This is perfectly even mix of completely adorable and completely frightening. Adorable, because, well, it’s a baby being cute and infantile. Frightening because her mushy baby brain’s already been transformed by an iPad.
As the video’s anonymous creator notes, for this one-year-old girl, “A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work.” She tries to pinch, tap and zoom paper pages. And why not? If you’re exposed to a tablet interface that works as effortlessly as the iPad, why wouldn’t you expect the same from the real world? And that’s just it — an entire generation of human beings will grow up with touch interfaces, and screens of all kinds, as the real world. What’s paper to a screen, when you know nothing else? Defective. [BuzzFeed]
Matt
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:19 AMThe future of this planet does not look bright.
wsDK_II
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:41 AM+ 1
Scott
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:44 AMSeriously? We’re going to get a sense of foreboding and doom because an infant got confused between two similarly shaped colourful objects?
If she was five and weeping that the Marie Clair wasn’t opening Angry Birds, THEN we have to worry. Let’s keep a bit of perspective.
iceleron
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:51 AMThis isn’t anything to be worried about.
Look at any baby with a magazine or a brightly coloured book over the past 30 years and they will do exactly the same thing.
Ooh! Pretty, shiny shapes. *grab grab grab*
Baby’s don’t have the fine motor skills and cognitive abilities to do anything but grab aimlessly at the things they want.
Mike
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 3:20 PMexactly. This video is a classic example of seeing what you want to see.
You’re seriously saying the 1 YEAR OLD BABY knows how to pinch-to-zoom? Looked to me more like she was trying to pull a sticker off the page…
EMH
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:52 AMMy youngest son once asked me how you click on a button. Trouble is, the button was in a magazine photo of a screen. He was only 3 at the time.
TSH
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:53 AMI’ve said for a while that the generation born in the Information Age is living in a completely different world and although I wasn’t thinking specifically of this, this is what I meant.
I don’t think it’s frightening. Every generation is different to the last, and in successful societies each generation passes its developments down to the next as soon as possible. From the discovery of fire, to the establishment of a postal service and on to Information Age infrastructure, this is nothing new.
What may be new is that we *could* be looking at a shift away from the pattern where each generation uses more resources-per-head (power, land, water etc) than the last. IT, light and entertainment appears to be approaching this trend. Heating, transport and cooking have some way to go.
Martin
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:00 AMall that comes to mind is three words from the movie idiocracy…..”Ouch my balls!!!!” our love of gadgets is slowly making the general public stupid!!!! This kind of stuff really concerns me as I have a 4 month old at the moment and all I see is a world that is slowly taking away what it means to be a baby/toddler/child/kid these days.
peterbrocker
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:14 AMGadgets is what’s driving us forward. All I can see is a world that is being held back by the old generation that still want to print documents, and use pen and paper, etc. Get over it and move with the progress. We laugh at the cave man for using stones as tools. We will be laughing about pen and paper, etc in 10-20 years.
Drongo
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:35 AMI’m laughing now! I teach and had some students print their report for marking. I then had to transport these things, some of them in non-recyclable plastic sleeves. 1 to a page! How good is that! 1 more bit of plastic for every piece of single side printed paper. Just upload a PDF you cave children! I’ll make it clearer next time.
Jackson Bison
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:36 AMWill babies ever learn?
Next they’ll be playing with their dolls and teddies, having tea with them and talking to them like they’re human…!
Josh
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 12:08 PMBut the baby seems to not have any clue how to use either the iPad OR the magazine. At one point she touched her leg with her finger.
Touching stuff is a basic human action and is the reason the iPad was made, not the other way around.
Somebody back me up.
Just This Guy ...
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 3:48 PMConsider yourself well and truly backed up.
Show me a video of her using a touch device any better than that and maybe I’ll take a different view.
For now though, she just looks like any other toddler with something colorful and shiny to prod at.
warcroft
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 12:13 PMIm guessing you dont have kids.
Thats how each and every baby interacts with a magazine.
Womp
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 5:31 PMI´m not a parent but why would you give a child a $400 computer tablet?
It is 12 months old now, and has already been indoctrinated in computer usage, so must have started using tablet computers before it was 12 months old.
$400 is about half the cost of my first car. I don´t know maybe I am getting old and grumpy, but I think someone somewhere is spoiling a child with fancy toys.
JM
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 9:37 PMMy 3.5 year old has an iPad1 64GB 3G. She loves it. And no, I didn’t buy it for her, I got an iPad2 and she got the iPad1.
To kids, technology is normal. My daughter argued with the girl at day care because she refused to accept that the old toy phone they had was called a phone because there was a cord between the handset and the part with the buttons. She has never seen anything but a cordless phone or an iphone.
But I am not worried at all about technology changing kids worlds because my kids would give it all up for 10 minutes in the playground.