On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?
By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.
He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.
On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”
When our oldest son and our grandson, who live in Prince William County, Va just south of DC, visit us on our farm, they seem to be totally unaware of their new environment and its rich opportunities for recreation.
Instead, both of them need uninterrupted access to our cable TV in order to watch mundane sitcoms and cartoons intended to baby-sit pre-school and elementary school children. The grandson will spend hours playing with a hand-held video game. The oldest son spends hours on the telephone having conversations with friends back in northern Virginia.
About three days into each visit, both of them are chronically bored and if the TV, video game or the telephone become unavailable or have to be ‘shared,’ they go into some form of ‘communications/game media withdrawal.’ And, they display the common , and often unsocial, behaviors of persons undergoing withdrawal from addictive activities.
The alternative activities that are so richly available on or within a few miles of our farm are apparently of no interest to them.
Within two hundred feet of our house is a first class trout stream, nearby a very popular resort lake with fishing, swimming and boating, the woods and fields are full of wild life, some of the most historic sites of the American Revolution are with in an hour’s drive, but it isn’t ‘city’ or the ‘ersatz suburbia’ of northern Virginia and they are not stimulated by it.
Their world is a very narrow ‘new world’ based upon the use technological developments and they seem to have no interest in any other sort of ‘world.’
And don’t even ask me if they read books!
Can I come for a visit?? I promise to leave the laptop at home.
Reply to #2.
Its is here and waiting for you to come and enjoy it.
You know, I had two of my young grandchildren here on my farm – 160 acres of space, woods field, streams – and all surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of acres where one can walk and walk and climb and camp and fish and I don’t know what – and all for for the taking. Nope. Gotta have Facebook and cells and elec games. Watching the beavers? What for? Moose, what moose? Who cares? Swimming in a big pool in a brook? Fly fishing? Ride a horse? Drive Alice (our atv – Alice Terrain Vehicle) over the logging roads? No dice. We tried, but they are dead to the real world. I am convinced now that this is a true addiction. Larry
And mind you, this is Maine! Even going to the coast, the surf, the rocks, the coves, the clammin’, the surf casting – all were failures.
I was at last frightened, in an odd way, because they seem isolated irreversibly. If salt has lost its saltiness….. well, what then? Larry