Generations - Not a Thing

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, maarsen said:

Really? Imagine a college thesis before typewriters became cheap. Which coincidentally was right around the time computers became cheap.

I'm not even worried about that. I actually own one. What would scare me is the library. I must have read 50+ articles before finding the topic I wanted for my thesis, but I could do that easily from my laptop. Imagine having to do that in an old school library. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Who remembers the Who's Classic "pooping bout my generation" really turned some heads at the time

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

I miss that thing! I also had it's knockoff, The Blackjack, but sadly I lost it in Cancun during freshman year spring break. It's actually one of the wildest tales you could ever hear. I once told it at a comedy club during open mic. I made no attempts to make jokes or embellish anything.

The room was roaring with laughter. I simply call it "Pirate Ships."

I'm listening......

[Larry of the Lawn]

I was born on a pirate ship (hold your tongue whilst ya say it)

[Buckwheat]

11 hours ago, Jo498 said:

"born in the 90s": cannot consciously remember time before widespread laptops, internet, cellphones

I can. Our family got our first computer quite late and Internet access even later. I know pointing this out goes against your post as a whole, I just needed to mention there are outliers on the other side too.

But now, I also cannot imagine writing a paper or a diploma/masters thesis without a computer. That must have been terrifying. And even though I was told about these big chests of small drawers with small cards in them serving as library catalogues, I never had to use that. My parents were diligent enough to teach me the use of the online library catalogue as one of the first things to do with a computer.

[DireWolfSpirit]

On April 13, 2018 at 4:44 PM, TrueMetis said:

I thought millennial started at 81.

Nothing's better proof that something's bullshit than people being unable to define it.

^^^This so much. I am bothered by the sloppiness of the dates that are defined differently every time someone writes commentary on the so called groups. Its especially a disservice to people born in the "lap years" like 64-65,  81-82, or 99-01 or whatever drifting date is en vogue with this ridiculous labeling. 

[Jo498]

12 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Noticed you avoided the almost certainly contentious description of those born in the 80s.  Maybe they had a computer or cellphone, but likely lived without for sometime of adolescence and early adulthood.

At first, I forgot the 1980s cohort. Than I realized that they are too grey and therefore left them out. Of course, there are also differences between countries. The US and Japan are often much quicker adopters of some new gadgets than European countries and even within western European countries differences could be fairly large (and of course everything was very different for central/eastern Europe until recently).

According to my recollection, cellphones were considered mainly for posh idiots (or strictly for business purposes) in 1995 in Germany. In that year I spent a brief holiday in/around Venice and was surprised how much more common cellphones seemed to be in Italy. A few months later I went to the US for a year of studies and among (graduate) students cellphones were a rare luxury 95/96. I remember that I was very amused to overhear someone in a supermarket calling his wife/gf on the cell about what he should buy. I found this sufficiently funny to tell the episode to friends and as far as I recall they also found it amusing. In Germany there were urban legends about people asking someone at a campsite to use his cell for an emergency call and that guy who had been seen frequently using his phone had to admit that it was a fake... (This was probably totally made up but it went around.)

Of course, by about 2000 cellphones were so common in Germany that one was basically an outcast without one. The timeframe for private internet access must be similar. When I got email etc. at the university in ca. 1994 it was very uncommon outside tech and academia. Even in 2000 when I helped as an RA with some lexicon project, elderly professors sent physical floppy disks (probably typed up by their secretaries) with their articles. I am sure some got their emails printed out, responded by hand and the secretary typed the email response...

[HexMachina]

2 hours ago, Buckwheat said:

I can. Our family got our first computer quite late and Internet access even later. I know pointing this out goes against your post as a whole, I just needed to mention there are outliers on the other side too.

But now, I also cannot imagine writing a paper or a diploma/masters thesis without a computer. That must have been terrifying. And even though I was told about these big chests of small drawers with small cards in them serving as library catalogues, I never had to use that. My parents were diligent enough to teach me the use of the online library catalogue as one of the first things to do with a computer.

