My 2-year-old thinks all screens are touch-screens.

When we pause a DVD on the television, he walks over and taps the “paused” icon, assuming that the movie will start up again. When we visit the museum, he looks at the same video displays in the dinosaur exhibit that I enjoyed as a kid. But he ignores the navigation buttons below the monitor and taps frustrated on the glass while the “interactive” display fails to respond.

On the flip-side, he’s been able to unlock, navigate, and pretty-well use an iPod touch since he was a year old. He’s living in an age where iPhones and iPads have made all non-touch-capable screens seem antiquated and unintuitive. It seems like a bug of history that we invented rich content before we invented rich touch-capable interactions.