Wife started a conversation with me earlier tonight (Monday) about how she feels overwhelmed by the lethargy in today's kids. She was reading an article talking about the future perhaps in 30-40 years our phones/laptops will be sort of empathic and treat us according to how we are feeling. I don't think we are that far from this future, they already target ads based on what we are looking at. I've noticed the more I look at boat videos, the more often the commercials I see in the little squares are for different boat manufacturers. You can't tell me everyone cares to see boat commercials, that must be something catered to me based on my viewing choices.
Perhaps we will have some blood pressure sensors or mood meters installed under our skin and our phones will communicate with these, maybe deciding it would be better to play some classical music in the background instead of some energetic Metallica, that could be easy enough. I say if it goes that far, maybe we have pheromone or enzyme boosters to be controlled via the internet and bring us out of a funk or just generally make us feel better.
Wife sees everything through a school format and she worries the kids spend too much time on their phones. Maybe we do need to dumb down society. Maybe it would be ok for people to say LOL and BRB instead of writing the words down. My mom used to teach shorthand as a class when she was a typing teacher before she became a counselor. I remember it looked like chicken scratch to me, but those in the know understood it well and were probably considered to have an advantage for business school or whatever it was applied to. Why do we look down at the shorthand that has developed for communicating in a text world? I think it is pretty clever and because most of us have to communicate through text, it is a language most of us understand. I use an occasion LOL when I write e-mails to my managers, even the smily face emoticons show up if you do colon parenthesis :) on some e-mail formats.
Wife may be upset at our children for not keeping up with the classics, such as the writings of Shakespeare and even Homer, but their works keep getting used as backgrounds for movies and even songs. I think every generation will always be aware of Romeo and Juliet, I just saw my third installment of King Arthur which may have not been written by a specific literary great, but his story is of importance in the development of England, much like Odysseus was a central character in Greek mythology. There is something about sitting with a book and reading a story page by page, specially with an older book that might even have a smell to it, is it the same feeling reading through an electronic device? If it is, then it all becomes a slippery slope when it is converted to speech and the book is now being real aloud. How far is that from it being performed aloud?
I have always thought it is about 20% of any given class that goes on to college, I would never expect more than that to want to have a full grasp on all the potential opportunities to learn. Not that I would think that college is required to succeed, those things are different, but ask any grown up for the capital of a neighboring state and I bet you get an IDK and if they care they might look it up, but probably not. I don't worry as much as Wife about the future of our children, I know my two boys are doing ok, and that is what I am responsible to get educated, new year, new Mando.
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