kids and technology

I know I'm getting older when I see news about how the Korean Office of Education is distributing leaflets on cellphone etiquette to elementary, junior high, and high schools. I didn't even have a cell phone in college and not until I was in grad school did I get a pager. Let's see, I started using cell phones around 1998, email around 1993, so a high school freshman now was born around the time mass email and cell phones were in use. I guess it's a similar cycle of events when I was born and TV was already in every home. I never knew a world without TV. Similarly, high schoolers never knew a world without cell phones, email, and the Internet.

I'm glad the Office of Education is trying to educate kids about etiquette. People (especially adults) need to be educated more about this, especially in public places like trains, buses, and streets. This must be a real challenge in a world where cellphones have multi-megapixel cameras, speech-to-text, mp3 players, digital satellite TV, GPS, etc. The guideline suggests ideas to prevent 'addiction' to cell phones, but if that's all they know, (just like TV was to my generation), is it considered an addiction, or is this a fact of life? This is current phenomena and not a future problem, but interesting to think about the future by looking back for a change.