Submitted for your approval, a child introduced to the iPad at a young age, exposed to its various delights of light and sound, unable to comprehend a magazine. The video shows that this 1-year-old baby, after being introduced to an iPad, has become trained by its (admittedly elegant) user interface to repeatedly try and use a glossy magazine the same way. Needless to say, it doesn’t work.
Of course, on one level this is cute, but on another, it could speak to the incredibly powerful way the technological innovations of the past 15 years or so will affect the next generation of human beings. We have generally thought of technology as being something hard to grasp and hard to teach, but this video seems to illustrate that that has fundamentally changed. Forever. Of course, as terrifyingly poetic as that explanation may seem, there’s way more to it than that.
Think about how much more intuitive an iPad is than a magazine from a purely sensory perspective. iPad: You touch it and it makes sounds and changes visually. Magazine: A series of colorful pages that, unless you have spent years learning a written language, appear as nothing more than a series of shapes and glyphs that don’t move when you touch them. Really, which sounds like it’d be easier for a baby to grasp?
There’s also the possibility that this kid could’ve been exposed to an iPad first, pure and simple. If you learn how to operate a nuclear reactor and then see a chair that looks sort of like a nuclear reactor, you aren’t going to try and sit in it. Doesn’t mean you’ll never understand chairs. You may have a strong opinion on whether or not a child that young should be exposed to an iPad before books — my experiences with Internet commenters lead me to believe many of you will — it’s still an interesting example of the usability of the iOS interface and the pervasiveness of increasingly complex technology. Sort of makes you wonder what a generation of kids raised around iPads are going to think about, well, everything.
Also: Aww, she thinks the magazine is an iPad, isn’t that cute?
(via The Next Web)
- Speaking of iPad use by children, Reading Rainbow is to be relaunched on iPad
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