to make up for the real estate intrusion.
I talked to my son the other day and he told me that Supergirl has mastered their rather complicated TV setup - they have a nice flatscreen TV and basic cable, and stream Netflix via the blueray player, and I found it confusing to operate the first couple of times. (In my defense, the router was acting up and I had to restart it to get Netflix to work.) No more fears on that - Supergirl has mastered the TV setup at TWO.
He was home with her the other day and got busy doing something when she wanted to watch TV - he told her to wait a minute, he'd help her. He found her on the couch, watching Babar - she'd turned on the TV and navigated to the basic cable set-up AND found the PBS Kids channel. I really AM going to get her to program my next cell phone.
Oh, and he taught her that the Blue-ray player and the TV don't always sync up right, and the first thing to try is turning them off and turning them on again. So he was having trouble with the TV, and the little voice piped up from the floor, "Daddy, turn it off and turn it on again!" She turned two last month.
But none of this 'stuff' is NEW to Supergirl and her cohort, it just IS.
ReplyDeleteYou are old enough to remember what a telephone was - a lump of black bakelite tethered to the wall. I am old enough to remember using one of those 'upright' telephones, like a black daffodil. We only 'upgraded' to the bakelite lump when we moved house in 1957. I was 12 years old when TV started in Oz - we hired a set for the duration of the Melbourne Olympics.
We just bought a second TV last week, and the darned thing TUNED ITSELF to the local channels, no need to borrow an 8 yo boy......
I can remember not being allowed to play records on the gramophone, because I might damage the needle.
Any infant can use an I-pod, apparently by instinct.
Gae, in Callala Bay
Gae, I swear it's true - it's like an evolutionary shift has happened and babies are born instinctively understanding this stuff. This child is TWO and can operate a fairly complex TV setup - not just turn on and click until you see Elmo.
ReplyDeleteI can remember not being allowed to use my mother's beloved big console stereo unsupervised, and when my son was an infant we had a kitchen phone with an extra long cord so I could reach all over the room while on the phone and thought that was awesome! I remember when TVs came with remote controls and that was sooo cool!
Remember the 'remotes' that weren't? because they were connected to the TV by a cord, which was a decent trip hazard right there!!
ReplyDeleteI don't think evolution has sped up, it is still a case of 'monkey see, monkey do', which just shows what awesome learning capacity is in our heads from the beginning. At that age they are watching and recording all the time, just as they have always done.
Just consider, we have existed since a time when the fastest pace for a human was a strong healthy male's best running speed. Yet most of us are capable of controlling a motorised vehicle, in traffic, at unimaginable speeds (in our distant ancestor's opinion!) And most of us think nothing of it, and most of us survive it.
We still have no real idea of the awsome power of the computer between our ears.
Gae, in Callala Bay
You express this better than I did! I didn't mean that an actual OMG evolutionary shift has happened and brains are physically different, but that brains are getting imprinted with more information earlier and using it earlier than the previous generation.
ReplyDeleteI do think that the stuff my granddaughters are exposed to is way more complicated than their parents' era, and certainly far more than mine - but to them, it's just life, and my two year old granddaughter takes the basic cable/streaming Netflix setup as just how that thing that brings Elmo and Babar works. It doesn't occur to her to overthink it or be intimidated, and she can't really break it by trying. That's a shift that happened in her parents' generation - that more relaxed attitude about technology that allows a 2 year old to figure out how to find PBS Kids.
I was born in '62 and when I was a little girl, my dad used me for the remote. I also had to adjust the rabbit ears while he sat on the couch and coached me---"That's it Shorty; just a little more to the right." When the young folks I worked with made fun of me not being able to work the cordless phone in our office, I would ask how many of them knew how to drive a car with a standard transmission. The answer was none, even among the young guys.
ReplyDeleteBrenda in Iowa
I have been thinking about this 'precocity' of small children for a long time:
ReplyDeleteSoon after domestic microwave ovens became available here, we got one, and I was still working out what worked best.
Visited a friend with a toddler, and while we were chatting in her kitchen, in toddled Simone, took her mug out of the cupboard, got the milk carton out of the fridge, carefully poured, and then toddled to the m'wave, popped the mug in, and confidently pressed the appropriate buttons.
I cannot remember exactly how old she was at the time, but I do remember my jaw dropping as I watched her! She had been told to stir the milk before drinking to disperse any possible 'hot spots' which she did......
This incident really did set off a train of thought for me.
Gae, in Callala Bay
Brenda's got something there - it's a different skill set, but the process is the same. I can drive a stick shift and used to be able to swap out the tubes in the TV to make repairs, but I never learned to cook on a wood stove or hitch a horse to a wagon. You grow up learning to use the technology of the times I guess.
ReplyDeleteAs to the real estate questions - I think it's interesting to hear about a field I am not in myself.