Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to BenWilson,
How does it look to them? I’m curious if this hyperconnectedness is something people born to it actually complain about.
This is a complicated question. Well, it's a complicated answer. Are they aware of the drawbacks? Some. Are they particularly worried about them? No. They have yet to have a potential employer go through their social media postings. We've had some issues with bullying which was over social media, but they don't associate that with the technology. Why would they? It's just like talking.
My feeling is that their expectation of privacy is much lower, and that's just the way it is.
But. My kids are also very tech-y, even for their age group. My son's obsessed with quantum computing. For my daughter, texting and social media help remove some of the communication barriers from her hearing impairment.
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to BenWilson,
Whilst older generations may have built the internet, I think X-generation can at least lay a claim to probably having built most of the World Wide Web, and I sure didn’t have me one of those back then.
My 18 year old son hangs out with us and our friends of a Saturday night, and plays board games and drinks gin with us and joins in our conversations. Last weekend we were talking about how, actually, it was our parents who were promised jet-packs, that old joke aside. Our futuristic literature promised us a bleak Cyberpunk dystopia, and boy have we been working on it. We asked Kieran what he'd been promised, and his immediate unconsidered reply was "VR".
His generation takes utterly for granted the increased connectivity the net brought me and Ben and our lot. That stops being a positive and is just impossible to imagine the lack of. He spends all his nights with his friends - on Skype. What they're having to grapple with is over-connectivity, the invasiveness, the lack of privacy. The permanent record of every dumb thing they've ever said or done. The same thing can look quite different depending on when you came in.
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Idiot Savant,
Obvious answer: because most of them aren’t legally allowed to. The law tells them at a crucial time that their political views don’t count. Is it any wonder they react accordingly?
Voting age is one of those things we need to be challenged on, because while it seems quite natural if you don't think about it, it's actually bloody hard to justify, particularly if you're actually talking to one of the people you'd have to tell you don't think they're responsible enough. "It's an arbitrary line. We have to draw it somewhere. Why not 17? Because... Shut up, that's why."
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Hebe,
I’m reposting because every part of this is Finn’s own work, his passion, his action that made it happen.
That's fantastic, Hebe.
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
Things are tough now but that is nothing new, what is new is the middle class, middle aged moaning about how everything has gone to the dogs but it isn’t their fault and they are reluctant to do anything about it.
Raymond, my mother was born in 1928. She got the Depression, and then World War II for her teenage years. That period was way rougher than anything my kids have encountered. But it stopped. And also, her parents went through it with her.
I'm talking about us creating an ongoing, long-term situation of pollution damage and resource scarcity, and leaving our kids to deal with the worst of it. This generation, for the first time, has a shorter life-expectancy than their parents.
And no. Middle-aged middle-class moaning isn't new either. It's been around as long as there's been a middle-class.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Russell Brown,
Fruit in curries was quite clearly a thing.
It's the consistency of the banana after being cooked for long enough to tenderise stewing steak that freaks me out. It might not be as bad as I imagine. Sometimes I contemplate cooking my way through this book, but I'm just too damn scared.
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I have my mother’s recipe book – the one into which she stuck clippings or copied out recipes for things she really fancied. And I really wish it had dates in it, because it’s a fascinating culinary record from someone who grew up in a farming family in the thirties and could remember the first time she used garlic. It goes back to at least the seventies, but I’m pretty sure further than that too.
There’s a recipe for kedgeree that has no seasoning in it. It’s just rice, egg and fish. At the start of the meat section there’s a recipe for “curry”, which is the British “stew with curry powder in it” version, and cooks for hours with coconut, sultanas, an apple and a banana in the stew.
Several pages further on, though, there is this recipe for “Indian Curry”, where the spice is actually fried.
So there’s that change, right between Chicken a la King, and a daring recipe for Ke Si Ming that involves a tin of beans and peas and a packet of chicken noodle soup.
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Hard News: The Internet Party, whatever happens, in reply to netcoach,
Colin King
Colin King’s screaming homophobia would make him an extremely unattractive proposition for the well-off youngish urban liberals who would seem to be the Internet Party’s natural demographic. And then there’s his negative charisma…
But then
Dotcom says the party is post-ideological
so… no policies, then?
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Dianne Khan,
They need to be able to solve problems, invent, analyse, discuss lucidly, adapt, work in varied situations, and be life-long learners.
This, so much. My kids don't need to memorise lists of facts: they have Google. They need to learn how to find and evaluate information. They need to learn how to learn, because nobody knows what they're going to need to learn through their adult lives.
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I was really surprised by the conclusion I’ve come to here, the photo I’ve ended up with. I nearly chose another, from the Wellington book launch, but it seemed weird because you could see one of my upper arms and there was no tattoo. Let’s call that an illustration of why this isn’t a photo of me as a child, and not “having no happy childhood memories”.
This was taken by Megan, at my Best Friend’s birthday, at Matterhorn in Wellington, which is one of my favourite places. Like a lot of my most cherished photos, it was taken in hideously low light and the company of alcohol. I’d had a fantastic couple of days, and I was enormously happy, which I think is evident. Also it reminds me of something another dear friend of mine once wrote:
…the grin she saved for special occasions that implied someone was going to have a lot of fun, and someone else was going to feel strangely compelled to stay despite it. “Hello. I’m Foxx. I like needles.” Briefly she paused as though reviewing that. “I meant Presents."
That grin.
