My eldest daughter, Blossom, loves me to tell her stories of things I did when I was a little girl her age. When she turned ten years old yesterday, she asked me to tell her stories of what SHE was like as a little girl, since she was now a mature pre-woman in the double digits.
This got me thinking, how long ago was ten years in terms of my lived experience today? I have long resigned myself to the look of horror on my children’s faces when I explain I lived out a childhood with only three TV channels and cartoons only on Saturday, but what will Blossom say?
Well, for one thing, she can tell her kids that she was born before YouTube changed our concept of entertainment availability. She was born before the iPhone made phones de facto tricorders in 2007. She was born before Kindle was available in 2007, and books were heavy and you couldn’t care 20,000 of them in your purse at once. She was born before the advent of tablet computers, like the iPad in 2010. Nowadays, the world is rife with tablet computers or phones that serve the same function as a tablet computers. My youngest daughter, Buttercup, will never know a time prior to tablet computers and that is a little weird to think about.
When I was in high school, tablet computers and book readers like a Kindle were something Wesley Crusher used to do homework with on Star Trek The Next Generation. Even Star Trek TNG could think up YouTube. Technology is changing so fast my daughters cannot even get my references to my venerable age. When I told them I was born before VCRs and that VCRs weren’t really common until I was in middle school, they asked me what a VCR was. The concept of cassette tapes were alien to them, let alone vinyl records. They did, however, understand me when I told them mobile phones weren’t common until I was in my twenties, and pitied me accordingly.
Nowadays, my daughters are exasperated that Granny and Grandpa’s TV cannot be paused, because they are used to Roku at our house.
What will their children think of as ‘normal’ technology?