Upwardly Evolving

And now I've joined up with a group studying the positive effects of the digital age on families. We're so excited to start researching about ways families can use the internet in a positive and useful way for family connectivity and growth within the family.

I keep meaning to post about another quote from my novel that I read for this class and I keep forgetting. Here is the blog entry about the first quote I shared. And this is another quote from the Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This is a hypothetical conversation between the two brothers. After the older brother has tucked his younger brother in bed, the younger brother goes off about how their lives are just a caricature of real life, just a skeleton of experience. How their current life still involves a lot of the same things as their old life, and 'The New Model' is just a cover. Maybe even a cover to help deal with the shock of their situation.  (They sometimes act out real family scenes, where the older brother takes on the angry Dad caricature who yells at the younger brother, the son caricature, to make life feel a little more real.) Anyway, the younger brother says:

Well, you think you're so open about stuff now, you believe that you and me are the New Model, that because of our circumstances, you can toss away all the old rules, can make it up as we go along. But at the same time, so far you've been very priggish and controlling, and for all your bluster you end up maintaining most of their customs, the rules imposed by our parents. Especially the secrecy. For instance, you hardly ever let my friends come over, because you don't want them to see how messy the house is, how we live.

They say they are the new model and try to not fit themselves into the old rules and habits of the old life. But they do it anyway. The older brother is frustrated that he cannot break out of the mold, the old model.
This might be a stretch in comparing it to the new digital age. But I think a lot of the time we get so excited about the new model of life, but somehow the old trash still gets brought up in an even faster pace in the new current model. Or maybe we try to apply old rules on the new model that don't exactly fit right and end up becoming a caricature of a system (almost laughable and unrealistic). Anyway, I think it is important to acknowledge that our lives in the digital age are very different from the past. But that some of the old rules and habits can still exist in this new life. That we have the digital tools at our fingertips to change our lives in a good way. We can't upset the whole system, but we can blend the old and the new to improve our lives. As David Eggers says (a few pages later), we

have an opportunity to do everything better —to carry on those traditions that made sense and to jettison those that didn't —which is something every parent has the chance to do, of course, to show up one's own parents, do everything better, to upwardly evolve from them...

So I'm excited to start working on this project. Through making a blog or a digital informative brochure we will be able to help parents blend the old and the new, and help them better understand the digital age. We will teach parents, so they can teach their children. We hope to help parents find the positive in the digital age.