I think about this a lot. I imagine a lot of millennials do, as we grew up without the internet, but were still kids and teenagers when we learnt how to use it.
My mum did her university coursework on a typewriter. My dad paid someone to type up his MRes thesis. I can’t imagine writing that kind of work by hand. CORRECTING that kind of work by hand.
But rappid change has been going on for a while now. Electricity. The automobile. Movies. TV. And before that, the industrial revolution. The printing press.
The 1920s were a lot like now in terms of rapid pace of change, generational shifts, wealth disparity, the rise of fascism...
I think we all grow up with the expectation that we’re being taught the way the world is, has always been, and will always be. Change had been speeding up since the Industrial Revolution, and it’s been turbocharged by the Internet, but the expectation that we’ll live the same lives as our parents is, I think, in-built - as we’re primed to learn from them what will keep us safe; it’s why children learn so much more easily. At the same time, I think having learned something of the world for oneself, it’s reasonable that every generation should then come to question what they were taught and push for change.
And there have been seismic shifts before. Rome fell.
Wild Swans is a hell of a book to read about how different one generation’s lives can be from another’s. Jung Chang’s grandmother had bound feet and was concubine to a warlord. China went through several changes of regime before the rise of Communism and the Cultural Revolution. The book was published in 1991, before the World Wide Web, and the pace of change over three generations of women is breathtaking.
So yeah, I agree that change is speeding up, and that changes in communication technology speeds things up like nothing else (see: the changes that follow the printing press - HUGE), but also, big changes between generations isn’t that new.
It’s part of growing up to learn that the way the world was when your parents were born doesn’t have to be, and likely won’t be, how it will be when you leave it.
It’s a freeing, but painful realisation. You don’t have to live your life the way they expected you to. In fact, as the world is ever changing, you probably shouldn’t.
