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Influence of technology on youth today

By – venkat sreyas yelisetty

Gone are the days that people picked up the phone to speak to their friends to find
out what is going on in their lives. Now we know in real time exactly what our friends
are doing, thanks to their Facebook status updates, Instagram stories and tweets. But
are young people losing the ability to hold a conversation? According to one high
school English teacher, yes. “My students don’t know how to have a conversation,”
Paul Barnwell writes in The Atlantic. He set his students a task that required them to
hold a conversation – to record a podcast discussing education issues. “Even with
plenty of practice, the task proved daunting to students,” he says. “I watched trial
runs of their podcasts frequently fall silent. Unless the student facilitator asked a
question, most kids were unable to converse effectively.”

But, as Barnwell points out, college and job interviews cannot be conducted via a
Smartphone, negotiations and discussions in the workplace need to be carried out
with a thoughtful presence and demonstrating their ability to think on their feet –
something that Barnwell’s junior English class (and, arguably, many others of the
same generation) would struggle with. Many parents know the dreaded feeling when
their child utters those words: “I’m bored.” Handing over the tablet or Smartphone for
another few minute’s peace is the easy option and keeps their child entertained. But,
Dr Vanessa Lapointe thinks that we should allow children to be bored more often. She
says: “Children need to sit in their own boredom for the world to become quite
enough that they can hear themselves. It is only when we are surrounded by nothing
that something comes alive on the inside.”She adds: “Children need to sit in the
nothingness of boredom in order to arrive at an understanding of who they are.”

Dr Lapointe challenges parents to let their children be bored “and then watch. Watch
as your child’s mind becomes quiet. Watch as their internal sense of self takes over.
Watch as their sense of being comes bubbling out of them and spills over into this
incredible energy to create and do and conquer. And then watch as they grow into
confident, capable, driven young people.” Research psychologist Max Blumberg
thinks that being constantly connected is reducing young people’s ability to think
about things on a deeper level.
He says: “The end result of all this, I think, is that you will become very reactive. You
won't be able to do deep thinking and you won't see things being built anymore. To
build a really cool company, like Virgin for example, Richard Branson needed a lot of
deep thinking and a lot of focus, which he couldn't have got if he had been always
connected.”He adds: “We’re already starting to see that the kids from richer
backgrounds are really restricted in the amount of TV and internet that they are
allowed to use because their parents who built these big companies know that that is
what is required to be able to achieve such things, so those kids are going to end up
building the big companies of the future. “And the kids from poorer backgrounds,
who are online all the time and have a very reactive brain, will end up being the
consumers and customers of the other kids' companies.

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