Same here actually. Mid-90’s child and I am able to recall life’s in my house without computers and internet. Maybe that’s more of a personal wealth thing but our school also didn’t get computers until...I believe Y4. Even then we only had a handful for our entire primary school and their use was very limited. By the time I left two years later though the use of computers and technology as a teaching tool had increased significantly. Actually, thinking back now one of our teachers in particular was often away on teacher training courses, after which she would come back and we’d get an uptick in ‘interactive’ lessons. I realise now her training courses must have been in the use of technology as a teaching instrument

[Jo498]

Of course there can also be outliers in the other direction. But again, pointing out anecdotal outliers does not change whether a typical thing or general trend ist correct. Because the claim never was that everyone experienced the same stuff, had the same gadgets etc., only about what was typical. My family did not have a color TV until I was 12 or even older and we never had a VCR but I was well aware that color TV was the "standard" in the early/mid 1980s and VCRs were not a rare luxury either. Despite the fact that we and some other people still had b&w I do not remember the appearance of color TV (because this was before my birth, I assume), so I clearly grew up in a time when color TV was normal (although I found it looked odd and artificial...). Or holidays.  Flying anywhere, especially transcontinental, was still very rare in the 1980s, expensive and hardly ever done by families with young/teenaged children, not even by really well off ones. This has completely changed. Who can afford a holiday at all can usually afford to fly to Tunisia or Turkey.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

13 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I'm listening......

Lol. I can’t write it from work. I’ll make a thread this weekend dedicated to people telling the absurd events in their lives. I expect to hear one of yours, because my tale will melt your eyebrows.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Lol. I can’t write it from work. I’ll make a thread this weekend dedicated to people telling the absurd events in their lives. I expect to hear one of yours, because my tale will melt your eyebrows.

I will tell either "That Time I had Breakfast with Ralph Nader and Shook Bono's Hand" or "That One Time in Myrtle Beach that I Half Remember But I Am Told Was A Lot of Fun."  

[S John]

18 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I will tell either "That Time I had Breakfast with Ralph Nader and Shook Bono's Hand" or "That One Time in Myrtle Beach that I Half Remember But I Am Told Was A Lot of Fun."  

I had one of those times in Myrtle Beach as well.  

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

19 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I will tell either "That Time I had Breakfast with Ralph Nader and Shook Bono's Hand" or "That One Time in Myrtle Beach that I Half Remember But I Am Told Was A Lot of Fun."  

Absolutely go with the latter. I will actually make the thread today because I’ve got another great one that I can write here, but as a teaser for the best one, I woke up to my step-brother punching me the stomach  at 7 AM and saying we’ve got 15 minutes until we have to get on the bus. Sitting across from my mother at breakfast waiting for it, head in both hands, I look at my left arm and there are enough club wrist bands on it to cover half of my forearm. I don’t remember leaving the resort….. Easy to see how I lost my phone.

[Fragile Bird]

All this talk about cellphones has made me nostalgic. I worked at a company that was a pioneer in cellphones. I was not senior enough to have one though (in the 80s). Friends did, and the handsets with the holder were the size of shoeboxes. One of my US colleagues travelled around the world setting up cellular phone tower agreements with various countries. She wrote many of the first documents in the industry, she had to because there was nothing out there. We recently re-discovered each other on Facebook, and it's been a real pleasure to see she's as feisty as ever and rabidly anti-Trump. I still remember talking to her about a commercial the company had about cell phones and how she wanted them to pull it because it showed the person using the cellphone while driving, a big no-no right from the very beginning. "You must pull over your car", she told me, "it's very distracting and you could get into an accident". The company was worried they would be sued by drivers involved in accidents.

I left that company to work for another US giant. I got my first cell phone there, a Nokia iirc, in, hmmm, 1990 or 1991. I wheedled and whined to get it, and since the General Counsel was a sly guy who liked to check up on people all the time (if he was out of the office he always called after 5:00 to see who was in the office. I was, to avoid the worst traffic) he agreed I should have one. I'm sitting in the living room posting this, and I can still see my mom sitting on the couch chatting to me and my sister-in-law when the courier delivered the phone to my house. I was very excited, ripped it open and proudly showed it to them. My sister-in-law, who had recently married my brother, who is also a lawyer, was a legal secretary who worked in a downtown firm and was out-of-her-mind insanely jealous of me. She just friggin' flipped out of her mind when she saw it, screaming at the top of her voice about asshole businesswomen she saw walking downtown streets with a phone glued to their ear talking loudly "like idiots" into it so everyone could see that they had a cellphone. My lord, she was practically foaming at the mouth. Of course, when she eventually got a phone she could not stay off it.

My mother took it very calmly. She knew how my SiL's frequent attempts to get under my skin bugged me, and afterwards she said soothing things and reminded me, as she always did, that I could be a better person than her. Her soothing worked, but I tell you, my SiL's reaction really spoiled what was an Event, with a capital E, in my corporate life. Very few people back then had cellphones at work and the fact that I had one really represented something important to me. Funny, that, eh?

eta:  I might still have that phone, somewhere in a box. It's big and heavy and thick. Later the first smart phone, the Blackberry, was the power symbol, and guys had these holster things attached to their belts to carry their Berries. I never wanted one, and never owned one.

