The life of a 21st Centurary Person: The Connected Generation
I was listening to a Webinar the other day which spoke about the ‘Connected Generation’. These are the people that have grown up using technology and in some cases don’t know anything but how to be connected. When I saw this picture on my Facebook I couldn’t help but think of that. In many ways I’m very much a part of this generation, though not as much as the younger people of today. My parents got their first computer in the late 1980s, I was born in 1990, they gt the internet in about 1996 or there about. I literally grew up with a computer in the house. Some of my earliest memories are playing Pacman on a Microsoft Dos computer, of mum sitting in the front room in one of the earliest houses we lived in (I was perhaps 3 at the time?) working on her University work. I got my first computer a few months after I turned 10 as the school required us to have one.
Even as I sit here typing this blog post up I have my phone next to me with email I’m checking, my iPad on my other side with some websites, other email and games I’m playing and I have five tabs open in this browser – a surprisingly small number for me. Besides all of that I have a Jawbone (a type of Fitbit), an eReader and an iPod. I use a computer for the majority of my work, for my uni work, for my volunteer positions and oh for my hobbies too. While I am a veracious reader I spend a LOT of my free time on my laptop. So do my house mates and many of my friends.
I’ve always been a big user of my computer, being highly introvert and not that great in social situations, though at first it wasn’t that common these days it isn’t odd for people to spend a lot of time on the computer or some other device.
As the person taking the Webinar said about this ‘Connected Generation’ is that they expect to be able to access the internet, to be ‘connected’ no matter when it is or where they are. If they can’t do something straight away then they just give up, they need the instant gratification that the internet and so forth can bring them. In many ways I’m no different, yes I will ‘disconnect’ and read a book for at least half an hour a day, go to the gym or go swimming but even then they overlap – on the top of one of the piles of library books is Android Application Development for Dummies – my reading is starting to give me new ways of being ‘connected’.
One of the things we stress despite that is that being ‘ connected’ all the time is bad but what do we do to discourage it? Not much. Yes, I’m someone who believes that we should introduce a lot of the emerging technologies such as the cloud into our schools, universities and day to day lives but at the same time the nature of Bush Schools/Forest Schools have their appeal to me just because it allows children t get out and explore the world in a way that many of us no longer do. We need to find the balance between the two because who knows what the future will hold. Will we end up teaching mediation like they are in the picture above? When I saw it my thought was a lot of children would be able to do that just because of their reliance on technology. It paints a pretty grim picture of the world we live in, in many ways.
