[ExI] toys rewiring kids' brains

[Mike Dougherty]

On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 11:21 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> were supposed to build.  We invented stuff.  We could stay busy for hours
> just building random things of lego blocks.  Now, they follow as specific
> instruction set, and end up with a closed-ended finished product, with a lot
> of very specific pieces, rather than about a dozen or so generic blocks.
>
> task is to extrapolate what happens when kids who grew up with these kinds
> of highly specific toys do in the real world, where everything is
> accomplished by following a specified and well-documented path to success
> with little room for deviation.

Remember when dolls and action figures spoke in our own voices?  We
used to think-up contextually-relevant things on our own.  Now those
toys say any number of vapid catch phrases from the marketing vehicles
(er.. "movies") that made kids want them.

One extreme example of this that I saw is new talking Furbies, and
their furbish dictionary [1].  You know what might be more useful than
sidetracking a child's language development into a nonsensical,
literal Toy language?  Make the damn thing speak a real language like
Spanish, French, German, Dutch, or less Euro-centric such as Mandarin.
 I'm sure all of you can extrapolate from this seed-rant... so there's
no need for me to continue.  :)

[1] http://www.furby.com/en_US/furbish-dictionary