A while back I was watching a quiz show and a contestant in his twenties missed answering a multiple choice question correctly about something in the 1940's because he wasn't sure if people had running water in their homes back then.
I was pretty stupefied and it made me realize how little youth, even grown up ones, know about the not so distant past. At first I thought 'Is this kid real'? Then I wondered if history teachers weren't doing their jobs properly since I'd left school. I mean, surely, his parents and grandparents would have talked about their past but, in his case, apparently they had not.
One thing that I have noticed about some younger adults these days is that they think they are mentally superior older adults. Perhaps they think that being knowledgeable about computers and technology is a sign of intellect. Certainly I and many other people, both younger and my age, are not so skilled in that area, but we are far more knowledgeable about many diverse categories as we have had decades to accumulate more knowledge and experience.
I can only hope that the youth who feel so superior now will one day find their children think less of them because they can't operate the latest gadget. I suspect they also think they are clever because they have access to all the answers they require on the Internet as well as being adept at all the new gadgetry. Has it occurred to them that some people don't want the new gadgetry because they've managed without it all their productive lives? I do enjoy a lot of the new advances but not all. At a certain age you just get more selective about what technology you find useful but I can see how kids love it all. My seventeen month old grandson loves iPhones as did his sister and brother before him; they're like magic after all.
Kids grasp new technology quickly because their young minds are like blank pages. It's the same with language. If you learn a second language before you are about twelve you will speak it without your mother tongue's accent. This is a fact. If we learn a new language after that age we will speak it with an accent. There may be linguistic savants who don't, but they'd be pretty rare.
We have accelerated learning ability as children because our brains are growing. Once our brains mature and we have had myriad experiences and have absorbed huge amounts of information, naturally our absorption rate won't compare to our earliest learning ability. Another thing that people who have grown up since the year two thousand don't take into account is that some of us have been dealing with computers since their earliest days and that constantly adapting to the changes becomes less amusing and more annoying.
I started my working life as a computer programmer after dropping out of a science degree. I programmed, what were then termed, mini computers. I wrote programs in COBOL on a paper form, sent them off to a compiler that translated them into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) punched onto paper tape that I then fed into the mini computer to program it.
What I would have given for a VDU and a keyboard to program directly into a computer, even in DOS. I lasted one year doing the job and decided it wasn't living. I did go back and study Computer Science a few years later thinking I should try again but, by then there were teenagers fresh from school who could spend all day at University on the VDU's, which existed by then, while I had a baby to care for and couldn't spare the time or baby sitting money. To be honest, I really wasn't interested enough. I think, today, I'd enjoy it a lot more as the results of what I'd do would be more immediate.
Computers are a lot more interesting since they've become part of our lives, not just part of the corporate, commercial and scientific world. The Internet arrived like a supernova but when I started out, I was programming accounting packages and that was it. There was no Internet . Had I seen the future I may have stayed, but I doubt it. I just enjoy the benefits now.
Forty years have passed since I worked as a programmer. Computers, or I.T. if you will, haven't ceased developing. Now try to put yourself in my shoes. If you were me would you keep up to date with every single new advance after forty years? Frankly, it gets a bit ho hum. You just know the next new thing is going to be superseded within the year. If you learn something new, you'll have to learn the new version next year. Okay, if you're under thirty, you probably still get a kick out of every new release, whether it be an iPhone, an operating system or whatever. What you don't realize is that it's just not going to stop and it becomes overwhelming and, frankly, tedious.
I'll give you an example of something that just recently annoyed me. I have a new second hand car. It's new to me but ten years old. One thing I love about it is the reverse camera and, because I am so smitten with this gadget, it has taken me six months to realize the car has no CD player. You're laughing aren't you? Fine, I'm not very musical but my old car's CD player had broken and it occurred to me that now I could play CD's in the car. Next time I went for a drive I looked below the reverse camera display for the CD slot. To my amazement there wasn't one. Later I asked my partner if he had one in his car. He said, "Of course not, people use iPods now and download everything or use their phones that they play through the car radio." Well I don't want an iPod, I have perfectly good CD's and my iPhone is a late model and won't communicate with the car so that's out.
As an example of obsolescence let's look at videos. There aren't any these days. In the eighties I lived in Hong Kong. My then husband and I bought a video player that took Beta tapes. We chose that over VCR's as it seemed that Beta was the way to go but back in Australia VCR's had taken off. Out went the Beta player. Next up DVD's came in. Much lighter and smaller but video hire shops could still survive. Somewhere along the way Blueray came in. I really have no idea what Blueray is because I probably lost interest. As soon as televisions could be attached to the Internet we began to stream, to download shows straight from the Internet.
Now I'm certainly not complaining about that, it's great, but my grandchildren still have Blueray discs so that when one comes to stay and wants to watch one, I'm meant to boot up the DVD player. I recently tried and couldn't so we settled for streaming. I'm from a generation that has gone from floppy discs to CD's to USB's. I have also gone from vinyl to tapes and Walkmans to CD's. I have not moved on to iPods. As I have said, I'm not musical. I have also loathed all music produced since the year 2000 so why bother?
Let me take you through one other area of advancement: cameras. When we moved from film to digital it was great, except for poor Kodak and its film processing facilities of course. There is one thing film still has over pixels however. You can blow up pictures taken with film a lot before you lose detail and some professionals still use it for that reason. When I first bought a digital camera it was 3 megapixels and I was told 5 megapixels was for professionals. I should have known, and did suspect, that 5 megapixels would soon be outmoded based on my initial purchase of a personal computer when I was advised to get a 256 Kilobyte rather than a 386 Kilobyte. Well you know how that went. Soon my 3 megapixel camera was left for dead by 12 Megapixels and onward but then Smartphones came along and you could send a photo from it directly to anyone or to the Internet without uploading to a computer as you did with a camera.
I only gave in and got a Smartphone for the camera capability or would have fought the purchase for years. Generations of Smartphones have superseded my phone but, by now, I'm sure you can see I've seen enough things outmoded not to care. It will have to die before I give in and get a new one but, by then, another generation will have come along and I'll be really up to date, until a year later when I'm not.
Baby boomers like me have seen more change in their lifetimes than any generation before them, even their parents. Fifty years before I was born, women were still in long skirts and unable to vote, the airplane had just been invented and electricity was really just coming into mass use. My parents saw huge changes but I have seen more, many of them good.
If we can just get the world's population stabilized and climate change under control, following generations may see more than I have, but change for the sake of change is not the best idea. I've seen wonderful things but crammed together in too short a space of time. It wouldn't hurt to slow down a bit. There's no rush if we play our cards right.
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