How can kids build progressive agency with media? A book library is a good model for other forms of media to follow: they scan a collection, decide to take a single thing out from it, interact with it, return it, and consciously grow or shrink their collection. It's an act of shaping a thing that shapes you. It involves spatial memory. Consider how different this is from a kid in front of a screen with an endless feed of algorithmic cartoons shaping them. The whole wonder of a medium gets flattened. Streaming is our default, but is it worth building an analog media library of VHS/CD/DVD for kids?
There's a viral video of a teacher using AI in a Chinese classroom to help kids visualize their future self in their dream profession. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” One says “Astronaut,” and then behind them it shows them, all grown up, on the moon. I wonder what that does? Maybe it helps some kids stay motivated and achieve their goal? Or maybe it gets kids to cling. My dreams as a kid were very stupid. I wanted to be a professional baseball player. I also liked beavers. If I saw my immature vision in high-fidelity, might I have never grown up?
