This week I have converted the windows in my kitchen so that I can ask Google to open and close them.
Another thing that happened is - yesterday at breakfast I helped Imogen to fill in a worksheet for nursery. It was titled, All About Me, and it’s for the older children who will be leaving nursery and having their first day at school within a couple of weeks.
Imogen is three and isn’t going to school for at least a year so I don’t know why she was doing it.
Anyway, it was quite good: questions like, What’s your name, and What do you like to be called, What’s your Favourite Colour. Also, What do you Celebrate at home? Imogen writes too slowly so I filled that one in for her: Christmas, Birthdays, Easter Eggs.
Another of the questions was, What Technology can you access at home?
TV, Laptop, night vision webcam on a barren bird box, radiators that email daddy. Problem is it was quite a small box.
Just saying, “Google” is quite a good shortcut for all of it. And anyway all the time I wonder what my kids must think of Google. This is what Google is for them:
- There are boxes around and about with the same voice in them
- It does stuff like operating the lights, TV and windows
- Tells you the word for anything in French
- It’s okay to be very rude to it
So it’s the butler from a dystopian sci-fi. Except for kids it won’t seem sci-fi. Or dystopian. But there’s more:
- It plays any music you can think of
- It’s on mum and dad’s phones too
- Shows them a map in the car and tells them where to drive
- Welcomes us when we arrive home
- Can show pictures of anything, such as an egyptian mummy or a sea cucumber
- Daddy has meetings with it
Hard to get your head round, because what’s the word for that? It’s apps, a manufacturer, some services, a company, and every medium of information. There isn’t a good generic term for Google’s everyday role in our house - definitely not one that Imogen would find useful.
So Google is Google. Perhaps we should have put it in the box for what we celebrate at home.