21st Century Child
Long ago, when my first ever 35mm SLR camera became jammed after a trip to the beach, the camera mechanic who removed the offending grains of sand told me that he had disassembled every single part of the camera. Luckily it was insured! The important thing is ... I would never have attempted to dismantle the camera myself, simply because I had no real sense of where to start, how to proceed, and somehow bring that process to completion.
Similarly, our usage of technology is a step by step process - if we don’t understand the process it can become a labyrinthine experience.
A child of the 21st century can be involved with Information and Communication Technology very early in life. We may speak of 'natives', (those who grow up immersed in ICT), and 'immigrants', (those who have become initiated somewhat later in life), but whatever the age one begins to utilise computers, we should consider the need for a philosophy in our approach to this powerful technology.
A computer's 'Central Processing Unit' (CPU), processes information in pulses of electrical energy so fast that our comprehension struggles to grasp the idea. Much as the wings of a hummingbird filmed in slow motion, what if that processing power was slowed down from several billion pulses per second to a more tangible speed. What if we could physically observe the electro-magnetic process of change taking place whenever we use a CPU.
We could imagine the experience perhaps from above... as if in a city building at night looking down at the headlights of cars with the traffic turning this way and that, starting and stopping for intersections in the gridlocked streets. Rather more useful than watching city traffic, we gain an experiential understanding of what it means to harness such enormous processing power whenever we explore our sense of process.