▶ Your Answer : While I am usually supportive towards technology and believe that it can help with children's education, I also have to concur that it seems to make them less creative. For one thing, I think that all the media children consume - YouTubers, TV shows, cartoons, SNS - puts them in a kind of frame of thought. Rather than making up stories and jokes on their own, they simply repeat what they have seen. Instead of finding things in an environment to play with, they depend on their parents' smartphones and are lost without it. There have been many ways for children to play in the past, such as hopscotch, stone skipping, jump roping, and countless variations thereof. When a group of children got together to do one thing but could not remember the rules or did not have the adequate space for it, they would simply make up something new on the spot. I'm not sure if children these days could do the same. Or they could, but there is no way for me to examine this, unless I purposefully take a group of kids and take away their technology. Besides, young children are prone to outside impact, and they may often form opinions based on the contents they watch and the people who make those contents, instead of making judgements by themselves. The shows they watch don't actually tell them what to think, but if, say, a child's favorite character acts a certain way, chances are that the child will imitate its behavior. In short, I think it takes away their ability to think for themselves. Another point is that I spend a lot of time online, and though I am not a child, even I find myself swayed by what is "trending". I started posting my drawings on the Internet some time ago, and found myself trying to draw images of whatever was gaining attention. Though now I am consciously trying to take myself away from this tendency, I still sometimes feel the want for attention and see others acting on it as well. And I assume it would be no different for children. If a child wanted positive attention from their friends, they would imitate whatever was popular with their group. Now, I don't have a lot of opinions on whether imitation itself is a god or bad thing. However, I do believe that it does not fit the meaning of creativity, which is the ability to form new or original ideas, or to make something that has not been conceived before. In short, I am of the opinion that although technology is not always bad, in some ways it can have negative impacts on a child's creativity. |