HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?


For any parent that allowed their children to have all the technology they wanted, their kids might just become walking, talking androids themselves. According to a Common Sense Media study, 38% of children under the age of two have used mobile devices for playing games, watching videos, or other media- related purposes. That wide-eyed stare into the digital realm only grows and expands as kids bound out into a tech.-saturated world with smartphones, tablets, video game consoles, FitBits, cars that talk back to us, and advertisements that play only when we walk by.


- 28%


But how much is too much? What’s the ideal balance between the digital and the tangible when we visit destinations? Should there not be a batery within a hundred miles, or should we be like Johnny Depp’s Will Caster character in this summer’s Transcendence: fully one with the network?


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What’s most surprising, however, are the perceptions of technology based on age. We would tend to think that our older visitors would not be too interested in technology, while the youth would be looking for every opportunity to snatch it up. In fact, nearly a third of respondents 55 years and older checked the third


29% c it migh


presented to them? Whatever the motivation, it might not be the teenagers you need to try and develop your technology for: it might be your parents.


pres 17% 26%


option – use technology to bring a story to life (the highest response rate to that option); and 33% of respondents 35- 54 years old chose the second option, to use technology to make things more convenient (once again, the highest response rate for that option). 18-34 year-olds were the most evenly divided with the first three options, and had the lowest-agreement rate with the final option, 16%, to use technology wherever possible.


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Could younger generations be experiencing technology overload, and seeking destinations as an escape? Or, being more immersed in technology day-in-day-out since


they were two-years-old, are they more critical and skeptical of the technologies


HOW MUCH IS TOo MUCH? When we asked guests in our study which


phrase best described their beliefs, the results were not too-surprisingly evenly spread.


26% I’d prefer attractions limit the use of technology. I am surrounded by technology every day and prefer to avoid it when I’m visiting leisure attractions.


29%  speed up lines and make a visit more convenient. However, I do not necessarily want technology used to enhance what’s educating or entertaining visitors.


28% I think the use of modern technology is good if it is used to help bring the experience to life and tell a better story. But I don’t like the gratuitous use of technology just for the sake of adding some modern element to an experience.


17% I’d prefer attractions use modern technology wherever they can. Technology makes attractions more  enhance the experience, I think it should be used.


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