renewable) and maybe a bit of steel for extra support. Concrete would also look like timbers.
At the start of the day, HAL will wake you out of your bed in your 16" x 20" rustic cabin in the middle of a forest and start the coffee machine with a carefully measured Arabica with a water temp at exactly 109C all powered by solar + wind. You put on your bedroom slippers made of recycled materials and head to pick up the paper (same one as yesterday, but now with today's news) and it will actually contain bloody NEWS, not some random malarkey dipped in mediocrity. You sip your coffee with your e-ink paper as you watch snow fall outside (it's September, but the windows will perfectly display the outside in winter, because.... well, just because).
... OK, I'm done.
Edit: I initially wrote August. Forgot, it's already September.
Except for in automobiles and aeroplanes, two of the few places I say "good riddance" to wood.
Despite having its heyday before Hitler's nonsense, there's so much of modern style that school influenced. There's no reason we can't have traditional materials and blend it with modern sensibilities.
Maybe cars and planes can do with a bit less of it (though I don't mind a wood dashboard), but a carefully curated blend of wood with a nice grain, a sprinkling of glass and a dash of metal on the side can absolutely work well.
Instead, we have "Breaking: We don't know how, what or why, but it looks like something bad happened... probably". It sucks and it stresses me out for no reason except ratings.
I've started moving away from TV altogether for news just for that reason. There's a set time of day I take in news and that's about it for news for the rest of my waking hours.
There is an intelligent limiting of technology for a purpose, and there is brainless dogma.
They started with the first, and ended with the second.
If one of them falls sick, they'll be glad for 2013 medical practices and technology.
As another commenter pointed out [1], this is more a case of brainless dogma than anything else. The fact that the father is having a hard time finding a job because job applications have to be done online is a nice example of that.
Western culture (I can only speak for this one) too often goes to the extremes to address subtle points, and we end up with movements like "no technology in the house whatsoever" or "protein only diet". Sudden changes sound good on paper ("from now on, I'm going to work out 5 hours a day every day!"), but pervasive progress more often comes from changes in small every day actions and habits.
Have no fear, medical advancements are still coming as fast as ever.
This really depends on your definition of 'basic care', and, therefore, isn't a very interesting statement.
My immediate counter-example is this: If someone in that family gets gallstones, they'll want laparoscopic surgery as opposed to the "open 'em up all the way" technique that was actually common for cholecystectomies (gallbladder removals) in 1986.
Also, MRSA existed in 1986, but if it's resistant to the first-line choice of vancomycin, linezolid and other drugs that can cure vancomycin-resistant MRSA didn't exist then (and being in trials doesn't really count as 'existing' because, really, how many people can count on getting in on a drug trial?).
Our ability to catch diseases is almost as, if not more, important than our ability to cure them and this ability has increased manifold in the past thirty years.
If their 5 year old is getting to spend half the day in the year 2013 with his classmates, & half the day with family in the year 1986 it sounds like the best of both worlds doesn't it?
"So why 1986, you ask? Because that was the year Blair and Morgan were born. “We’re parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it’s like," Blair explains."
Take John Romero, who loved playing video games, but didn't have the endless quarters to play them in the arcade. So he started creating games by programming them, playing them and tweaking them endlessly. And that's where he learned game design (he was the designer of Doom and Quake).
This isn't to say that this is the "greatest generation" of technologists or something -- they were merely well-suited for what came afterwards, which was an exciting time anyway.
However, I will venture to say that those who come of age in the early years of a certain technology, art form or skill seem to have fewer limits on their creativity. When you have stood on the shoulders of giants your whole life, you are much less likely to have "ground-level" ideas. You want to program the next great MMORPG, not a game about mutant camels.
So maybe this is a poor technological environment on the average, but it could be argued that it could engender a rare sort of brilliance as well. Since it seems that there is certainly an eccentric streak at work (parenting as performance art?), that seems like a possibility.
• That not having access to technology at home for one year will have a meaningful impact on digital fluency 10+ years later.
• That in the technology vacuum no other skills or furtherment will develop which outweigh any minor delay in digital fluency.
I'm far more worried about what kids miss out on by being immersed in (distracting) technology than the negative consequences of them having a little less of it.
Starting this late, they never reached the level of proficiency required to close the hedonistic feedback loop and learn how to saturate their minds with awful internet memes (and harmonise with the hivemind's sense of humour). They also never adopted the socially calculating mindset that you see in the kind of person who grew up on MySpace and Facebook.
> Earlier this year, Blair says, he was hanging out outside the house, and he asked his 5-year-old son Trey to join him. Trey refused. He was too busy with his iPad.
Oh, that explains it.
I actually know someone (not really my own contact directly) with similar lifestyle and what I have been observing is that she is so isolated from information inlet that she started developing high sense of skepticism as with current standard of technololgy adoptations by her peers, she'd be often last person to know everything. (I guess this also gives plenty of time to think about things, and every little things becomes very very big deal for her, but then that might be just her personality. She does show some hostility to people who are "informed" and they tend to become a target of complaints for just about anything...)
Looking back, I wish that we'd had the internet when I was growing up, as well as personal computers, for I would like to think that my life would have turned out differently had I been exposed to programming while still in secondary school rather than during my mid twenties.
I kick myself for not joining the Air Force, because my test scores were high, but in my youthful indiscretion I chose the Army because it seemed more "manly." (hindsight is 20/20)
Sure, the rationale is to make sure none of those things "pollute" their lives or allow them to mingle with the outside world. It's still quite cultish though and it's sad so many kids are forced to deal with it.
It's worth realizing how much our world changed in those decades.