On Telephones That Do Not Work
Sep. 16th, 2008 01:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerGlancing out of the kitchen window, I happened to see a child of about seven or eight walking past, talking earnestly into a mobile phone; and it occurred to me that when I was about seven or eight, it would have been a toy telephone (and not a mobile either), but that this one was almost certain to be a real, functional one. And I was overcome by a wave of sadness, not because I had never had a real telephone when I was seven or eight, but because this child had probably never had a toy one.
So great is our hurry to push, pull, drag, throw, bully and cajole children into adulthood these days that we give them all the things we have, and we make sure they work. I have seen little petrol-driven go-karts for the use of toddlers (under supervision, please gods), make-up sets for three-year-olds, computers for babies who have not learned to spell yet, and possibly never will. It can surely only be a matter of time before we start palming off our less pleasurable work on them, and then we will have come full circle; only instead of sending children down the pit or up the chimney, we will sell their eager parents the Kiddy Kall Centre, complete with real telephone on which real customers can call up and arrange their car insurance with Damien, aged six.
I had a car when I was a child. It was blue, and it worked by pedals, and I had a lot of fun with it, and I learned that one's speed is directly proportional to the effort one puts in, a valuable life lesson it took me a long time to unlearn. If it had had an engine, I would have been terrified; but even more disastrously, I would have been deprived of the fun of pretending it had an engine. I also had a toy telephone. It was red, and plastic, and in due course I took it apart and added ping pong balls and turned it into a robot as you do; but before that I had derived far more pleasure from pretending to talk to people on it than I could ever have got from actually talking to people. For one thing, the range of opportunities for conversation is so much wider when one is talking to oneself, on a telephone that does not work.
Similarly, I cannot help but think that if the parents in the excellent song "Mommy, Can I Have A Spaceship?" had presented their preschool child with a fully functioning interstellar probe vessel, the song would have ended rather differently, and possibly much sooner; and the child, if he survived, would very likely have gone to work in a bank instead. The benefits to be gained in childhood from games of "pretend" are too many and various to be listed here, but most of them may be summarised under one general head; the freedom to exercise the imagination to the full in the knowledge that one is safe from the consequences of one's mistakes.
These days are different, of course. No-one is safe, the hedges are heaving with paedophiles, and it is vitally important that a child should be able to call for help on a real phone, zoom off in a real Formula 1 racing car, or in the extreme blow away its assailant with a real Walther PPK. There is no time for games of "pretend." Life is real, life is earnest, and life starts when you learn to walk. The child I saw through the window was probably contacting her broker to adjust her investment portfolio in the light of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But I cannot escape the thought that she might have found it more pleasant, and possibly even more educational, if she had been talking to the man in the moon, on a telephone that did not work.
So great is our hurry to push, pull, drag, throw, bully and cajole children into adulthood these days that we give them all the things we have, and we make sure they work. I have seen little petrol-driven go-karts for the use of toddlers (under supervision, please gods), make-up sets for three-year-olds, computers for babies who have not learned to spell yet, and possibly never will. It can surely only be a matter of time before we start palming off our less pleasurable work on them, and then we will have come full circle; only instead of sending children down the pit or up the chimney, we will sell their eager parents the Kiddy Kall Centre, complete with real telephone on which real customers can call up and arrange their car insurance with Damien, aged six.
I had a car when I was a child. It was blue, and it worked by pedals, and I had a lot of fun with it, and I learned that one's speed is directly proportional to the effort one puts in, a valuable life lesson it took me a long time to unlearn. If it had had an engine, I would have been terrified; but even more disastrously, I would have been deprived of the fun of pretending it had an engine. I also had a toy telephone. It was red, and plastic, and in due course I took it apart and added ping pong balls and turned it into a robot as you do; but before that I had derived far more pleasure from pretending to talk to people on it than I could ever have got from actually talking to people. For one thing, the range of opportunities for conversation is so much wider when one is talking to oneself, on a telephone that does not work.
Similarly, I cannot help but think that if the parents in the excellent song "Mommy, Can I Have A Spaceship?" had presented their preschool child with a fully functioning interstellar probe vessel, the song would have ended rather differently, and possibly much sooner; and the child, if he survived, would very likely have gone to work in a bank instead. The benefits to be gained in childhood from games of "pretend" are too many and various to be listed here, but most of them may be summarised under one general head; the freedom to exercise the imagination to the full in the knowledge that one is safe from the consequences of one's mistakes.
These days are different, of course. No-one is safe, the hedges are heaving with paedophiles, and it is vitally important that a child should be able to call for help on a real phone, zoom off in a real Formula 1 racing car, or in the extreme blow away its assailant with a real Walther PPK. There is no time for games of "pretend." Life is real, life is earnest, and life starts when you learn to walk. The child I saw through the window was probably contacting her broker to adjust her investment portfolio in the light of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But I cannot escape the thought that she might have found it more pleasant, and possibly even more educational, if she had been talking to the man in the moon, on a telephone that did not work.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 11:29 am (UTC)On his first day at secondary school in Grantham (a 45 minute bus ride away) he couldn't find the bus stop, got so panicked that he lost his return ticket and took so long to figure out that he was in a hopeless situation needing adult intervention that he only *just* found a school-employed adult before they all left the site. If he'd left it another couple of minutes I have no idea how he would have contacted me as he didn't have money for a payphone...
We bought him a mobile phone the next day, and it's the best damn £14 I've spent on him.
£10 credit lasts six months, and over the course of the past year he has called to let me know that buses have broken down, drivers have been taken ill and routes cancelled. He has let me know when unscheduled rehearsals have taken place at school, and very usefully - what programme item he was in at Eastercon in a big hotel.
Once they have to travel any distance on their own, the lack of worry is worth the very small price.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 11:48 am (UTC)It isn't just kids, though. I've been apalled at the number of adults who are terrified about being out of touch for even a few hours these days. I've worked in places where mobile phones are not allowed (when the place is dealing with radio calibration etc. you don't get to operate your own radio transmitter!), and the complaints from some of the staff were horrendous. "I need to be callable by my wife!" Why, was she pregnant or ill or something? Not at all, they were just used to calling each other a dozen times every day during work hours! It wasn't as though there weren't other methods of getting in contact, every desk had a phone and in any emergency there would have been no problem calling the switchboard and getting put through.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 02:27 pm (UTC)I'm pleased to say that my trust has been repaid on this front.
And I don't think that being welded to a mobile phone is the fault of the technology - it's rudeness.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 04:25 pm (UTC)There must have been manner issues with other new technologies before - just think "cars vs horse carriages" and then the first telephones... but back then it took so long for a new technology to really spread and was for a looong time unavailable for the vast masses that the social manner codex had time to be imposed on people's behaviour. Now today one great new technology chases the other and society hasn't really had time yet to educate its slower and duller members who wouldn't pee into a corner publicly but haven't understood yet how to handle their mobiles.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 08:40 pm (UTC)