1-year-old thinks a magazine is a broken iPad

We were ahead of the curve on the Red Hartebees vs Evan van der Spuy video – posting it here when it had just 300 views, way before it had the 74 billion (is this right? – Ed.) it has now.

And I think this one has the potential to go viral too. It’s a one year old girl (the daughter of the CEO of the French Telecoms company Orange-Vallee, as it happens) who can’t understand why she can’t pinch-zoom and scroll on a magazine.

 

As her Dad says:

Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Things move on, we advance, we progress. Yes, books are great to hold and touch and smell (for weird people), but those are simply emotional responses. And while it’s fine to have emotional responses, we shouldn’t let them hold us back. We have to realise and we have to accept that in the future, books as we know them almost certainly won’t exist. Just as if I handed my kids a cassette tape or a rotary-dial telephone, they wouldn’t know what to do with it, so this one year old doesn’t understand why she doesn’t get any response from the magazines.

One thing it does make me realise is how important introducing as much new technology as possible into my kids’ lives is. Because being able to utilise touchscreens and the internet is every bit as important to them as being able to read a book was to us “back in the old days”.

2 thoughts on “1-year-old thinks a magazine is a broken iPad

  1. I have to agree with you. From a fairly early age it’s a good idea to introduce kids to technologies. It’s not going to give them any kind of edge in life though, these days it’s more a case of not letting them lag behind.

    But in all that, it has to be controlled. Kids still need to be kids. Free to run in the sunshine, free to climb anything that can be climbed (even if, perhaps, it shouldn’t be). Free to keep their eyesight for more than 10 years…

  2. Gary > This is true. I was merely suggesting swapping reading time for tablet time. But I agree that that time should be limited.

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