Top Hat
Anyone?
So have you voted
yet? Maybe you haven’t heard. Parker Brothers, makers of the game Monopoly are planning
on changing out one of the tokens you move around the board….apparently for
something more up to date (maybe a cell phone??). Anyway, apparently they want our opinion. I don’t know about you, but I always
preferred the dog or the top hat….I mean, who wants to be a thimble? Lots of folks I know have lots of memories
associated with the board game Monopoly…..some of whom only remember a bunch of
fights! You gotta admit, foreclosing on
your kid sister because they spent the night at your Boardwalk hotel doesn't go
over really well when she’s only 8.
But I remember lots of good times playing lots of
games together as kids. Inside we played
Monopoly, Sorry, checkers, canasta and put together jigsaw puzzles, just to
name a few. Of course, we played with
lots of other things, too….horses and soldiers and the like. We had fun, fights, winners, losers and
challenges for a rematch.
Educator and Parenting specialist, Stephen Glenn,
once pointed out some of the things that have shifted and been lost in our
society by how we handle children these days.
He talked about the difference in organized sports for kids, where they
are told by adults what all the rules are and how to play, and contrasted it to
the days of backyard baseball or stickball where the kids have to negotiate out
the rules amongst themselves. His
concern is that kids aren't learning the art of working out their own solutions
through negotiation and compromise. I
remember doing that kind of thing. In
our “ball field,” the ditch was represented the first base foul line, the maple
sapling out in the middle was second base, and we stepped off whatever we
thought was fair for the pitcher’s mound.
Today, of course, everything is already laid out, creativity and
compromise are not necessary.
So the other day, I was at a local restaurant that
is a “wifi hotspot,” where I saw a college couple sitting close together, each
with a small laptop or ipad, earplugs in their ears typing away. I interrupted long enough to say to the young
man, “Please tell me you aren't emailing each other.” He laughed, put his earplugs back in and went
back to whatever he was doing. But it
all has me wondering. Are we becoming a
society of people who have relationships with technology, and none with living
people? Or of relationships over the
internet, but none that require personal and face to face involvement? Have we become too used to the video games with
their established rules, secret codes that can help you get around the rules,
and interactions with either a machine or perhaps people we will never
meet? Even the social media is at a
distance. Have you ever noticed that a
text or email without vocal intonations and facial expressions can lead to
misinterpretations? Or how the Facebook
pages create and discard “friends” casually without any personal commitment or
cost?
Why do I bother to bring this up? Because I suspect one of these days somebody
will do a doctoral dissertation, or get federal funding to research the ways
our lack of personal interaction and negotiations as children has contributed
to a rising divorce rate. We are
becoming skilled at all sorts of things, but not at the kind of daily human
interaction that is necessary for a good marriage. I think there was something of value in
sitting with friends to decide whether or not your sister has to reroll the die
that fell on the floor. Or to have to
work out together who actually stepped on home plate first and whether the
player’s elbow should be called a foul in basketball or was purely
accidental. I like lots of things about
the opportunities all the changes are creating, such as connecting across a
greater geographic area so quickly. But
I also am saddened and concerned about some of the price we may be paying
because of the relationship and life skills we are neglecting along the
way. Not saying what it is, but do
believe it is worth thinking about. Just
my opinion. Oh, and I think they should
get rid of the race car….I never did very well when I had that piece anyway!
TL:DR Technology has value but don't let it cause you to loose important human contact.
