This week, I walked past a shop with a come-hither sign on the door: "Where Will You Find Your Summer?"

The hiking boots, water bottles, quick-dry clothes and canoes inside the store were a clue. If you were fit and adventurous, you could find your summer in the great outdoors, climbing a mountain, rafting on a river, camping.

Away from concrete and traffic, you could stretch your muscles and rest your brain, on overload from electronic gadgets, everyday technology we can't seem to live without.

At least, that's my 12-year-old granddaughter's take.

During a family beach vacation, when I asked if she and her sister would put away their iPhones, leaving more time to play with their younger cousins, her eyes widened.

"Oh," she said, visibly pained, "I couldn't live without my iPhone!"

The younger cousins, twin boys, 8-years-old, aren't privy to the wonders of iPhones, not yet, but they love, love, love their handheld video games.

On a recent grandparents' visit, they sat on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, moving their thumbs as fast as possible to win games they were playing.

When I asked why they couldn't tear themselves away to come and eat lunch, Elliott, one half of the duo, explained. "Sorry," he shrugged. "We just can't help ourselves."

I know it's Neanderthal, but I've become one of the naysayers who sees new media as too distracting for young minds, who worries when children can't disengage to read or indulge in make-believe.

I look ahead and see a world so focused on technology, today's 12-hour-a-day media consumption diet will be as irrelevant as the typewriter.

I do "get" the positive side of media as search engine and interactive connector, the reality that young Internet users' brains can find and process information while those of us from the comic book era are dragging our encyclopedias off the shelf.

And I understand the interpersonal communication offered by texting, how children away from home are more likely to check in with friends and parents by filling a screen with letters than by sitting down to write them.

But I wonder what lies ahead when computer users admit they visit an average of 40 Web sites a day and those who study behavior link "the lure of digital stimulation" to the need for food.

The 8-year-old twins have an occasional babysitter, a high school guy, whom they dub "cool" because he speaks the language of techno-craft. Luckily, he's also learned to juggle a plugged-in existence with study habits.

But others in his age group acknowledge their grades have dropped, affected by an addiction to electronic "fixes," a condition real, not imagined.

Research has shown media consumption does excite the brain. Too much distracts the user from tasks at hand, and too little leaves an information overload pilgrim, bored.

We can shoot the messenger, but we'd be foolish not to acknowledge the roles of smart phones, personal computers and video games in daily life.

Too often, they get in the way of personal relationships, because parents to spend less time with their children and children to spend less time in the neighborhood, playing freeze tag until dark.

Since I'm the "uncool" babysitter, my twin grandsons expect reading to be the entertainment of the day when I'm on call. There is some complaining, but, finally, a small person hands me a book and we set about learning the fate of "Homer P. Figg," a boy who outwits a couple of scoundrels as he looks for his brother, sold as a foot soldier at age 17 to fight in the Civil War.

In the heat of the day, my voice drones on, the TV is silent, and young minds rest. The action figures of video games are powered down.

No one is winning or losing.

It is time spent, unplugged, when little boys can just "be," which is, after all, the secret to finding your summer.

Judy Elliott is an award-winning columnist from Marietta.