Realtime Child

Nicholas Carr wrote this very sarcastic blog (and yet not too far from reality) on the “central challenge of modern parenting”: how do you raise a kid who is well adjusted to the realtime environment?

Note that realtime is just a subset of the Internet: it refers only to those parts of the digital world in which we “live, work, love, and compete for the small bits of attention that, in the aggregate, define the success, or failure, of our days”. In other words, the status updates on sites/apps like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. As Carr says:

“If maladapted to realtime existence, these parents understand, their progeny will end up socially ostracized, with few friends and even fewer followers.”

An agitated young mother wrote to Carr asking:

“Can we even be said to be alive if our status updates go unread?”

Time for an update to Descartes famous proof of existence!

Carr points out that a newborn, in any case, is “immersed entirely in the “stream” of realtime alerts and stimuli”. So, he says, we just need to replace the biological womb with the “wi-fi and/or 3G womb” and bingo!

“Adaptation to the realtime environment will likely be seamless and complete.”

Of course, at some point every kid sees that “time may consist of something other than the immediate moment”. And that is the point of highest risk when “maladaption to realtime becomes a possibility”. The solution?

“Ensure that the realtime child is kept in a device-rich networked environment at all times.”

But it doesn’t end there. It is the realtime child’s parents’ responsibility to ensure that the child never has any time where he is not doing something with a networked device, because he then risks getting into an “introspective dream state”! But surely, a child will go outdoors and risk getting “corrupted”. The solution?

“A child be outfitted with portable electronic devices, including music players, smartphones, and gaming instruments, in order to ensure no break in the digital stream.”

Sound like a lot of work? Well, it has its rewards:

“One of the great joys of modern parenthood is documenting your realtime infant’s or toddler’s special moments through texts, tweets, posts, uploaded photos, and YouTube clips.”

Now ain’t that the truth?