Vacation with a Hologram?

On my lunch hour today I was catching up on Blogs of Note and I ran across an interesting post on the blog The Cougar Clause regarding texting. The post was written by Trista Daniell entitled The Reality of Student Communication: Sexting, Texting And Everything In Between. It was a really interesting post and if you get a chance you should go check it out.

One of the comments made on the post is what prompted me to write this post. The commenter states:

stoplivi said...

It is really sad when the youth of today can't seem to fully function without a cellphone around.
I'm surprised so many people I know can manage to actually put their phone down to study and whathaveyou.

My sister and I were discussing just the other day how much fun we used to have on long car trips with our parents because my dad used to tell us stories of his growing up in Mexico and my mom used to tell us stories of growing up with so many sisters and how they both met. We used to sing songs, our favorite always being "Sons of God" learned from our Catechism classes. We would read and fight with each other and do the slug bug game. We interacted and shared moments together.

I mentioned that kids today would never know how to do that as the minute they get into the car they either have the DVD on watching a movie or they have their earbuds on listening to music on their IPods or they are busy texting their friends and total strangers on their phones. They don't watch the scenery, they don't sing and laugh and play and fight with each other. The don't listen to their parents talking about all those interesting adult things that I loved to eavesdrop on.

So I told my sister that it's going to be even weirder for them when they become adults and take their kids on long car trips. Heck, they probably won't even have to take them. The kids will be able to sleep program themselves to stay home and they will send a hologram of themselves to go on those long drives.

We laughed and thought it was so true that that might actually happen, but seriously...it's not funny. If you stop to think about it our kids are missing out on time spent with us, their parents and/or their siblings. They're missing out on learning to socialize by actually speaking face to face with people and are much more comfortable texting or facebooking or tweeting. Many of them would prefer to spend hours on their phones and computers speaking with strangers than talking to their friends down the street.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm just an old fuddy-duddy and this kind of thinking comes from getting older; just like when my parents didn't understand the music we were listening to, or the hair styles we had. What do you think? Have you ever wondered about this? Those of you that have teenagers, do you see this going on? Those of you that have smaller children that don't have phones and computers yet, have you wondered how you're going to handle that? It's intersting to wonder about as it truly is A Brave New World!