Generation of Multitaskers

I wonder what the future might be like... In back to the future the pictures on the news paper moved and information changed on the moment, and it seems that with the latest technology books will be a thing of the past. I still think that the best way to read is with a book in your hands. But it's true that I’m just a guy from Venezuela with political control of money change and I can't buy freely books on Amazon or whatever because technology is not at all accessible. The thing is that I really wonder if in the future, taking out the economic issues that don’t allow everyone to have access to technology, people really would stop reading in paper and invest in iPads and Kindels and whatever engineers and creative technological geeks come up to make even wider the experience of reading.

The only thing that really concerns me about reading and the new experience of it is that it will be even harder to make children really learn how to read, and the children that have some sort of learning problem will even have to learn how to multitask in order to read an entire book. We ask ourselves why is it so hard that children’s this days sit down and pay attention, and some go to a pharmacist to prescribe something to make the kid survive a day in school paying attention, sitting down, but the complicated thing is that technology and progress are taking us to a less specific field of knowledge, to a sort of "know a little bit of everything" and learn more about the things you like, and the world is not moving towards children that concentrate on one thing, but on multitaskers that are in contact with everything and are not really paying attention to anything, unless you are really gifted and develop a sort of super learning skill that goes beyond the tool that is given to you.

I see the future in the present and the path that technology is taking and I confess that its really amazing, but also hard to process if you are not in perpetual contact with all this new stuff; the world and technology are becoming a perpetual revolution, nothing stays the same anymore, and our brains are almost forgetting what peace and quiet means. I wonder how education will be in the future, how we will be able to modernize the way we approach reality and the way we learn, how will the children adapt...Isn't that the goal of everyone standing in front of progress? Change and adaptation?

Even so, I'm here, sitting down, writing to the wind, and asking myself how will I have children and raise them to be calmed and multitaskers with a powerful tool like Nelson, Coupland, and Alice, because I want my children to be calmed and fun, and active, and smart, and a little geeks, but I feel that the world is becoming a constant bombarding of stuff very difficult to process...Everything is going fast and I don't want it to slow down...but it also gives me a little angst...

Maybe is right...Angst is the motor of the world, without it we would be dead...but what do I know?

In the mean time you could see what the hell am I talking about here:

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Peace!