5 things my 4-year-old taught me about technology

One of the great things about being a parent is that you get to see how kids use technology. I have a 4 year-old daughter who loves to mess around with my phone, watch videos on YouTube and play Angry Birds.

It’s fun to watch her interact with these things, not only because she’s already better at some of the games than me. The really interesting stuff happens when stuff doesn’t work the way she expects it to, or when she finds ways to use tech that I hadn’t thought of. That’s when I get to learn how tech should work, and why some of my assumptions about it are wrong. That’s right, I’m a 35 year old journalist who has been covering tech for 15 years, getting schooled by a 4 year-old. And I’m loving it.

Here are five things my daughter taught me about tech:

Touch screens change the way we see the world

My daughter must have been two when we took her to a mall that had backlit billboards, advertising some movie that used what looked like icons as part of its title. She went up to it and started pressing and swiping things, fully expecting that something would happen. It was funny, but also very revealing.

I grew up with the command line, and gradually made the jump to graphical user interfaces. Both shaped the way I think about technology, the way I organize information and the way I interact with new types of devices. My daughter’s experience with technology is fundamentally different. She has never used a mouse, and still has trouble using the trackpad of my Macbook Pro.

Her experience is instead completely shaped by mobile devices with touch screens, which is why she naturally assumes that that any screen is a touch screen. Her view of the world is much more tactile, and she prefers to navigate surfaces to retrieve information instead of diving into nested structures. In short: She wants everything at her fingertips, which gives her a much more organic, immediate connection to technology.

Voice needs to be ubiquitous (or Siri is a huge deal)

"Search for penguins!"

I use a slightly older Android phone, the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide, which was released before Google added voice commands to much of Android. It includes a somewhat gimmicky “Genius button,” which offers voice-activated search for contacts, local businesses and web results. I showed it to my daughter, trying to impress her with searches for nearby ice cream shops. She loved it.

Then, a few days later, she used my phone to watch videos on YouTube, and started to scream: “Search for penguins! Search for penguins!” That’s when I understood that voice on mobile isn’t just something that helps to keep the eyes on the road when you try to pull up an address. It’s an essential part of the device.

We talk to our phone all the time – so it should understand us, and pull up some good penguin videos whenever we feel like it. At least on mobile devices, voice needs to be ubiquitous. Granted, some people may feel a little uncomfortable talking to Siri in public. But for the generation growing up now, it’s going to be weird not to talk to your phone. Why would you use a painful onscreen keyboard if it can hear us just fine?

Linear TV is dead

I’ve been writing about the future of television for years, but one of my biggest aha-moments came when my daughter watched TV at her grandparents a while back. She’s used to watching videos on YouTube and Netflix, (but her grandparents at that time only had basic cable. Guess what happened when her favorite show got interrupted by a commercial? She got mad. Really, really mad.

That’s when I understood that linear TV has no future. Sure, we’ve all used DVRs to free ourselves from the schedule of broadcast and cable channels, and online sources of content have added even more flexibility. But we also still remember the experience of passively consuming hours of TV without interruption, including ads and whatever was on next. Kids growing up today don’t have that experience, and TV is about watching what they want, when they want it.

Games are social

My daughter's favorite game: Bakery Story.

Okay, this one may be obvious to many, it it was still an eye opener for me: I’ve never been a big gamer, and I’ve been having a particularly hard time understanding casual gaming. I just don’t see the point of putting hours into maintaining a virtual farm. My daughter on the other hand is magically drawn to games that feel like work to me.

Her favorite: Bakery Story, a game that consists of managing a bakery and selling cake to people. It’s pretty challenging for her, but there’s one thing she really gets a kick out of: She can spend hours visiting other people’s bakeries, checking out what they have done to the place and what kind of pastries they’re offering to their customers. It’s like taking a peek into other people’s lives, much in the same way we look at the Facebook profiles of our friends – and to her, it’s much more rewarding than getting points in some traditional game where the score doesn’t matter to anyone but her.

The alive web will be huge

Here’s another thing that’s interesting about my daughter playing Bakery Story: Whenever she visits other people’s bakeries, she talks about “calling them.” And if you think a little bit about it, equating real-time social experiences with phone calls totally makes sense. We’ve been using Skype video calls a lot to keep her connected to relatives in Europe, so she is used to the fact that phone calls are becoming more and more about telepresence.

You don’t just call people to talk to them, you call people to share an experience, show them your room and generally spend some time together. That’s the very same idea that also has made Turntable.fm and Google’s Hangouts so popular. It’s not about connecting with intent and purpose, but about sharing real time experiences online. Services that tap into this need are going to be huge, and the generation growing up with them now will embrace them as a natural extension of the technology that surrounds them.

Want to learn more about the alive web and the way companies can design social and intelligent objects for future generations? Then ckeck out our Roadmap conference, which includes speakers like frog’s chief creative officer Mark Rolston and Dreamworks Animation CTO Ed Leonard.

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