Issue Date: June 17, 2001
A (micro)chip off the old block
That's my toddler -- and a whole generation -- teetering on the brink of evolution.
When I look at my son, Sam, who just turned 2, I see my wife. But when I watch him, it's like watching me.
Sam's not only cute as a button, he's adept with them, too -- as well as knobs, keyboards and mice. Sam suffers my same compulsive technological urges.
As you can imagine, our house is an electronic fantasyland (or wasteland -- depending on your point of view). We've got two of those newfangled TiVo digital video recorders, a home theater, a wired and wireless home network, five PCs, two Macs, two laptops, three Palms, a digital home music studio, three cordless phones, two digital cameras and sundry portable CD players, headphones, radios and other gadgets.
And believe it or not, Sam knows how to run just about every one. Though he tends to smear jelly on the discs, Sam's fully capable of starting and pausing his favorite DVD movies. He likes nothing better than seizing control of the remote and wreaking channel havoc until we tune in Teletubbies.
Sam loves my home office. He has his own computer and is even getting pretty good at using the mouse. He can spend 20 minutes (a lifetime in toddler time) captivated by computer games.
He can stand about five minutes of baseball on the TV in my office before turning it off. Instead, Sam dons a pair of wireless headphones, starts up the CD player and dances around the room. He can turn every component in my home studio on and off, and just loves pressing his stubby, sticky fingers into any button he can find.
It's no different in the garage. He demands to sit in the driver's seat, where he turns on and off the air conditioner, radio, hazard lights and windshield wipers. If he could get the key in the ignition, he'd probably drive away.
OK, I admit I am a proud father. Yes, I know other kids who love cars and can push a mouse around. But Sam's been immersed in technology since he was born. I think he'll be better equipped to operate in a wired world, simply because he's been surrounded by this stuff since birth.
Of course, every parent thinks his or her kid is really special -- and I'm no different. But I really do think technology immersion is altering the generation we're raising.
Through my job at TechTV, I've been talking with a lot of teenagers. And from where I sit, technology has changed them. It's not uncommon to see a teen watching TV, talking on the phone, chatting electronically simultaneously with three or four friends, reading a textbook, playing a computer game and listening to music. I can do two things at once pretty well -- like watching baseball and answering e-mail. Add a third, and my brain melts -- I end up watering the computer and throwing my keys in the trash.
Most computers today operate like my brain. They can juggle tasks, but work on just one at a time. But the next generation of home computers, like today's kids, can actually work on two or more tasks simultaneously. The computers incorporate more than one central processor to pull off this multitasking. Technology immersion, I'll bet, did it to our kids.
Although it might be frustrating, and a bit scary, to see your teens doing homework while juggling phones, computers and music, don't be too quick to judge. You could just be seeing evolution in action.
Homo sapiens has been stagnant for a while. Ever since we moved from hunter-gatherer to farmer, our evolutionary development has stalled. But now, I believe, evolution is on the march again.
Who's more fit for today's world? My multitasking Sam or pre-digital dummies like us? My money's on Sam and this next generation of digital divas. Their ability to adapt, process and interpret lots of simultaneous data streams makes them more suited to survive.
Of course, it is Father's Day, so that could just be the proud papa in me. But the more I watch Sam, and other kids, the more I'm convinced. In 100 years, perhaps Homo digitalis will replace Homo sapiens.
Contributing Editor Jim Louderback is editor of TechTV.
Photo by Gerry Gropp for USA WEEKEND
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