 

[A wilding]

Talking about mobiles, this is something I actually saw.

In South Africa in the 1990's just after apartheid had ended and they had just got their first mobile network up. A guy was walking through the city centre talking loudly on his mobile, clearly showing it off.

And then it rang, because someone had actually phoned him  ...

 

[DMC]

On 4/18/2018 at 6:46 PM, Tywin et al. said:

Yeah I think there's a lot of truth in this. I was born in the late 80's and tech has always been a part of my life. Both my parents have graduate degrees and were really into tech. I'm pretty sure I had a computer in my house with internet action by the time I was 5. If first grade we learned how to write in cursive. In the second grade they said nuts to that and bought a computer lab. Thus, my hand writing has always been trash. Flip phones were common when I was in 9th grade. And on and on. I can see how that would separate early Millennial from the rest of their cohort. 

I think technology access is a good barometer between older and younger millennials, but it's more nuanced than this - or at least I think it is my case.  I had a computer in my room by the time I can remember, before internet I was all about Sim City and Carmen Sandiego.  We got dial-up internet access the same time every upper middle class family did, which I think was 1995.  My school had a computer lab and had a typing class by the 4th grade (something I should always be appreciative of).  The idea of cell phones was prevalent and popular for kids once you saw Zach Morris on Saved by the Bell.  But, I avoided cell phones specifically because I thought it was stupid - I used a pager during high school to deal because even then we all assumed Big Brother was listening.

Anyway, the difference is my childhood was going outside and fucking around with the neighbor kids.  This was how the boomers were raised, and how they raised me.  Especially during summer break, but even during the school year, from ages 5-12 there was a group of us in the same age group that lived next together and our parents just told us to go outside and play.  I still remember when Princess Di died our parents had to search us out and we were underneath some double pine tree fort we had made for ourselves that summer. 

I look back fondly at that time, and not just because it was immediately followed by my entrance into drugs and alcohol.  That was Americana, hell, it's the suburban American dream - neighborhood picnics where everyone knows everyone because their kids have made up their own sports/games together while the adults were able to do their own thing.  My impression with younger millennials is instead of that experience, their childhood was spent in front of a computer screen, and I think that's unfortunate.

[S John]

27 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

I think technology access is a good barometer between older and younger millennials, but it's more nuanced than this - or at least I think it is my case.  I had a computer in my room by the time I can remember, before internet I was all about Sim City and Carmen Sandiego.  We got dial-up internet access the same time every upper middle class family did, which I think was 1995.  My school had a computer lab and had a typing class by the 4th grade (something I should always be appreciative of).  The idea of cell phones was prevalent and popular for kids once you saw Zach Morris on Saved by the Bell.  But, I avoided cell phones specifically because I thought it was stupid - I used a pager during high school to deal because even then we all assumed Big Brother was listening.

Anyway, the difference is my childhood was going outside and fucking around with the neighbor kids.  This was how the boomers were raised, and how they raised me.  Especially during summer break, but even during the school year, from ages 5-12 there was a group of us in the same age group that lived next together and our parents just told us to go outside and play.  I still remember when Princess Di died our parents had to search us out and we were underneath some double pine tree fort we had made for ourselves that summer. 

I look back fondly at that time, and not just because it was immediately followed by my entrance into drugs and alcohol.  That was Americana, hell, it's the suburban American dream - neighborhood picnics where everyone knows everyone because their kids have made up their own sports/games together while the adults were able to do their own thing.  My impression with younger millennials is instead of that experience, their childhood was spent in front of a computer screen, and I think that's unfortunate.

Yea I agree that's part of it as well, though it still does tie into the role of technology. 

My younger years were definitely spent primarily outside.  Today I think parents have a different attitude about 'free-range' kids and its probably because the news cycle is now 24 hrs of scaring the shit out of everybody. 

But for me, even if I wanted to stay inside and play video games all day my parents would not have let me.  Riding bikes and such with the neighborhood kids is what I remember doing the most.  I wouldn't see my parents all day and there was no way for them to contact me unless I happened to be within hollering distance.  And this was completely usual at the time.  I also used to walk to elementary school every day with only my friend from the next street over as company and we were, like... little kids!  How were our parents not a nervous wreck all the time?  I get concerned about the welfare of my adult (and wholly capable) SO when I am out of town for work, let alone an idiot little kid off on their own in the world.  

