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> One interesting thing I noticed is my kids who have grown up with touchscreens think that everything is a touchscreen I've talked to teachers who said that t
by dx87 6y ago
> One interesting thing I noticed is my kids who have grown up with touchscreens think that everything is a touchscreen
I've talked to teachers who said that they've started seeing young children with picture books doing the zoom in/out pinching motion on pages.
- Romanulus 6y agoOuch... that's kind of bleakly sad. Reminds me of the video of a very inebriated old Polish man doing a breathalizer test who mistakenly takes a swig of the device (instead of blowing into it) and then promptly falling over. We are drunk on information.
- jdietrich 6y ago>Ouch... that's kind of bleakly sad. Early versions of iOS were rife with skeuomorphism. Is it sad that iBooks displayed your books on a wooden shelf and played page-turn animations that look like paper, or is it just an application of existing skills and knowledge to a different technology? Paper books are obsolete. Some people think that they aren't obsolete because they're using tiny low-res monitors or don't know how to use a document manager or haven't used an Apple Pencil, but digital text is just better. I don't care whether young people know what to do with a paper book, but I do care that they know how to interact effectively with text. I'm far more perturbed that schools waste countless person-hours teaching cursive handwriting, but most don't teach typing.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoPartial damage to a paper book leaves the rest of it functional. Partial damage to a digital book leaves it unable to boot.
- WalterSear 6y agoPartial damage to a paper book leaves you with a partially damaged book that costs as much time and money as a new one to replace. Restoring/downloading a new copy of a partial damaged digital book takes less time than it took me to type up this reply.
- jdietrich 6y agoIt's quite hard to back up a paper book.
- grugagag 6y agoBest features to paper books are the deep focus that they confer, the durability of the books, ability to scribble on them, make outlines. You can also share paper books with your friends or even sell them. Ebooks aren’t bad at all because of the portability but theres something we loose compared to traditional books.
- naavis 6y agoDespite both achieving roughly the same goals, I would argue that writing on a tangible piece of paper with a pen or a pencil is wholly different from writing on an electronic device with an electronic pen, and I suspect they stimulate different areas of the brain. I might be biased by growing up with paper, but writing on my iPad with an Apple Pencil makes me feel very different things compared to writing in my notebook. Paper is physical. I can rip paper, I can spread my paper notes on the floor, I can put them away and find them 30 years later etc. To me comparing writing on paper and writing on an iPad feels like comparing walking to travelling with an electric scooter. Yes, both take you from place A to place B, but they have very different implications and are very different experiences.
- Lammy 6y agoI think paper books are not obsolete because I don’t want to live in a future where every copy of a certain piece of information can disappear or be rewritten instantly.
- enobrev 6y agoI don't understand why it's sad. Isn't it an attempt at approaching new things with an understanding of previous interactions? Say you give a child a maraca, and s/he learns that s/he can shake the maraca to make noise. Then you hand a child a block, s/he is going to shake the block to see if it makes noise. The interesting bit and teachable moment is that these things have different features and properties and we interact with them differently, and thus we use them for different things. How does a touchscreen fall outside of that? I say this as a recent parent who is hesitant to introduce screens and approaching the subject carefully. Also, that video is hilarious, and it's clearly for the best that he's been pulled over.
- ajford 6y agoThis! So many people attribute this "failed attempt" to bad parenting or stunted development and fail to realize it is only the natural progression of development. Children (and adults) learn from their interactions with items, be it technology or not. Attempting to use "touchscreen behaviors" on something that isn't a touch interface is just another learning moment. They're attempting to use their knowledge and experiences to explore the world around them, as each generation did before us. We're just more connected than we ever were, so this behavior is now more noticeable due to that connectivity and sharing.
- grugagag 6y agoThe problem is the prolonged exposure to technology at a young age when they have to learn a myriad of other things. And the danger lies in how addictive these things are - needless to say a lot of things are designed that way. The technology is unevitable, my grandparents wrote on slates in school and our parents used to do caligraphy, etc. Tech changes, thats allright but because of its pace of acceleration some kids fall prey to other’s schemes to make money on their behalf.
- closetohome 6y agoExactly. The counterpart to this is walking up to a touchscreen credit card reader ten years ago and going "uhh..." while looking for physical buttons to push.
- juliend2 6y agoThey are just envisioning the future that is ahead of them. I remember the laugh of a guy in 2008 when I scrolled with my fingers on his blackberry's screen. Now I own a Blackberry KeyOne and it is a reality.
- dublin 6y agoThis was even true 15 years ago, when I was CTO for a startup that put displays on restaurant tabletops. Even back then (before the iPhone was even released), we saw that most users tried to touch the screen to control it! People reasonably expect all screens (especially any screen displaying information) to be touchscreens they can interact with. We need the hardware to catch up. Fortunately, newer technology now makes it possible to build large (up to 100 inches or more) touchscreens with no compromise.
- pak9rabid 6y agolol, I find myself doing this sometimes when looking through pages in regular magazines. It's almost like it's just become hardwired as an instinct.
- giomasce 6y agoI read a book I sometimes feel the need to grep it, just to realize that you cannot grep paper. Apparently I grew up on Linux shells instead of smartphones.