When we found out a little over three months ago that I was pregnant, my husband and I, like any other first-time “millennial” parents-to-be today, delved head-first into the vast encyclopaedia of the internet to frantically educate ourselves as much as we could on all things ‘Baby’. Search engines were being penetrated at lightning speed for dos and don’ts from multiple devices.
While most of the pertinent questions are reserved for those frequent doctor visits, admittedly Google has become the go-to even before we have grabbed our car keys to head to the clinic. This is a constant topic of conflict between my mum and me. Belonging to the pre-millennial generation that was devoid of the internet and technology like app stores that now house pregnancy apps that provide you with pregnancy bulletins on a weekly basis before you have even got out of bed in the morning, my mother is understandably disdainful of our constant thirst for premature knowledge on the subject that leaves no room for the “element of surprise” or natural discovery.
My argument in favour of the availability of information and the easy access to it quite literally at our finger-tips today is met with scoff and a roll of the eyes, dripping with disapproval. It made me wonder: has the age of information and technology indeed become a double-edged sword? Have we by means of our greed to reach out for information so easily obtained from the device lying closest to us, diminished our sense of adventure, evaporating our sense of learning by living, and instead allowed the bait of information to be dangled before our eyes every second of every hour to make us complicit targets of technology?
It is, after all, this easy access to technology that has made my husband, who had zero knowledge about pregnancy and its nuances, a near expert in the kind of food I need to be eating and avoiding, surprising me every day with new revelations obtained by a new session of daily online reading. From the benefits of pasteurised cheese and hard cheeses as opposed to soft and unpasteurised
cheeses to the spices used in cooking and those that need to be quickly banished from our kitchen, he had them all. I was suddenly being overloaded with information. I felt I needed another app, perhaps to be able to store and memorise for the future.
It is this easy access to information that makes me tell my mum “I know already” every time she has a new piece of advice on the subject. Her answer to my question on how they managed in her time without the internet would simply be, “We listened to what our doctor advised and didn’t worry about the rest. We lived our lives.”
Our arguments continue but there is no denying that there can’t be an easy winner. Our thirst for instant knowledge quenches our fear of the unknown while the adventures of the unknown are what the older generations are advocating for us to try and hold on to.
While technology continues to make our millennial lives easier and has become a way of life for our generations and those that lie ahead, we must also try to hold on to some old-fashioned “off-line” adventures that allow for the element of surprise to continue to entertain our lives without being ousted by the ease of availability.
When people ask us if we know we are having a boy or a girl, we proudly declare that we do not know and we do not plan to find out. This is our way of balancing the boat. Of challenging the age of information just a little bit by holding on to the “offline” element of surprise. And yes, mum is finally pleased.
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