"Mommy, Can I Have an iPad?"

It seems like every kid born in the last 10 years knows two languages: their first language and the language of technology. Kids are exposed to technologies at younger and younger ages. Whole markets of “educational video games” and educational toys that mimic technology have developed out of this supposed need to begin a child’s learning at a younger age. Is this a social construct due to the competitive nature of education and the job market? Are these toys and video games beneficial at all for toddlers? As discussed in Professor Michael Rectenwald’s book about writing and real world topics (Chapter 2: Learning from Games, intro), academia is still not sure where the study of impact of video games fit in. Many people don’t know if it should be a considered a part of media and communication studies or psychology. Regardless of where these studies are taking place, there is still the issue of what technology has done to children today.

Technology of any kind should never pass for human interaction. Human interaction is literally what has created our modern society, and is the most valuable and impressionistic learning experience young children can have. Too much technology, I believe, does cause these negative affects of attention disorders and hyperactivity. The debate between pro-technology for children and dissenters is mainly a moot point because at this point in time, not exposing a child to technology at all could be more detrimental to their social situation as older children rather than not exposing.

It’s interesting to look at how these educational toy companies are marketing to parents. Both vtech and LeapFrog have “laptops” and “cell phones” made for 6 to 36 month and 18 to 36 month-olds, respectively. The goal of the toys is for the children to learn from them and how to use them. The description about the “Baby's Learning Laptop Pink by VTech” says, “Your child will be ‘wired for learning’ with Baby's Learning Laptop Pink!” The notion of “wired for learning” promotes the idea of a perfect worker, one who is obedient and thoughtless. What a better way for big business to secure a future, they simply have to program it into the heads of babies.

LeapFrog's Learn & Groove Music Player

vtech's Baby's Learning Laptop Pink

An article in babycenter mentions that:

Toddlers between the ages of one and four years are at their exploratory best, using all their senses to learn about the world they live in. Touching, tasting, feeling and smelling, your toddler satisfies his curiosity and learns more and more every day.

It goes on to explain that this same age group should not watch television because they do not have the cognitive ability to interpret a TV show. Screen time of any kind for more than half an hour is thought to have these negative affects, including hyperactivity. However, its simply one study.

One thing that is a recurrent theme with these media research studies is that they all yield different answers, or at least, the professionals interpret them differently. For example, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has published this set of guidelines for reducing screen time for all Americans, especially those at risk for becoming obese. On the other hand, the American Council on Exercise after performing studies on both the Wii Fit and the PC-based game DanceTown came to the conclusion that the Wii Fit is a mild workout, and should be used as a supplement, while DanceTown is an appropriate alternative for aerobic exercise in adults. Even within the gaming studies there are variations and this causes many mixed feelings for the everyday person.

Many parents today are very concerned about giving their children an edge, especially in our globalized world where children, when entering the job market, could potentially work anywhere in the world. A simple Google search for “How do I give my child an edge in life?” reveals a plethora of results and ranges from an unfortunately named Jagged Edge song to an article entitled “Baby Genius- your genius baby, kid, or child genius.” One thing that many professionals agree on is that technology should never become a substitute for parenting. This has become increasingly difficult as children become aware of technology at younger and younger ages, and are throwing temper tantrums for the technology. So if all this technology is bad for children’s behavioral development, what can parents do to give their child the technological edge and still have relatively normal children? In an article published by U.S. News Health section, Good Parents, Bad Results, it’s been determined that parents today are less willing to set limitations, are more overprotective, and basically are simply drawing their parenting ideas from so many different sources that it causes negative effects on their children over time. These effects include increased depression and anxiety in teenagers, which is supposedly at an all time high. 

"How can I give my child an edge in life?" search results, unfortunate lyrics and all.

In the end, being able to keep up with the ever-changing world of technology is a skill that is practiced and learned. Children who are exposed to this edge may or may not actually have one, since most babies develop certain skills in the same time frame. While I believe it is a moot point to try and raise children without technology, not studying the affects of technology on young children is a loss of information for behavioral scientists, parents, and ultimately the children. In the same article as mentioned above, Good Parents, Bad Results, it shows that “Surprisingly, many family therapists and parenting educators aren't up to speed on the research, either, so that parents who seek professional help won't necessarily get the most proven advice.” Certainly more conclusive studies need to be performed and disseminated so we, as a human race, can deliver that “child 2.0,” one fluent in technology, without causing major damage to the child.

