How Did We Live Without our Cell Phones?

Commentary, This and That

I have five great-grandchildren, and they all have tablets and cell phones…albeit the cell phones are under supervision.  They range from 10 to 2 1/2, and the older four are proficient in computer skills (at least on a basic level, two of the kids are seven years old.)     The youngest, for obvious reasons does not have a tablet, or access to cell phone use.

Their parents are my grandchildren, all in their 30s.  I have a photo of the oldest, at five years, sitting at my good old KayPro II (my first computer) typing away.

No, this isn’t me bragging about my grandkids…it is a treatise on Children and Computers in general.   I’m not trying to say that ALL kids everywhere have their own tablets, or even access to them…not even at school.    The point I am trying to make is that although it is still the dawning (or maybe the sunrise) of the digital age– and certainly children in certain world societies and/or economic levels have greater exposure to technological break-throughs than others–kids do have access to computers and methods of learning and teaching have changed drastically since “WE” (whoever we are) were kids.

In fact, if I may state the obvious, there are areas in the world that still do not have running water, inside toilets, or electricity.  I won’t even go into the issues of politics, availability of education, nor launch into a discussion of poverty-vs-wealth.

There is much discussion about the extent to which children who are not exposed to technological gadgets are deprived.

I will be the first person to admit that the internet is…well, GREAT (to lack a more expansive superlative) and agree that everything anyone could ever possibly want to know is available online.   This is excellent.  Research possibilities for students of all ages are phenomenal…just enter a key word, and PRESTO! there is a wealth of information.  The downside to this is that although there are internet bibliographies, endless links to endless sites, one of the negative aspects is that there is no extraneous information to “discover” along the way of the search.

A good example is The Dictionary.  Remember the clunky old book we dragged around, and laboriously searched the pages for a certain vocabulary word.  Sure, the word was there (usually, if we had a clue about how to spell it,) but half the fun…or torture…of searching for our destination word, was the bonus appearance of other words popping up during the search.

Unfortunately, now that they have the internet dictionary…the paper dictionaries are becoming obsolete in some places.   Please excuse me for being an old-fashion English teacher–which I’m not, exactly….but I maintain that the old dictionaries, and other research tomes, and the endless reference books on the library shelves can’t be replaced with a quickie visit to a dictionary.com site.

But, having said that, I admit to being something of a luddite, (one of those guys that smashed up the new machines because they saw them as taking away jobs) and its quite possible that I don’t know everything about the subject. (Quite likely in fact.)

One more thing…sobering, and widely believed to be impossible, or at least improbable, is that an artificial storage method can fail…power sources can fail.  That’s a worst case scenario, of course, but we all know Murphy’s Law: that anything that can go wrong…will.   I think that it is risky to try to put all of human knowledge online, at the mercy of  cyberspace a la 2001 Space Odyssey.

At the risk of being annoying, I did not know how to spell Odyssey, and didn’t want to leave the post I’m writing and go to a dictionary site…so I used a Latin dictionary.   I’m not sure what the point of this paragraph is, except that it illustrates my insecurities about online-posting…it is too easy to lose a post when I leave to snoop around online.  That wouldn’t happen with a paper dictionary, except that I can’t find mine.

Sigh… the moral here is the old saw: “…don’t do as I do, do as I say.”

43 thoughts on “How Did We Live Without our Cell Phones?”

  1. You state both sides of the issue and I am straddling them both. I have found just how awesome the Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries are online, especially the thesaurus. I admit I don’t know the plural of thesaurus. I see how children can have access to everything online they could want to know, other than the field work of actually visiting the ocean, the desert, etc to see what they are really like and add that to their data.

    But what I see around me is students who skimp on their homework, use summaries for book reports instead of reading the books, and taking a lot of short cuts in the educational part of the internet, yet being on the cutting edge with the entertaining part of the net. This frustrates me, no end.

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    1. Thanks. I agree. Half of what I know I picked up browsing and added it to vocabulary and general knowledge. I will say kids get it somewhere…Sesame Street? Seriously. Our 2 year old knows the alphabet, all of it, and can identify letters. I believe a lot of this is just being exposed to the knowledge. It begs the question of whether ALL children have the capacity but are not afforded opportunity to learn?

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      2. not really, it came from a book store down in Chiapas about ten years ago when I was there. Most of the people around there in the mountains speak one of several Maya language. They are very much alive…

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      4. nice people, but remote, and they mostly don’t speak Spanish, especially women and girls; they tend to send their boys to the city to learn to live in the modern world when they get old enough. I think I’ll blog about that…

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  4. Oh, yes, I’m with you on this. In fact, I posted a while back a mini-story of a world in which handwriting is a lost art (after reading in a local paper how kids don’t know how to do it anymore) and got a comment from a (local) dad that it is true – kids today don’t know how to handwrite… so sad… the world seems diminished somehow, despite (or because?) all the wealth…

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    1. I saw that too, but when I asked my great-granddaughter if they are learning to write in cursive she said they are. I wonder if its another example of how some kids learn certain things and others don’t…depending on the whims of the school systems. I’ll check out your mini-story. 🙂

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      3. here’s what I got at that url: Secure Connection Failed

        The connection to lweaveswords.wordpress.com was interrupted while the page was loading.

        The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
        Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

        Learn more…

        Report errors like this to help Mozilla identify and block malicious sites

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      4. Aw, wow… that never happened to me before… I don’t know what it means…
        I wanted to save you the search effort but if you do want to (and you are, of course, not obligated) than on left hand side of my blog is the question: Looking for something? In the field below you can put:
        Development, partly fictive
        which is the post title. Maybe this way it’ll work? I really don’t know…

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      5. it means I typed in the url wrong the first time 🙂 I found the “Looking for Something” and typed in “handwriting” it works nicely even with just a single word that is in the post.

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      11. I found the story…typed it in correctly I guess… interesting speculation about the future of arts. The I located the Search button and searched “handwriting.” –cursive…

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      12. also by using the search feature it would eliminate the need to type in the url, etc. from wherever on your site. Nice site by the way, I like the header photo. 🙂

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