Like it or not generational labelling is a thing – we are all slotted into compartments labelled boomer, gen X, Y, Z and so on based on nothing but the year of birth and some shared history. Gen Z in particular would find many objects and experiences to be completely mysterious since they never ever encountered them. Hobbies then and now are completely different. Gadgets and gizmos have undergone a sea change. There are things that kids today will never know the joy (or annoyance) of.
This is the literal truth: earlier we had the cassette player (or CD player), still camera and movie Handycam, VCD player, desktop. How one sleek, highly advanced device takes the place of all these and then some!
They never knew the joy (or rather limitation) of using a VCR, of rewinding a cassette before playing it – no longer than three hours.
Today they create playlists with a few clicks. Then we made mixed tapes by laboriously recording songs from different cassettes on to one, and then wrote out the track names on the cassette sleeve – Side A, Side B. If someone gifted you a mixed tape with your fave songs back then, they probably loved you.
We used to wait for songs to be played on the radio or MTV/ Channel V and then we recorded them. Now kids simply play any song in the world that they want – on any of several music-streaming apps – or they summon up YouTube to watch the video of the song: instant gratification.
Kids today grew up with Google maps, automatic car windows, instant access to millions of songs and practically any directory in the world on demand. They take those things for granted; without realising how miraculous the modern upgrades actually are.
If you had to block one person, you – and the entire family – blocked pretty much everyone else. And practical jokes on the phone were hilarious, because without caller ID we were never really sure which evil cousin or friend called up at 3 AM to ask whether our fridge was working (and when we said ‘yes’ they said ‘then it must be tired’ or some such).
It is a bicycle pedal. I used to cycle 6 km to school and back as a school kid. My kids wouldn’t dream of doing that – also as a parent, I wouldn’t dream of letting them. Those were safer, simpler times.
Now it is possible to unfriend or unfollow people across platforms to send out a message --- to them and everyone else. Ghosting and orbiting are things that didn’t exist then. At the time, we made expressed angst in other ways (probably because of that impossible hair?)
In the age of eBooks and Kindles, kids don’t know the joy of becoming a member of a good library, browsing books while breathing in the smell, taking books home to read. That library card told us when the book was due and how much late fee we would have to pay if we delayed its return.
I remember the time of Napster when I would be delighted to ‘find’ a song and to be able to download it within about the time equivalent to the length of the song (if I was lucky). Kids these days are impatient with anything less than lightning speed and they will never, never know the joy of hearing the screech and twang of the dialup modem connecting.
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