I had limits on how far I was allowed to roam, which I usually obeyed, but I could've been doing anything.  And the most prominent landmark on my walk to school everyday was the West Virginia State Penitentiary, located right in the middle of town.  The prison had been there since the 1870's so everyone in the town was just kind of used to it being there and didn't really think much of it.  But I can't imagine today that parents would let their elementary school aged children walk to school every day past a maximum security state penitentiary where the prisoners were close enough to heckle you through the windows.    But that was my existence as an elementary school aged kid.  The prison was great fun.  One of the best exploring spots was the filled-in hole on the back side where some dudes had tunneled out and escaped.  

 

Side note - I too used to love Sim City.  That was probably the first real computer game I had.  Shortly after, I got a copy of Age of Empires not too long after it came out (which wikipedia tells me was 1997) and was so excited to play it, but quickly found out that our computer was not up-to-date enough to install it.  So I had this game that I really wanted to play but I had to wait a year or two until my family got a new computer with the chops to handle it.  But by that time I was in high school. Incidentally, I love Age of Empires and still play it every once in a while (mostly the second one, though).  I did play computer games (and N64) in high school but not too much of that stuff earlier.  I had some older nintendo systems (the original + super) as a kid and I do remember playing mario and NBA Jam but I don't remember that begin a prominent part of my childhood.  

[DMC]

19 minutes ago, S John said:

But for me, even if I wanted to stay inside and play video games all day my parents would not have let me.  Riding bikes and such with the neighborhood kids is what I remember doing the most.  I wouldn't see my parents all day and there was no way for them to contact me unless I happened to be within hollering distance.  And this was completely usual at the time.  I also used to walk to elementary school every day with only my friend from the next street over as company and we were, like... little kids!  How were our parents not a nervous wreck all the time?  I get concerned about the welfare of my adult (and wholly capable) SO when I am out of town for work, let alone an idiot little kid off on their own in the world.  

Yep, exactly.  I don't know what changed, but something definitely changed.  I'm not a big fan of Putnam nor his Bowling Alone - primarily because it derives conclusions without any type of quantitative analysis - but there's something to the idea of social capital and how we've lost it.  And no, social media is not a valid substitute.  If anything it both brings out the worst in people (whereas actual community functions bring out the best), let alone how information can be manipulated in multitudes of ways to society's detriment.

[mankytoes]

1 hour ago, dmc515 said:

I look back fondly at that time, and not just because it was immediately followed by my entrance into drugs and alcohol.  That was Americana, hell, it's the suburban American dream - neighborhood picnics where everyone knows everyone because their kids have made up their own sports/games together while the adults were able to do their own thing.  My impression with younger millennials is instead of that experience, their childhood was spent in front of a computer screen, and I think that's unfortunate.

There's this assumption that being outside is better than being inside. I'm not saying I'm not a fan of nature, I'm a fairly outdoorsy person. 

But I think there's a rival argument that I've never really heard anyone put forward- video games are really good these days. Who is to say that climbing a tree is better than playing Halo? I have fun memories of riding bikes and playing endless games of football, but also great memories of playing computer games- with friends and on my own. What might just look like a mind numbing game to an adult can be an awesome experience to the imagination of a child. When I completed Pokemon Blue, I really felt like I'd defeated a whole world of people, bonded with these Pokemon, beat the bad guys, become the champion. And games have progressed a hell of a lot since then. 

It's only when I meet my friends and we talk about playing these games as kids that I realise how important these games were to me. 

This is part of the generational thing- new=bad. Parents today often lament that they can't get their kids to read, but novels were first popular there was outrage about young people being sat staring at pages instead of playing sports and being all outdoorsy. These days playing games seems to be seen as a worse hobby than watching television, even though it seems clear playing games is generally more stimulating. 

[DMC]

7 minutes ago, mankytoes said:

But I think there's a rival argument that I've never really heard anyone put forward- video games are really good these days. Who is to say that climbing a tree is better than playing Halo? I have fun memories of riding bikes and playing endless games of football, but also great memories of playing computer games- with friends and on my own. What might just look like a mind numbing game to an adult can be an awesome experience to the imagination of a child. When I completed Pokemon Blue, I really felt like I'd defeated a whole world of people, bonded with these Pokemon, beat the bad guys, become the champion. And games have progressed a hell of a lot since then. 

That's fair.  Video games can certainly be a great socialization tool in theory.  However, I think in practice it tends to lead to more atomistic behavior.  At least that'd be my prior, and I think it's well-founded.  To be clear, this isn't me judging the "younger" generation in the least.  I'm not a gamer, but the closest people I know who are happen to be older than me.