- Thu May 08, 2014 12:58 pm
#188236
As part of a people who did get a stern yelling at if he did something bad, or a spanking if he was extra bad, I turned out fairly alright. That, and I, for all my life, spent seemingly 'unhealthy' numbers of hours in front of the screen. Sure, I'm not exactly Mr. Popular, and I don't have many friends; but all the friends that I do have in the real world are true friends. The sort that stick with you through the thick and thin.
What annoys me about this video, from my perspective at least, is that this video seems to blame technology for the social and cognitive failings of people nowadays. Of course, there are many people who spent many screen hours like me and turned out bad; but my mind always seems focused on a habit that, even though you may not see it as such, is a most human habit indeed. You see, one thing that we humans seem to get a kick out of doing is blaming everything but ourselves. Kids are 'antisocial'? Blame technology and video games, not the kids' choices or the guidance of parents, always the technology and video games. We live in a day and age where people have it in their heads that our lives are not moulded by ourselves, but purely by the environment around us. In publicised media and studies, this assumption we as a people make is a correct one, but in reality I am willing to bet that many of these cases were influenced by the choices of the person involved... not the environment they were exposed to.
Now, as for the public decrying those who's children get the occasional scrape from accidents, or people using legal action against others for minor incidents... that stems from a gradual progression of more sheltered parenting and care. If one shelters a person, that person will find other means of seemingly interacting with the world, and that is through technology. Even though I spent many hours in front of a computer screen, I still spent some time outside playing and more often than not grazing myself or cutting myself. Mother would put a plaster and some antiseptic, and depending on how big the graze was, she'd let me go straight outside again. This instance of little sheltering gave me a small insight to what pain was, and made me more hard-skinned. Because I was given the choice to go out and risk getting myself hurt, thus not being sheltered, I learned to suck up minor accidents, and not immediately blame others for my issues. Many other kids around my age also experienced this, and come the first year of secondary school, we were all fairly hardened 11 year olds. As such, our football (soccer) and rugby was often brutally rough and the vast majority of us had a great deal of fun doing it, and if some of us got injured, we'd laugh it off or if it was serious, we calmly dealt with it instead of decrying the world around us for our strife. One example was when one of my rugby opponents accidentally fell on my right forearm, snapping one bone in 3 places and the other in 2. One week after we were laughing about it.
Yet a good 4 years later, when my year group would often play football on a hardcourt with people of different year groups, I accidentally a 13 year old on the ankle, he fell over and started crying about a small graze, with himself and his colleagues immediately having a go at me for 'injuring' the boy. It was pretty clear that this lot simply, as a whole, were not nearly as used to tumbling a bit as my lot were, despite my lot facing much worse at a younger age. Because of this, I can say that not exposing someone to a little taste of the real outside world can be all the more damaging than shielding them away from it completely, and I fear that by the time I reach my 30's (or some other time I decide to make a new life), humanity will be too afraid to come out of it's cave. I'm 19 now.
Of course, everything I say is HIGHLY generalistic, and not to be taken as targetting any specific individuals.
OrigamiElephant wrote:That's like saying you hate Microsoft, so you throw your Ipod in the dishwasher.
