I think there’s a general misunderstanding among our parents’ generation of what growing up in this rapid boom of computer technology really means.
All the time, I hear people my age (22) referred to as “the cellphone children” and jokes that we came out of the womb sending texts.
This always strikes me as odd and a little funny, because it’s just….so not the case?
When I was a young child, if you had a computer, they usually lived in a designated “computer room.” My family was very financially privileged, and we only had one in our house.
Only a few of my friends were lucky enough to have a computer at all in our younger years, and I was one of the only kids in my class who could use the phone AND the internet at the same time.
I remember my parents buying 8-packs of D batteries to load into a CD player for long trips in a van that didn’t take CDs yet.
I owned cassette tapes. I remember roller-blading around bumps on the street, trying (and failing) to keep my portable CD player from skipping.
“Born with cell phones in their hands.” I remember clunky car-only phones for emergencies that pretty much never worked. I couldn’t believe it when camera-phones started emerging in the hands of older teenagers. We had only just transitioned from cameras that used film-only to digital. Things like video-cals on Skype were still largely accepted as science fiction, because it wasn’t accessible.
When my family got a DVD player, it was a huge deal. No one else I knew had one yet.
Brie found a journal from Girl Scouts or something she wrote when she was a kid in which she said she dreamed of having small computer-watches we could wear on our wrists.
Which, y’know, exists, and children have them now.
Most of my friends didn’t have their own cellphones until we were on the cusp of adulthood. My brother and I shared a cell phone as younger teenagers in case of emergencies. Can you imagine a brother and sister sharing a cellphone now? It’s less practical.
Sure, all of these things were invented and available a few years before these times in my childhood, but it took time for them to become even somewhat accessible to the “middle class,” and the people in my generation were growing up while that happened.
I’m not saying all of these things to establish myself as one of the “real” adults who remembers some bygone days.
I’m just……marveling at how quickly technology has advanced. It’s gone so fast that the lines have blurred to older people. They remember us all having these things. I talk to older friends who would swear people my age all had their own laptops and smart phones when we were little kids. It happened so fast, that people think it’s just always been.
And now the question is how this generation and the ones after us who are being handed smart-phones and tablets at age-two are going to adapt. Will we eventually be out-paced and as confused by new technology as our parents usually are?
Or is it now so engrained in our every-day lives that we’ll move with it and die as elderly people who know how to…idk, download cooking instructions into AI units for our family dinners?
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