Wrestling with the future: iPad edition

Today I was missing my daughter, so I decided to Skype with her on my phone. The phone has a camera which can record video, so I can talk to her, and if she gets bored I'll show her something besides my face. I take this for granted, but it is interesting to reflect that my "video phone" is actually just a regular phone on which I installed a third party application to enable two way video calls. It's a banal and marginal use for the device. Information technology is far more ubiquitous than the occasional video conference. Over at The Atlantic there's a piece up, The Touch-Screen Generation, which channels some of the moral panic sweeping across this nation. Some of this panic may be justified, but as noted in the article this is something we've all seen before, all the way back to Plato and his fellow travelers ...