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...