A clash of worlds

I’m in a quandary. I grew up in an era when the only games I played were in the physical world. Games like hide and seek when I was indoors (40-40 as we used to call it when outside), cops & robbers, cowboys & indians. Then the sports like football and cricket with the occasional, I mean, very occasional interruption when a car came driving down the road. Then there was the park, 10 minutes walk away, which I walked to on my own to hook up with friends, finding them in dens in the bushes as well as playing games of football, lasting, with no exaggeration, hours, involving dozens of youngsters, all of mixed ages.

I sit writing this on a laptop, having returned from a walk to the local park where a bottle bank is sited. I walked there with a  boy of 13 who found it more interesting to find Pokemon characters on a tablet, rather than take in the red kite flying no more than 40 feet above our heads. And now he finds it more interesting to play a game that involves shooting characters as I wait to play the card game Uno. I attach no blame to his behaviour (or mine!) as I know we will play other games later. In fact there has been a pause since I wrote the last sentence when we ate lunch. He made his tuna & salad cream mix, chopped several slices of cucumber on which he spread cream cheese and I asked him to turn off Spotify on the tablet. I explained that I prefer to either converse or be quiet whilst we ate. After I washed up, I realised why so I told him that I like to talk & listen to him because I like him. No big deal or major response required.

Ah yes, my quandary. After writing this, I realise I don’t have one. It’s a problem of navigation. Or rather, navigating my way through unfamiliar or largely forgotten territory where young people are concerned. I feel similar to the way that adults must have lamented the changing habit of watching TV for listening to radio. Yet the answer to both is the same: not either/or but as well as. And if I’m honest, there was of course another side to the ‘rosy glow’ memory of my younger days. This involved watching much TV or as much as I was able to watch then, especially as I entered my teenage years. I needed a balance of physical and virtual experiences then & it’s still required now. After all, what is reading a fiction book but a virtual, imaginative experience? Where things do seem different tho, is in the effect of the virtual world on our nervous systems, the resulting perception of ourselves & our immediate and wider environment. As Richard Louv in ‘Last Child in the Woods’ writes, ‘Nature calms the nervous system, creates focus and  excites the senses’. I’ve added the converse, that ‘The virtual world, excites the nervous system, scatters attention & dulls the senses’. Like anything, when it’s taken to excess. And a wider question, of course is: who is providing the options and choices of activities and are we consuming or creating?