What Is the iPad Steve Jobs Wouldn’t Let His Own Kids Use Bringing to Ours?

In a Sunday article, New York Times reporter Nick Bilton said he once made an assumption and asked Jobs, “So, your kids must love the iPad?”

Jobs replied, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

What Is the iPad Steve Jobs Wouldn’t Let His Own Kids Use Bringing to Ours?

Smartphones are today’s indispensable, non-negotiable liberated zones. We’ve all grown so used to living there that, according to research carried out by Vodafone, we feel the need to check our smartphones 250 times a day on average. This is actually more than a habit; it is a state of addiction. Like a nightmare pressing down on our souls. You’re in your bed, you can sense the outside world, the sound of cars honking, a street vendor passing in front of the building, you can hear all of it, and even beyond hearing, as if your body had gained some new superpower, you can see what lies behind the walls, yet you cannot move. You are stuck in your bed and you can’t even lift your hand. You’re sure this isn’t a dream; what you hear, see and feel is more real than real, yet your soul isn’t strong enough to lift your body up. No matter how badly you want to, you can’t even raise your arm.

This is actually a perfectly natural state that all of us have surely experienced in childhood, known among people as the “karabasan” and scientifically called sleep paralysis. There is nothing to exaggerate or fear about it. The state that people in today’s world have so widely fallen into, however, does have something to exaggerate, to worry about, even to fear. This is a state beyond a habit or an addiction.

Humankind has always tended to get more with less effort. When you look at it, this is the very instinct that lies beneath today’s technology and that drove technology to where it is now. But technology has now reached such a point that it has gone beyond merely having the potential to threaten people’s lives. A study conducted in America shows very clearly how grave the issue has become. According to research by Project Wild Thing, the time spent outdoors has fallen by a full 50 percent in a single generation! A generation is growing up that has abandoned habits going back thousands of years and is inclined to recreate the world. You may think I’m exaggerating, but once you lift your head from your smartphone and look carefully around you, it won’t take you long to understand this.

Don’t take all of this to mean that I’m someone who finds the advance of technology harmful or evil. I met this magical world when I was 6, and I’ve been immersed in the internet ever since the days when the home phone was busy whenever you were connected. What I want to get at is not opposing or refusing to support all these new technologies, but the fact that these technologies have the potential to wipe out, in a very short time, human life, the shared culture built over thousands of years, traditions and the survival instinct. Imagine you’ve gone out to sea in a rowboat to fish with your child and your child falls into the water in an accident. How would you expect your child to behave? Of course, to thrash about with the survival instinct and make an effort to stay afloat. But what if, instead of thrashing and trying to stay above water, your child made no effort at all and accepted drowning from the very start? That’s when you’d panic and jump into the water to save your child. This may look like an extreme example, but it is exactly the situation we are in. Your child has fallen into the water and is making no effort to survive, but you are so busy that you don’t even notice!

Advancing technology has also radically changed our habits of accessing information. There’s a saying that has been around for years: the whole world is just a click away. You can reach any information you want in mere seconds. Got a problem? Just type it into Google. Or have a gadget that needs fixing but don’t know how? Just search on Youtube. But do we actually do these things? Do we access that treasure of knowledge humanity has built over thousands of years? Or do we instead prefer to consume shallow, bite-sized, worthless pop-culture content on our social media accounts?

None of what I’m saying is really an attack on the system. After all, humankind, which has managed for thousands of years to find solutions to every problem it has faced, even if by trial and error, will of course manage to find solutions to this one too. But the important point is that, during this trial-and-error process, the values humankind is willing to risk losing for the sake of winning, the trade-off it will make, lead to the conclusion that the future will not be at all the place we hoped for.

To sum up, we now live in a world where children are deemed as smart as the level they can pass on a tablet. A new generation is growing up that doesn’t think, doesn’t question, doesn’t generate ideas, and has grown used to consuming instead of producing, and this generation is very eager to tear down all the values humanity has carried to this day. So what can be done? How can this rising generation be encouraged to produce? In fact, this is not as easy as it looks, and it is not something that can be achieved with members of the old generation who can’t even master the communication tools the new generation uses. The people, ideologies and ideas that will encourage the new generation to produce will, once again, be created by individuals who emerge from within that new generation. Sadly, this can’t be done with professors who teach e-commerce but have never shopped online. What matters is creating opportunities for the new generation so that such people can emerge from within it, and building the infrastructure that will encourage them to read, research and generate new ideas.

You can follow me on Twitter: @MarketingHolmes