WORLD TODAY AN ALIEN PLACE FOR RELICS OF AN OLDER TIME
Society has changed to the extent that the everyday of just 20 years ago is consigned to a novelty website
KIDS turning 18 this year were born in the year 2000. That really freaks me out. They’ve grown up in a world that is totally foreign to those who came of age back when Spam was a meat product, Pong was a video game and people still said versus instead of “verse”.
It’s been on my mind this week after I spied my daughter looking at Instagram memes under the heading “Things kids today don’t get.”
There was a picture of two kids standing in wonder looking at a public phone handset, presumably trying to work out where the touchscreen was. And how do you watch zany videos of kittens if there’s no screen?
So what else don’t kids today understand? Thanks to mobile phones, they don’t have to make eye contact and make small talk with strangers on public transport. Of course, kids today don’t catch public transport, just like they don’t walk to the milk bar for a milkshake – they let Uber do it for them.
They don’t know what it’s like to watch TV shows with ads and only at the times they’re programmed.
When I was growing up there were no videos or downloaded movies to entertain us on long car trips; no iPhones, just eye spy for thousands of kilometres.
In fact, kids are missing out on quite a lot. There are no alarm clocks, rolodexes, telexes, late fees at the video shop, cassingles (cassette singles) and waiting for the phone rotary dial to spin back so you can dial the next number. There are also no TV test patterns, tram conductors or Sunday shop closing.
Kids today will never understand the frustration of buying the wrong size film for their camera. Or owning a camera. Or running out of film on their camera a week before the end of their holiday. Or having to wait two weeks for photos to be ready from the chemist, only to find most are pitch black or have people with their heads accidentally cut off.
These days, kids’ entertainment is either screen-based or scheduled. As one friend reminded me this week, there’s no place for randomly dropping in to your friend’s house, knocking on the door and saying: “Hi Mrs Jones, can Peter come out to play?”
Nowadays, everyone has their own phones and screens. The days of one phone per house sitting on a table in the hallway with a fluffy seat attached are long gone. So is the race to answer the phone when it rings; you don’t know who’s calling but it might be for you!
Technology has changed beyond recognition. When I finished Year 12 in 1987, I had to wait for the postman to deliver my results. Around the same time, the first mass-market printers were available; remember when you had to rip the holes off the edges of the dot matrix printer pages?
And what about dial-up internet, which kept dropping out because someone tried to use the landline?
I also remember back when brand names had spaces between the words and when nouns were nouns and verbs were verbs. Now we “diarise” and “incentivise” things.
Kids today will never get to book flights seven, 14 or 21 days ahead and go backpacking with a bag full of Lonely Planet books. They’ll never rip out chapters of countries they’ve visited as they go to make their pack lighter.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for young people who miss out on all of these things. In turn, they judge us for texting with one finger rather than both thumbs, being unable to program the new dishwasher and not remembering the Netflix password.
Viva la difference!