A light bright didn't cost me $400 bucks. A walkie talkie didn't cost me $100 plus an additional $50 a month. Phones and ipads do not breed much creativity.
I used to rock one of these back in high school. Some pager shop in Alief charged $4.95/mo for "air time"
Can't help but think of this... <a target='_blank' title='ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting' href='http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/200/l4t.png/'><img src='http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/7707/l4t.png' border='0'/></a><br>
With worse diets, a plateauing of life expectancy, growing class stratification, crushing national debt, skyrocketing education costs, a broken social security system, a broken healthcare system, and the evergrowing international power of the Chinese, I think kids today have it much worse than the people of my generation. How will their iPhones help them as the country devolves into a has-been nation like the European powers, the Ottoman Empire, or the Roman Empire did before them? I think the US will hold on long enough for me, but I worry for my children that they will live in a country that does not enjoy the economic, political, and international hegemony it does during my lifetime. Enjoy your iPhones now kids. It's all downhill from here.
My cousin who is 11 was talking to my oldest uncle a year ago. He was explaining to her how before we didn't carry our phones with us but they were attached to the wall or sat on tables. Also how they didn't have buttons but we had rotary dials, the word "dial" refers to disc with numbers and not a keypad. She looked perplexed and then asked him "If you didn't carry your phones how did you get to the Internet?"
Spoiled is a matter of opinion, but there has been a fundamental change in the way kids are seen in American society. Go ask your grandfather if his parents would have ever said something like "You have your whole life to work, just enjoy being a kid!" to him when he was a child. For the majority of human existence, children were a blessing not because people just loved to watch them grow up, but because they could work. Help in the fields, cook, clean the house, etc. That obviously shifted the last several generations, but even in the last two or three there's been a huge shift in "chores." When I was a child I had to do real chores around the house. Today kids are taught that keeping their room clean is a chore. The shift is that kids are put on a pedestal more now than ever before. Parents want to give them things, make them happy, make sure they enjoy life, etc. None of that is bad obviously, but is certainly different than the past.
Some kids are spoiled and some not. It's like that with every generation since the birth of capitalism.
I, for one, love the progress of technology and can't wait to see kids walk around with their supercomputers in their pockets in 20-30 years. Actually, I think the next big innovation is going to be Google Glass. Just a thought.
