{"id":57,"date":"2010-01-04T00:20:55","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T00:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=57"},"modified":"2010-05-07T23:46:19","modified_gmt":"2010-05-07T23:46:19","slug":"kids-today-kids-back-then","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=57","title":{"rendered":"Kids Today; Kids Back Then"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over Christmas, my mother landed on the commonly-expressed idea that &#8220;kids today&#8221; hardly talk to one another; instead, they spend their time &#8220;texting and emailing&#8221;. Is this really a problem? Is it, indeed, worse than when I was a kid in the 70s\/80s? I&#8217;ll admit that some uses of technology are very isolating\u2014computer 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&#8217;s excellent <em>Games Britannia<\/em> series on the BBC over the last few weeks).<\/p>\n<p>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 <em>in the house<\/em> 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 <em>her<\/em> childhood\u2014living 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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over Christmas, my mother landed on the commonly-expressed idea that &#8220;kids today&#8221; hardly talk to one another; instead, they spend their time &#8220;texting and emailing&#8221;. Is this really a problem? Is it, indeed, worse than when I was a kid in the 70s\/80s? I&#8217;ll admit that some uses of technology are very isolating\u2014computer games being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[22,5],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}