LOL Memes

“Forever alone.” “Bad Luck Brian.” “Philosoraptor.”

Upon hearing any of these phrases, a digital immigrant might ask, “What the hell are you talking about? What do those things even mean?” A digital native, however, would probably be on the floor laughing, or ROFL-ing. This is all due to the latest Internet fad called the meme.

To clarify meme [meem], according to Dictionary.com, is “a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.” Furthermore, it is also an actual sociological and cultural study, as in one can study the “memepool.” To break it down, the idea of memes come from Richard Dawkins’ 1976  book “The Selfish Gene” and basically begs the question of originality in humanity. As Brent Silby says in his article “What is a Meme?”: 

Think about all the ideas that you have in your head right now. They are all memes, and they all came from somewhere. Some of them will have come from friends and some will have come from the internet or television.

This theory, called meme theory, applies to everything in human culture, but certain aspects of memes have exploded with social media and the Internet. Many involve characters, pictures, and some have even expanded into full on comic strips (most notably Le Rage).

Example of a Le Rage comic. 

Memes are clearly a very human theory in the sense that they are born, live, evolve for a purpose and inevitably will die out or simply be replaced. Internet memes are so important and radical because unlike other cultural memes, these memes are encoded into the World Wide Web. Their cookies and code will live on forever and can always be accessed, and this fundamentally changes the meaning of a meme.

In Jonnie Hughes’ article for The Independent, his study of memes allowed him to realize the true biological comparison between memes and genes as he describes memes as “countless living ideas that skip through our seven billion brains, each one competing for space in our cerebrums and the chance to procreate through our tongue and wrist movements.” This implies longevity in the spread of memes, where it has taken time for these interactive, conversational memes to come about. For instance, almost everyone in the world understands “flipping the bird,” but they didn’t know instantly. Internet memes are so radical because they can instantly, in comparison to the spread of hand gestures, spread cultural ideas, phrases, slang, images and so many other things. Internet memes are plastered on Facebook, Twitter, used in text messages and sometimes even in everyday speech. This rapid spread of memes has become less evolutionary and more viral.

The uses of these memes are also changing. Silby predicts that memetics, or the study of memes, “will become an essential addition to a psychologist's tool kit.” Are these Internet memes also valuable to analysis of the human psyche? Since these memes tend to be very simple and immature, does it imply that humans are becoming more infantile? Or is it simply an expression popular culture?

Philosoraptor ponders the meaning of memes.

In a blog post by Alex Leavitt, he explores the idea of memes as a movement and Internet memes as a manifestation of that movement. He goes on to say that if the Internet relies on popular culture then Internet memes are memes of popular culture, in this case meaning where a general populace can gain access to the meme. 

With 2,267,233,742 Internet users as of December 31, 2011, its fair to say at least 1/3 of the world’s population has used the Internet. In North America alone, there has been a 152.6% increase in Internet users in only 11 years. Globally, there has been a 528.1% increase. With more of the world’s inhabitants having access to the Internet, it seems only fitting that Internet memes have truly exploded. Further more, out of the estimated 273,000,000 Internet users in North America, about 173,000,000 are using Facebook. I have no doubt in my mind that non-Internet memes have exploded with population growth; more people means more ideas as well as a wider spread of ideas. However, simple ideas can be lost with time and general dissatisfaction with an idea. Cultures become melded and ideas lose their original meanings as they evolve. With Internet memes, the ideas can evolve but the original can always be recalled as well.

Internet memes are created everyday, and whether they take a while to infect the various Web 2.0 users or not, they are here to stay. In fact, marriage proposals have even been preformed through memes! (See below) They have perhaps taken out the evolutionary aspect of a meme, or maybe they have furthered the evolution of a meme, causing memes to be created and die out at a rapid pace. Either way, for the first time in history we can look back on memes and know the context, as the Internet records them forever, and maybe we can still even get a laugh out of them.