Ranting on TVs, games and focus
May 23rd, 2008 by HenIn the spirit of finding something I agree with and using it to justify my belief; here’s a BBC report entitled ‘Web worlds ‘useful’ for children‘. The subject came up at the doctor the other week about how much TV a child was watching. The general rule we try to live to is that our son doesn’t watch TV alone (occasionally broken when absolutely necessary - such as Apache board meeting while Carrie is at the doctor), but that he either watches TV with us or we are playing video games together. Again, with the last bit - the rule is to not have him playing video games on his own.
The doctor’s view was that the visual display was the bad thing and he should not be spending much time interacting with a visual display - that it was damaging for his ability to work at school.
There are a few thoughts you get here as a parent.
1) AARGGGHHHH I’m a BAD parent.
2) Hang on… what’s medical about being a good student and why is a doctor preaching this?
3) Wait a minute, your definition of normal wouldn’t include me.
4) I want my child to be normal.
5) I don’t want my child to be limited by my generation’s (or the preceding generation’s in reality) view of normal.
Computers are invading every day life. It’s like saying you won’t let a kid near a hammer until they are old enough - no toy hammers, no helping you while you use a hammer, no getting to hit the nail in under your guidance (which Nathan and I had huge fun doing the other weekend btw… my son helped me put up shelves… it rocked). Social activity is increasingly through computers. It seems very fair to ask:
“What is a more valuable skill - socialization in the playground or socialization on the Internet?”
The answer is obvious to me - they’re equal. My point being that I’d rather see schools embracing the technologies that the article talks about rather than trying to block them. I’d love to see work done on having kids in the school all having a shared virtual environment (what we’d call a MUD back in the day eh?). Hell I want the same for an office - even today in a tech job I find that people want to pick up a phone (worst possible medium) or have a face to face meeting (good, but needs to be kept for important issues) than have a long running email or message board thread. People haven’t learnt to express themselves, or to innoculate themselves against flames and trolls.
The majority of employees out there are quite frankly unprepared for where the modern work environment should be going; and the solution is to hide things from our kids so they’re not prepared either (except through their personal lives - turning the environment into gossip and not constructive).
So there I sat having been told that studies show that TV stunts a child’s ability to focus; and I’m thinking “what about their ability to multitask? What you’re really saying is that schools can’t support multitaskers, just highly focused one taskers”. Looking back, experience agrees. I did well at school until it got really hard and I needed to focus deeply - I was used to multitasking. However, I did obscenely well up to that point because I could multitask. I’ve since taught myself how to focus deeply, but it’s multitasking that continues to be the increasingly valuable skill.
Side note… I remember a report that kids were getting better at multitasking. Maybe I blogged about it. The weird thing was that the report thought that was a bad thing. I was stunned. Kids need to multitask more; they’re adapting. What’s not adapting are the schools and the common wisdom.