So apparently Hollywood is more worried than ever about the future of movies. Kids everywhere are increasingly ignoring traditional forms of entertainment–no big surprise–and have increasingly short attention spans–again, no big surprise. The recent worry was boosted by the emergence of special camps in China for kids who are too addicted to the Internet. Many articles and posts have been written on this topic lately, including one in Variety last month, “Invasion of the Techie Tots.”
I have kids, their friends are around a lot, and I find it a bit difficult to believe that we’re reaching the end of an era. Can you imagine–children not captivated by movies? Sure, there’s only so much Hollywood can do to protect itself (and the realist in me assumes they aren’t going about it right, anyway), so parents have to get involved. But kids are kids. They always have had and always will have a built-in sense of wonder. They’re captivated, creative, sponges. They’re made that way, and as far as I know, the way kids are made hasn’t changed even as new technologies and modes of entertainment have been developed. It seems like in order to dull those inbred characteristics of wonder, you really have to lock a kid in a room on a daily basis with a computer and video games and an iPod Video.
But most kids aren’t raised in that grim of a setting. And giving them some positive influence isn’t really that much work. All any kid really needs is a bit of balance (sorry, you can’t play video games all afternoon), some encouragement (let’s finish this book before we start something else), and exposure to good books, music and movies. Her amazing imagination will do the rest.
A Wall Street Journal article over the weekend by Joe Morgenstern, titled “YouTube Youth,” summed up my thoughts rather nicely. I’ll end with this:
Market forces and the inexorable march of technology will determine what’s going to be seen on what sorts of screens in what settings. Still, we can help to assure the continued existence of a receptive audience by infecting our children and grandchildren with the movie bug. Doing so effectively, though, means knowing which battles can’t be won, and which ones needn’t be fought.
The enemy, in whatever medium, is incoherence along with its partner in crime, indiscriminateness. In this fevered media environment, kids need not only to be restricted in their access to commercial junk, but exposed to what will delight and nourish them–first to children’s literature, and then to our endlessly rich heritage of motion pictures.
Exposing them is all we can do; what happens next must be an article of faith. I’m certainly a congregant, though. I believe the same lures that hooked me on movies as a kid–the spectacle, the mystery, the roiling emotions and the suspense about what happens next–can hold their own against whatever enticements the new media may serve up. First, though, our techie tots must see the flickering light.
