I got back from San Francisco late last night, and I am ready to resume my Marx tutorial, but first, a story about my granddaughter. Athena is two and a half. She talks a blue streak, and is totally pulled together, but she is tiny -- standing tall, she doesn't even come up to my waist, and I am of what used to be called middling height. Yesterday morning, she came downstairs after she got up, dressed in a darling red and white bunny suit, carrying an oblong black object. "What is that, Athena?" I asked. "Daddy's IPad," she said. She proceeded to put it on the living room table, contemplate the array of Ap logos for a bit, and then select a monkey game -- an interactive puzzle game with a talking monkey who sets you a variety of puzzles and awards you stickers when you get them right, which you move with your finger onto a white sheet of paper -- all of this on the screen of the IPad. As I stood there mesmerized, looking down at Athena and the IPad, she proceeded to work her way through the entire game [obviously something she had done before.]
I mean, SHE IS TWO AND A HALF!!!!
By the time she is old enough to go to preschool, she will undoubtedly have an email address and an IPhone and lord knows what else.
It took me a week to learn how to use my IPad, and I am seventy-seven years old.
As Gwyneth Paltrow says, in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, the morning after her first night with Shakespeare, "It is a new world."
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I'll never forget a similar experience. We had just gotten our Apple Color Classic (look it up; it was brilliant). One evening I came down the hall to my bedroom/office. My 19 month old daughter was sitting at my desk, her hand which was raised up above her shoulder was scrolling the mouse across the mouse pad, and she was opening folders ad lib. When I walked in, she just happened to be in what Apple calls the System folder. I laughed so hard because it was so easy for her to navigate, but I also panicked. We had just moved from the C:// prompt prompt DOS system to Apple because, as the ads said, the GUI was so simple a 4 year old could use it.
The next day I bought something called "Kids Desk" which was a desktop with games on it for the kids and which prevented them from getting into substantive folders. My daughter is now in college, and we still laugh with her about that moment.
BTW: she's still a devoted Mac user.
Funny enough there was an ars technica article about this very phenomenon:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/01/preschoolers-better-at-navigating-iphone-than-tying-their-shoes.ars
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