The Dolmio Pepper-Hacker Adverts

The Dolmio Pepper Hacker

My husband has just had one of these adverts pop up in between a game on an app he was playing (on his IPad) and thought it would be beneficial for me to include as part of my research, as it relates directly to the subject area of my Body of Work project. A quick You Tube search has given me more than a few results but it is worth me embedding these two adverts here as they have both been uploaded by Dolmio to their YouTube page - using their pepper hacker device. This device is a pepper shaker with a click button on top which, when pressed, blocks Wifi signal to all the devices currently using it.

The video above has been entitled 'THE LOOK UP EXPERIMENT" by Dolmio and involves a series of swaps to the family and room around the children engrossed in their devices at the dinner table. From switching flowers to ones of a different colour, switching paintings on the wall and then actually swapping family members for other random people, the experiment shows that these children are so consumed by their devices that they do not even look up and notice any of the changes until the pepper hacker is pressed and the signal is lost. It is only then that the children notice that they are sat at a table of random people.

This second video is also by Dolmio, introducing the pepper hacker and posted back in March 2015. The video is slightly different to the first in that the first video is more staged and set up. However, this video shows normal households and how, as it has been entitled, technology has taken over dinner time. The video, again a split screen showing four different households, begins showing how people will sit around the dinner table eating and using devices at the same time and how children need to be called several times before they will leave their devices/computers and come to the dinner table. As the pepper hacker is introduced and explained, the videos shows the mums twisting this device to switch off all electrical signals and also they children's reactions to having them turned off. But then, after the initial tantrums, the video ends with dinner time being restored to a family occasion without devices creating separation between the family members.

I feel that these videos are very important and relatable so many families today. In my home, dinner time is the only time that we will be all sat together, where we can converse about our days and where technology is not allowed. These videos show the distraction that this technology does have on the family dynamic. It also relates to the article in the Guardian in my previous post as to why parents are getting angry. This shows that children do not come immediately when called if they are on devices, whether its due to them not hearing being called or just not wanting to leave at that moment. My children are exactly the same. 

"Can I just finish this race first?","One sec Mum!" and ten minutes later they are still not ready and this is where the parents get frustrated as they are constantly waiting and getting annoyed that they are not doing as they are told. 

I understand that this is how technology is now and looking how fast it has progressed, even over the last ten years, its easy to see that it will only progress more. I only had the conversation with my kids this morning about how lucky they are to be able to have numerous children's tv channels, or even numerous tv channels period. How we didn't have the ability to pause the tv so we didn't miss our favourite tv show, or how we would miss the first 10 minutes of a film or song on the tv/radio that we didn't know was on and had to take that long to find a cassette and get it ready to be able to press record. But where we think it is a privilege for them, we have to think that this is their "norm and we have to think about how technology will change by the time they have children. I'm sure they will have the same conversations with their kids too, I know that my Mum had it with me. But it is important in the family dynamic to have rules and boundaries when it come to technology. There needs to be time set aside for family and interaction away from mobiles and IPads.