All I Really Need to Know About Technology I Learned in Kindergarden

Every so often children have a funny way of helping you realize that how much technology has  changed our basic notions of how we interact with the world. I had a small one quite awhile ago attending a local fair in Minneapolis while watching a performer on the children’s stage talking with the kids and interacting with them with them by watching a “pretend” TV and then he asked all the kids and their parents to change the channel. He and the parents pantomimed changing the channel by turning a knob on the TV set, the kids however changed the channel by pantomiming holding a remote control and aimed their remotes at the performer and pressed the “buttons” on the remote with their thumb.

Another time was when I was chatting with a friend of mine recently about his own technology paridime shift when he was looking at his friend’s four year old daugther watch “Dora the Explorer” on TV when suddenly she got up in the middle of the program and begin to rummage around the back of he TV set in the snake pit of wires. His first thought and reaction was how cute, she is pretending to be Dora and was exploring. As the four year old became increasingly fustrated it was clear that she was not exploring at all. He asked her what she as doing and she replied she was looking for “the mouse”. Interactivity with media was so commonplace with this four year old that she felt it her right that she should be able to control the show on TV.