You can pick any restaurant anywhere, no matter the cuisine or niceness. Any is frequented by one particular blemish in our contemporary society, one that, upon sight, will trigger irritation for just about anyone.
It is the sight of a child sitting on the restaurant’s chair, legs folded in the most obnoxious way, hands irreversibly stuck on the sides of a screen, and their attention entirely imprisoned by the iPad.
Ipad kids are the frequent targets of ‘attack’ on the internet as more than a widely agreed upon issue, they also represent most of what’s wrong with how children behave and foreshadow the ominous future where human minds become mush and our dystopian High School required reading proves to be relevant.
More than just an annoying kid, the child you see sitting (if you could call it that) is the personification of everything wrong in contemporary society. This child will grow up without having any resemblance of original thought, literary capability, or social intelligence.
While the iPad kid may be scapegoated, is the problem the children or the people raising our children? Parents who stick a phone in the hands of a child begging for attention, teachers easing curriculum because times are changing. Now, kids aren’t interested in outdated books like The Odyssey. CEOs have been reaping the benefits of ‘Brain Rot’ because they discovered they could make a quick buck on the regression of human sociability. By dissecting the issue of the iPad kid, we expose several problems that scurry out, such as rats from a dirty, neglected cabinet.
Today, our connotation of the word media has drastically changed to something very negative, and why shouldn’t it when we look around and see biased news contorting the truth, movies poorly made with budgets far exceeding their worth, and 30-second videos draining the attention of everyday people?
Now, the standard of good entertainment and media is lowered, as most people are entertained by paint drying, so why should anyone bother to write anything good?
Human culture is threatened by the loss of creativity we’re facing. While it may seem that ‘everything has been done,so why try?’ this mindset is dangerous. Rather than a loss of new things to do, there is a loss of drive for what people could do and the passion to do it. If we want to see good movies in the theaters, someone needs to write them; then there needs to be someone to back the idea and several others to support the story and create a production. But when people tell you that being a literature major will put you working at a coffee shop for the rest of your life, and the Hollywood CEOs that say AI can write a script, or the general lack of enthusiasm for media as a whole aside from ‘GRWMs’ and ‘POV: ur a birkin mom,’ how is it that there’s a future for good media especially with younger generations growing up illiterate on cocomelon.
Now that a TikTok ban is on the horizon, one wonders if it will change how we consume media or if something else will just replace it. With fads’ short and fast lifespans these days, perhaps this is just our new way of life.
