I cast my mind back to 2010 and my then three year old
daughter has woken me up. It’s too early and I need my sleep. In desperation to
grab a bit more dozing time she is given a mobile phone with various
educational games. This will keep her happy for a while. Her eyes dark around
the small screen as her fingertips tap and swipe. She performs various tasks
that will stimulate her mind and build neural pathways. I was as dubious then
as I am now by the benefits of early education, but these games cannot hurt. My
daughter is actively engaging in something. She is being proactive whereas I
will soon turn on the radio or the television and passively receive whatever
information happens to be available.
I was a child that grew up at the dawn of the fourth
terrestrial channel. It was also the era of the video cassette, personal home
computer and arcade games. With the romance of hindsight and that intoxicating
drug we call self-righteousness, it is very easy for me to say that we had the
perfect balance over today’s hedonistic, spoilt, overweight and unhealthy
wretched brood. We were the last and most representative of Douglas Coupland’s
Generation X and just followed the tail end of Andrew Collins’ “Where did it
all go Right” brigade. Our generation were the last to experience good
rebellious music as teenagers and the ones responsible for allowing our
children to be baptized in Don Tapscott’s digital ocean. We were also the first
to embrace large scale toy merchandizing alongside our traditional fairy tales.
Many of us cried when a giant robot was killed in a motion picture in order to
make way for a Christmas toy line. When we got to our adolescence we were
filled with a combination of righteous indignation whilst being simultaneously
softened by political correctness, which seemed set to ruin the childhood we
remembered, sanitizing it for those not yet into double figures. We were cynics
and sceptics, and we were also superficially sentimental. The science fiction
and fantasy of our youth now dominates the cinemas, which is barely enough to
distract us from the fact that we have been lapped by the Millennial
Generation.
