----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Hi Tamara --
It's a big responsibility to introduce technologies to a child!
part of their world, their mind and their experience - there is little distinction between self and other and rather a synthesised world emerges for them. Many of the children had a readiness to give up the 'I' of their selfhood in order to work collaboratively with the technology - it became part of their perceptual and e xperiential field, again suggesting integrated
This probably arises as a function of the need/tendency to play ('make believe') as a 'natural' extension of childhood/evolutionary learning strategies. And is perhaps quite independent of a particular 'technology'. 'Taking on' a contemporary technology is only 'different' in its degree of flow changing power...
When a child picks up an object and turns it into a 'make believe' toy or companion in play, it is quite a different intensity of process of picking up an ipad that is packed full of protocols that are subtly 'directing' the play. Those protocols, in their power to direct embodied energy (life!) are non-trivial, and I would suggest that in their subtlty, they are more problematic in their ability to 'direct' the social development of the the child than less complex technoogical devices. In the case you describe, the presence of "a larger avatar" to "encourage" the children to move "in creative ways" seemed to be a crucial point in the process. A less complex device, say a stick that is turned into a horse to ride, carries practically none of those techno-social protocols (some, still, to be sure, in the fact that for a child to do such a thing now, they would have to be exposed the concept of horse-back riding in some context!). In the case you were observing, the exitence of a dominant character directing their play is a wildly different process of play, imho... perhaps not even play at all, but simply another set of directed activities that our system is substituting for play on a broad scale for children generally.
Once the child adopts a techno-social protocol (in childhood) it will be a 'natural' extension of their awareness and 'being' (the fish-knowing-water situation). This dependence is both a benefit and a danger, depending on what level of techno-social system they are dependent on. I would suggest that our general level of dependency is becoming so complax and so beholden to 'hidden' actors who are creating and forming protocols of human relation as to be a huge risk to to continuance of wider civil society...
This partially because when we are dependent on a particular techno-social system (from childhood), when it fails, or when it is distorted by 'hidden' actors, we have no easy way to reset our relations in that system. (Example -- imaging in this finite world that electricity becomes hard to get, all the protocols of communication and so on becomes redundant for all of us...)
Just some morning musings... Cheers, JOhn -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
