Missing the old social ways

You look at the world today and what do you see compared to when you were a kid growing up?

I look at what my children have and see them missing out on the world outside. Sadly, today everything is at the tips of their fingers. Cellphones, internet, gaming and social media.

I remember the days when the streets were filled with children throughout the year, games of tag, kick the can, hide and seek, street hockey. We had treehouses, forts, highways of roads made in the sand for our cars. Girls built cakes with mud. Heck, even my sister used to roll around in the mud with her brand-new red winter suit late in the fall. Mom was not impressed.

In later years we saw the forbidden game of spin the bottle that turned us innocent kids into shy adolescents. I doubt this game has lost its place in society.

It is the ever-continuous battle between technology and parents in raising our children right. What was once a convenience for us to keep our children “busy” as we tried to keep them quiet turns out that they are now way too silent. We have now shown them quicker access to everything they can imagine.

As we all know, the cyberworld now provides the answers for every question that comes to mind. Homework queries are easily answered, a child’s question about the wonders of their world can be quickly looked up by a parent and given the right answer. I don’t know what life would be like in our home if we had internet. The kids get excited when we tell them we are going to Gookum’s to visit because they have wifi. Note to grandparents whose grandkids don’t visit enough, get wifi. It is more valuable than money now.

So how can one complain about their children when almost all of us are glued to our cells as well? Lately, when people visit each other, I can guarantee that one or two people will be glued to their phones scrolling some form of social media rather than enjoying the company around them. I can be guilty as charged as well. The best places I’ve visited were the ones with a bowl set is aside for visitors to drop their phones in so that everyone is able to enjoy the immediate company around them. Rare, but it is done.

The best times are those etched in your memory and not stashed in some “cloud” that will remind you about it every year or so. The image that comes to mind is the one showing five people watching a parade with four of them holding up their phones to capture the moment so they can “share” it with others. The one person who wasn’t recording it was an elderly woman capturing every detail of the moment with her very own eyes.

The art of verbal communication has almost disappeared, the visits to friends are dwindling, keeping of memories in a photo album are nearly nonexistent. Seriously, I haven’t seen anyone pull out a photo album in a long time.

Imagine if the townspeople all agreed to shut down the cell signal from the tower four or five hours every evening. That would mean all the gamers wouldn’t be able to connect to their outside gaming world, cellphone users would have no choice but to put their phones away, the children with their iPads would have no use for them without the internet on. There would be more visits, more face-to-face greetings and smiles. Parents would be able to go out and spend more time with the kids or finish building that shelf the wife wanted. But who am I kidding, right? We could never live that long without checking out or posting on our favourite social media page.