Have you checked the children?

Hello friends,

Sorry I could not post yesturday, the the blogger website was down everytime I tried to log on. So here is yesturday's post today.

This is the first generation of true multi-tasking.

Children and Teens are in the day and age of doing everything all at once.

Text messaging from their cell phones as they are playing video games on their computers, while listening to their I-Pod as they are doing homework.

They think differently and faster than we do.

They communicate faster than we do even when they speak. Short hand without the writing or short tongued.

And they learn quicker than we ever thought possible.

Remember the film Lawnmower Man ?

Many consider their daily habits to be detrimental as real communication will be lost when they get older and join the work force.

They don’t have a few real close friends and many acquaintances anymore but rather they have 100s if not 1000s of e-friends.

We are forced to sit back and see this new way of living, be it good or bad.

Of course this isn’t everyone on earth but it is an alarmingly large number of young people.

While I can’t say how this will affect our future, I’ll can tell you how it relates to the majority of new magician wanna bees over the age of 12.

I see it nearly everyday in our store. The internet breed. The ones who have no interest in seeing an effect demonstrated. These newbie’s bring in a list of what they want. And they want it now.

The items on their list are not the things we would normally suggest to a beginner. But these people are in a mindset to skip the early learning stages of magic. They don’t even know that effects like Nickels to Dimes, Ball & Vase and Color Changing Silks even exist and while we offer to show them to our friends, many of them are in a different mindset. This is not what they are interested in.

This Army of young performers is looking for the hardest things to learn and they want to learn them now. The truth is, while we would normally recommend starting slowly, more than 75% of them learn and master these knuckle busting moves in record time. It is astonishing.

They don’t want books. They want minimal props if any at all.

All they really want are DVDs and instant gratification for some of the toughest manipulations possible. This really shouldn’t be instant learning. The method, YES, the performance, NO. I still believe should be in many cases a slow learning process to get everything down to perfection is how it should be done. Yet I am continually surprised on how quickly they get it, all of it and keep coming back for more!

Have a look at what the youngsters are doing. It really is impressive. I bet a lot of them are more technically advanced than you are.

De'vo's Cobra Collection
De'vo's Cradle To Grave
De'vo's Xtreme Beginnerz
Capaso Casino's C4: CapCuts
3 volumes of Jeff McBride's The Art of Card Manipulation
3 volumes of Jeff McBride's World Class Manipulation
Eric Evans Secret Art of Coin Manipulation (With Jumbo Coins)

But a real problem still exists. All they absorb from the video is a Monkey See Monkey Do learning process. They do not learn how to entertain and interact with an audience let alone real people on top of that, and plenty of them can’t do a single card trick. All they want to learn are flourishes and not magic. My question is why?

Even still, give them credit for doing these amazing feats.

There is an exception as there always has been, some of these young masters are learning more, much more. It is a very impressive to see a 16 year old flawlessly master material by Shoot Ogawa Apollo Robbins. See Cultural Xchange & Cultural Xchange 2.

Thanks for reading.

Pete