70 GENIUS INTERVIEW Gaël Seydoux
AS A PARENT, YOU HAVE TO EDUCATE YOUR CHILDREN TO BE HUMAN BEINGS IN THE REAL WORLD
we don’t have a TV. We watch the films we want and we’re not polluted by the TV. My little six year old gets 20 minutes of TV time every three days. She takes that every time and I have to grab it back. My kids have been raised this way, so they still are in the real world, but they are completely immersed in the virtual world. When I find it difficult to find something on the internet, they show me the way and it’s natural for them. Me, I’m 53 years old, so I struggle a bit. That said, I think those two worlds are there. You can be something in the real world, you can be something in the virtual world. The new thing is that those two worlds collide all the time and they merge, they bridge. They are connected and they are close to each other. I think we are building technologies to bridge those two worlds. The virtual world also allows for immense possibilities. If you look at Google Street View and Google Earth, they’re basically replicas, digital twins, of the world. Today you can use these applications to navigate almost everywhere on the planet. I remember being in a place in London five years ago and couldn’t remember the name of a shop. So I used Google Earth
and went there virtually. I could see the front of the shop, I could read the name, I could get close and even see the schedule. I sent it to my son who was in London at the time saying ‘go to that shop. It’s open today until five’. FEED: Are there negative aspects to giving so much of our attention to the virtual world? GAËL SEYDOUX: The other side is that a lot of young people get attracted to this virtual world because the possibilities are immense and they can do whatever they want. They get hooked and they don’t leave it. You find young adults and even young children spending tens of hours a week on a game console or watching TV. So it’s a balance. As a parent, you have to educate your children to be human beings in the real world, as well as a human being in the virtual world. They need to understand that there are rules to how it works, that everything you do on Facebook or Google is tracked so they can push content to you, to be aware that when you search something the ads that pop up are related to your search. So then you use maybe another web browser.
IS THIS THE REAL LIFE? As kids spend more and more time in the virtual world, Seydoux believes they have to be prepared to judge differently
In the real world, I touch things, I feel things. Tomorrow I come back to a place, it’s still the same, but the virtual world is different. So you have to behave differently from the real world. And you have to educate your children to make them understand those differences, and how they need to behave. Then they can get the best out of it, because they are aware of what’s happening. Today, you can build an image of something that never existed. So our kids have to understand that they have to doubt what they see. In the real world, you hear people saying, ‘don’t believe everything
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