Smart Phone, Smart Baby

A week and a half ago, I first activated my new smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy.  It has lived up to its name, reminding me on a regular basis that it's significantly smarter than I am.  Moreover, I'm often not smart enough to understand how to use it optimally.  I don't mind: I'm used to the people and machines around me understanding the world better than I do (as the single History major in a house full of people studying mostly the natural sciences, and as the only member of my family without either a Bachelor's or an advanced degree).  It's a big world, there are many forms of technology to master, so many disciplines to understand, so many worlds within worlds and specialties within specialties, that it's a little bit overwhelming at times.  It reminds me of a poem by a certain curmudgeonly Luddite:

Men say they know many things;

But lo! they have taken wings, —

The arts and sciences,

And a thousand appliances;

The wind that blows

Is all that any body knows.

 

There is someone I know who understands phones fairly well, and she's about twenty years younger than I am, give or take a few months.  Noveya, Eliana and Rav Ami's baby, is fascinated by phones.  She has learned to press them against her head, and say "hi," although I'm not exactly certain whether she knows that the phone is for communicating with other people over long distances.  She learned about phones before she learned her first three-syllable word (which was "Elana"), and she still hasn't quite figured out stairs, yet. (All of this is absolutely adorable, by the way, and everyone who meets Noveya immediately starts drooling over her.)

I've read that the first thing that the first thing that an infant learns is the five-finger pattern of the human hand (ironic, because the gene for six fingers is dominant, and what we think of as the "normal" allele is recessive).  I wonder what the next things learned are?  Noveya is the first baby I've been around regularly, and observing her growing, learning, and developing.  Some of the ways that she understands names and naming are fascinating, yet so obvious.  For a while, she called both parents "Mommy," or something close to that, probably because "Ami" and "Mommy" sound almost identical.  Now, she's learned to call them "Aba" and "Ama," getting closer.  She's learned Lani's and Judy's names, and called Ilan "baby" before, because that's what he says when he speaks to her.  Isn't that what a name is?  The word that we assign to a particular person, place, or thing, in order to indicate it to others?  And if that person always makes the same sound, wouldn't it be logical to assign that sound as it's verbal tag, i.e. its name?

Homo sapiens has been around for about 200,000 years, and might have been able to speak from its origin (don't quote me on that).  We all take speech for granted; of course normal, functioning babies will learn to speak.  We take plenty of other things for granted: permanent dwellings, mass-produced clothing, urban spaces, salt... Phones, at least in middle-class America?  I wonder what kind of technology Noveya's children will take for granted, and what the phones that they'll be holding next to their heads will look like?

~JD


"While the Champagne Campaign never captured the public’s imagination as D-Day did, it did signal the first time, and probably the only time, that gastronomic considerations had a direct bearing on military planning.  It was not by chance that French general Lucien de Monsabert, who helped plan the campaign, made sure that French troops advanced up the western side of the Rhône, where the best vineyards were planted.  The Americans went up the other side, where the lesser growths were" (Don and Petie Kladstrup, Wine and war: the French, the Nazis, and the battle for France's greatest treasure, 184).