Over Christmas, my mother landed on the commonly-expressed idea that “kids today” hardly talk to one another; instead, they spend their time “texting and emailing”. Is this really a problem? Is it, indeed, worse than when I was a kid in the 70s/80s? I’ll admit that some uses of technology are very isolating—computer games being a canonical example (though this is changing, for example with the Wii and online gaming, as explored in the last episode of Benjamin Woolley’s excellent Games Britannia series on the BBC over the last few weeks).
When I think back to my childhood, I had very little communication outwith school with other kids. I was a geeky, only child, lived on a street with very few other kids in the locality, with essentially no use of phone (indeed, no phone in the house until about 1985), and with comparatively few visits from schoolfriends (perhaps the occasional on-the-way-back-from school visit; but this was capped off very strictly by teatime, at which we all had to be back in our own homes). The ideal my mother was describing might have described her childhood—living in the middle of a newly-built row of council houses in the 40s and 50s, where most people on the street were families of a similar age; but, it certainly doesn’t match with my experience. I would have imagined that computer and mobile-phone technology would have vastly improved my communication as a child/teenager.