Don't Take Me Seriously - Book - Page 256
This is app-surd
#HILDRENS OUTDOOR PLAY n GOES ONLINE
n a total resignation to handheld
handcuffing, an app was recently
created that children can use to help
them play outdoors.
Say what?!
Yep, the PlayOutdoors app was
supposedly developed under the
following directive:
“Nowadays children play
outdoors less and less, which
has big consequences on their
physical development and the
increasing number of obese children
worldwide. Children seem to know
fewer games than 10 years ago. In their
spare time, they play on their computers
or smartphones. Why not combine those
things?”
Yes! Let’s make 5-year-olds carry
phones with them everywhere they go.
And, aw shucks, let’s make some money
off the kids, while we are at it!
Come on now. Do kids really need an
app to show them how to play “Hide and
Seek” or “You’re It”?
Have we resigned ourselves to the fact
we are now raising automatons that have
no imagination at all? I mean, whatever
happened to the tradition of older kids
passing on game skills to younger kids
– and fudging the rules so that the older
kids always won? These were game skills
and life skills, people.
Jimmy: “Hold on, let me check the
app. Yes, it clearly says here, Butch, that
I
*IM 7ALKER
Don’t Take Me Seriously
double-bouncies are illegal.”
Butch: (as he crushes Jimmy’s
smartphone under his foot and folds his
fingers, one by one, into a fist) “I’ve got
five friends here that say you’re wrong.”
And, whatever happened to the
good-old games such as Red Rover, Eat
Dirt, Flaming Swords and Fishing with
Cherry Bombs? Will these be offered in
PlayOutdoors II? And, if they are, what
fun will these games be when Big Brother
is controlling every aspect of them. At
that point, play will become work, and it
will be a thing to avoid whenever possible
– as all work is.
Now, I will give the PlayOutdoors
creators all props for, I hope, genuinely
being concerned about getting kids
outside more. Well, that and the profit
thing, of course. But, my friends,
this is just silly. Creating an app for a
smartphone that will guide children
toward healthy physical activity in the
fresh air … is like … well, trapping the
fox in the henhouse. Or, to put it in more
current terms, it’s like helping Charlie
Sheen get his head right by providing him
“Goddesses” in coke-flavored bikinis.
And I am convinced it is a wrong
direction.
On the small end of the problem-scale
this will create, is the danger of these appfocused children running into trees or
into traffic while they are staring at their
screens. While they are staring into their
Video Link of the Week:
*IMMY +IMMELS @-OVIE 4HE -OVIE 6
T
he original “Movie: The Movie” created for “Jimmy Kimmel Live” picked up
some 40 million views online, so, as Jimmy says in his intro for this segment,
“When you have a big success in Hollywood, there’s only one reasonable thing you
can do … and that is cheapen it with a sequel.” Here is that sequel, with the help
of a number of Hollywood stars. Brilliantly ridiculous.
http://bit.ly/13Ri3Yc
| >>
WWW.CONNECTSCV.COM s FEB. 27 - MARCH 5, 2013
palms, they might get beaned with the
very balls they are studying.
And, at the large end of the problemscale, you’ve got phone apps (and their
creators) becoming your kids’ controlling
influence in all their free time. Pacifiers,
play instructors, buddies, babysitters and
tracking devices – heck, why spend any
time with your kids at all? There are apps
for that.
Phone app twanging: “Let’s have a
catch, Jimmy.”
In fact, the only creativity these apps
will allow – in fact, encourage – is
hacking. It is a given that kids will
always defy rules and restrictions, and are
attracted to anything “off limits.” In my
day we had juvenile delinquents smoking
in the alley and pulling the underwear
over your head. But in the next few
years the equivalent will be juvenile reprogrammers, who will hack existing apps
or create false ones to control other kids
and make them stick their own heads
into toilets.
Butch: “Well, Jimmy, the rules is the
rules.”
And, once kids are app-zapped on the
playground, he who controls the app,
controls the lunch money.
Yes, it’s a lesson in future reality, Mr.
Zuckerman, but let’s allow the kids to
have their innocence as long as possible.
Comment at jwalker@signalscv.com or at
http://Twitter.com/DontSeriously.
