I remember being in late elementary school when email and chat rooms first became common.
One morning before school I was in an AOL room and chatted with someone from New York. At the time it blew my mind. So impactful I still remember the sense of wonder — before this, you had to pay to call someone outside your area code. I had never met anyone from New York, but suddenly I was talking to them before school! As someone in Alabama, it def had a cool factor.
Fast forward to today. This morning before school my 4 year did a zoom with her video penpal in Shanghai. She will have no moment of “wow we can talk to anyone” because for her it has always been true. Her worldview has emerged intertwined with interconnectivity. And not just with people, but also ideas. She knows how to ask chatGPT to explain something to a 6 year old “I’m a baby big kid! I’m 4 but it tells me like I’m 6!” She thinks robots are normal, that it’s common to take multiple flights a year (our family is far); she has no concept of being limited to your local geographic area. She has used voice dictation to vibecode not one but two websites, though I’m glad to say only one of them has fart sounds. You may wonder, are we chronically online? It’s coldAF in Boston so last week we shoveled an outdoor scenic ice skating path on a lake. Yesterday we had a snowball fight. The online affliction is perhaps not chronic, at this stage just a bit of connection infection. I imagine what the world will be like by the time she’s 8. Or 10 Or 15. Or 40, like I am. These kids are being raised seemingly centuries ahead than the way that I was. Last night we were reading from “So you think you’ve got it bad - day in a kids life in Mideval era” just a few hundred years ago civilization was barely that. Today we eat like kings, travel like great explorers, and learn like gods. This generation must be the greatest. I hope I can live to be very old so I can see how far they go!