I worry about the loss of focus in this new generation.  I'm afraid that a whole generation may have been sacrificed for the sale of technology and the profits from it.  I have mostly done business to business marketing in my past, but now the focus is on marketing to kids. I don't play video games, but the ones I have seen are all about continual chase scenes. What happens to an entire generation when they never reach the end?  When there is no sating of the chase? Are they ever sated in anything? The movies I have seen in the past ten years, ie. Mission Impossible, Superman, Spiderrman, etc., are all about continual chase scenes. I worry about this, because an entire generation is being raised on the latest technology and it is never enough.

In technology today, you have to upgrade whatever you have in six months to keep up with the Jones'.  It used to be that the parents had to keep up with appliances, cars, houses, etc.  But now your kids have more expensive equipment than your house does.  What happens if they don't have the latest?  One of my bosses from New York, before she had her first baby, was worried about it, and this was before anyone ( and everyone) had a cellphone.  We were talking about not letting them have everything they want, but she said 'What happens when all of their cousins, friends, etc. have the latest?'  Now that everyone has a cellphone, video game, etc., I don't know how parents do it!  It's much worse now than when we talked in 1991 (?).

I was raised on books, toys, playing outside, etc. Books have a beginning, a middle and an end.  Even if a book has several stories, as in Tanglewood Tales, each story has a beginning, middle and an end. At the end of each story, the reader is sated. I am told that Aristotle is the author of this type of story. I think that this has completely changed with the overuse of technology.

When we had a landline phone at home, if someone called and I was outside playing, they had to wait untiI I was finished to talk to me.  What happens to an entire generation who learns to talk to you now instead of  waiting until you are done with what you are doing?  What happens to focus?  How many kids had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) in 1970, before technology itself was the focus instead of how it could help your life? When I call my friends now, on a cellphone, I always ask them, 'What are you in the middle of?'  How many kids today would think of that?

In marketing, I always had more than one project going on at a time.  But on each project, one section of it was finished before I moved on to another project, ie. I was waiting on someone to edit a newsletter, or I was waiting on a department to edit my writing about their work, etc.  But it is still doing ONE thing at a time while you are waiting on the other project.  Now that the word multitasking has been taken to an extreme, and technology can do many things at once, everyone believes this is the best thing in every scenario.  What happens to focus?

I don't have kids, and I don't know what I would do if I did today.  But I am a marketer, and I do not stand behind irresponsible marketing.  I have long believed that it started happening when the shareholder became more important than the worker in this country.  The company has too many people to please, and that never works for too long.  If the shareholders' pockets keep being the most important thing, and 'new and improved' continues to be taken to an extreme, who steps up and worries about the focus of the next generation to run this country's?  And, if a CEO's ego is insatiable at a generation's expense, how will the new generation ever be sated?