This Is The NOW Generation!!!

Oh, how times used to seem so much simpler. (Insert angelic, sweet music for effect in your head). You were outside, with your neighborhood friends, playing in every one's yards, and not a care in the world. Video games? Psssh. Whatever. Maybe some of your cool friends had Nintendo and everyone played Duck Hunt or Mario Brothers from time to time. But it was so much more fun to play flash light tag in the dark outside. Catching fireflies, squashing them, and making your body glow is probably forever gone. Do kids even know what fireflies are these days?! It seems that less and less you see kids outside playing. Bikes are also ancient. Plus, there are too many flippin crazies running around, to top it off.
Did you know that today's generation is now considered to be 'the dumbest generation of all?' Isn't that great. My son was doomed when conceived. They are often too busy texting, instant messaging, watching weird You Tube videos or playing with iPod apps to have an old-fashioned sit down with their mom. And that, according to Emory professor Mark Bauerlein, who has tarred the iPod generation with the dumbest honors, is the problem.
While parents gripe about these electronic addictions, Bauerlein, who is author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, warns that these digital distractions whittle away at the intellect of teens and twenty-somethings and could also jeopardize their success in the workplace.
The times of today aren't called "Generation Now" for no reason. Isn't it apparent of kids of today are completely different when you were younger? Oh, do they know so much now. But they need to. Today, it would be hard to shelter your child and keep them innocent for too long. They can turn on the TV, or simply go to school for that matter, and learn all the things you don't want them to know about yet.
Here are a few lyrics from Black Eyed Peas-Generation Now:
I want money,
I want it-I want it
Fast Internet, stay connected in a jet
Wi-fi, podcast, Blasting out an SMS,
Text me and I'll text you back,
I want it, I want it NOW!
Since so much of young Americans’ communication is done electronically, they struggle with reading verbal cues. Maybe you can tolerate this, but the boss at your kid’s first job probably won’t.
“We live in a culture where young people — outfitted with phone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another — are ever less likely to develop the ’silent fluency’ that comes from face-to face interaction,” Bauerlein writes. “It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish…when it comes to their capacity to ‘read’ the behavior of others, they are all thumbs.”
It's pretty sad.