Technology grows rapidly and sometimes we have a hard time keeping up with the new gadgets and trinkets.
We live in a time where free thinking and ideas is at it’s peak. With Internets partial anonymity, we can express ourselves freely. The upcoming generation is sadly taking that gift for granted.
My full time job is to create digital dolls for a younger audience to appreciate and play while visiting the enchanted world wide web. I compare this upcoming generation with my own a lot. What I mostly see amongst our audience are children running ramped with technology because of their parents feeling inadequate into handling or limiting technologies exposure twards their children. I do constant research about handling children in technology, that way I can perform my job better.
What I was mostly curious about is how this exposure of online communities and technological toys effect the brain development of the upcoming generation. Because lets face it, when we are old and grey, the children of today will run the world of tomorrow and personally, I want to know what type of culture we’ve developed that will take care of us when we become useless.
According to studies done by the brain-mapping expert Professor Ryuta Kawashima at Tohoku University in japan. It has been revealed that video games and computer games only effect and stimulate the part of the brain that influence vision and movement.
So basically, for those who told me that gaming made them more sophisticated, well…HAH!!
[B]Tracy McVeight (Education editor at observer.guardian.co.uk) writes:[/B]
[I]Computer games are creating a dumbed-down generation of children far more disposed to violence than their parents, according to a controversial new study.
“The tendency to lose control is not due to children absorbing the aggression involved in the computer game itself, as previous researchers have suggested, but rather to the damage done by stunting the developing mind. “[/I]
Personally I think that there needs to be an inistiavite involvement by the guardian of a young gamer (4-13 years). With a vast online culture influencing young minds, the guardian need to educate themselves about social behaviour online. For me an online society is no different then real life. If you are 10, and start cursing out a 30 year old, you will have your pants pulled down and get a belt to the bottom. Also guardians need to be aware of what video games and the online social culture does to a young persons brain development. So if videogames stimulates vision and movement, then start involving the child into activities that stimulate the rest of the brain.
Since most likely a lot of young gamers lack stimulation and exercise for other important brain functions, it will influence their behaviour on and off line.
The frontal lobe steers the behaviour of the individual and keeps developing till the age of 20. Stimulating the frontal lobe is of the most importance, because without proper nourishment, a person will grow up with anti-social tendencies and wont be able to adapt to the world outside of the Internet.
As we all run into young gamers that don’t see to have any respect to their elders, and do not hesitate to sacrum to name calling. The reason for that is that they’ve spent to much playing games without limited if any nourishing the frontal lobe brain function. It’s not about them being rude, they just simply [B]”don’t know better”.[/B]
My fear is how this will effect the upcoming generations as a lot of guardians are unaware or unwilling to sit down and read about how the online life/video gaming effect the brain development of their children.
[I]
“The importance of this discovery cannot be underestimated,” Kawashima told The Observer .
‘There is a problem we will have with a new generation of children – who play computer games – that we have never seen before.
‘The implications are very serious for an increasingly violent society and these students will be doing more and more bad things if they are playing games and not doing other things like reading aloud or learning arithmetic.'”[/I]
Kawashima, visiting the UK to speak at this weekend’s annual conference of the private learning programme Kumon Educational UK, said the message to parents was clear.
[I]”Children need to be encouraged to learn basic reading and writing, of course, “he said. “But the other thing is to ask them to play outside with other children and interact and to communicate with others as much as possible. This is how they will develop, retain their creativity and become good people.”[/I]
So next time you run into a young person playing an online game, and that person starts acting up, don’t just boot them, inform them that what they are doing is wrong and it’s not acceptable.
Anjo Banjo on Gaming Life Love and Art 