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Toxic Wonder
We are surrounded by cell phones and social media, shouldn’t we know something about their power?
It started with the children. They were perfectly normal on the outside, but something inside of them had changed. They didn’t play with each other anymore, or at least in the way children had played together in earlier times. They didn’t roam the neighborhood on their bikes, or build forts, or take toys to visit their friends. They didn’t dress up their dolls, or turn over rocks to see what wriggled and crawled beneath the ancient stones. The world around them, it appeared, had ceased to spark their imagination.
The parents, often busy with work and other obligations, took little notice at first. Occasionally they would find a child with a cell phone in their hands but the episode was usually short-lived. The phones were boring, designed to place calls wirelessly, but that was about all they did.
Over time, the screens became bigger and brighter, and the limited dialing functions of the phone developed into a crude form of text messaging. If a child was patient and smart, he could create words and phrases that could be sent to another phone, or simply left on the screen for the owner of the phone to discover later.
Hi Mom, I love you!
Parents marveled at their children’s capacity to absorb and adapt to the new medium. The…
