Is electronic wizardry complicating the life of Youth today ? and why?

Answer 1

Oh, yes. For one thing, communication is so much more ubiquitous. You carry a cell phone and an ipod, at the very least, and you have your email and your contacts which never let up. Getting quiet time and privacy has become such a challenge that many kids never do. They never learn to listen to the inside of their own heads.

It is also separating them further and further from the older people around them who are not so wired in. It must be lovely to feel superior and help poor old granny set up her computer, but you probably will never get to hang out with your grandmother the way I did, learning things just because she is doing them while I'm around her, and she can use an extra pair of hands. And just talking. Talking about family history or what things were like when she was a little girl, or anything. IM seems to have replaced talking.

You are also far more separated from history than we were at your age. (I'm 60, by the way.) Even recent history. I mentioned Woodstock to a young friend and she had literally never heard of it. I gave her a list of the authors whose books I had recently ordered from Dover (who publish books in the public domain, so they are all pretty old), and she had only heard of one: Mark Twain. She had never read any of his works, but she had heard of him.

Things lasted longer when I was young. Electronic devices and software programs are obsolete almost before you can buy them. So it's no wonder kids don't feel they need to take care of something: the race is not to use it before it breaks down, but to use it before it becomes obsolete.