Unexpected generation gap
Unexpected generation gap
I am mid-40s. My daughter is 11. I take her to school, among other driving things, and usually play NPR. Whenever she needs to refer to what she's hearing -- usually to ask if I'll turn it off so she can pull up some godawful thing where a random Youtuber squawks discordant lyrics to a Pokémon video game score -- she calls it a podcast. I've stopped correcting her, particularly since most of the "shows" release as podcasts by the next day anyway.
My 7yo son definitely would have no idea about physical formats if he didn’t see my N64 cartridges sitting alongside the Switch lol. I had to explain to him that we had to buy or rent movies and games if we wanted them. Blew his mind.
"We used to have to watch commercials"
"We used to have to wait til the next week to watch the next episode"
"We used to have to wait til we got home to call people"
"We used to wonder out loud about stuff and have to go to the fucking library to find an answer"
My son's face screws up for all of these
One of the things my friends and I would do in the middle of our lengthy discussions about whatever was to call the library and ask them to settle some dispute or other. They were always sincerely thrilled to help, often to the point of needing to go do research and then call us back.
Sounds familiar. Our kids (9 and 7) asked us at dinner the other night what "over the air" meant and what "radio" was. All they know is streaming.
WiFi and Cellular are also OTA .. just you can make your own bubble and to interact with the uplink bubble .. I mean you can do it with Broadcast radio too but they get mad ..
Not surprising. I'm 36 and it feels strange when someone talks about "radio", "over the air", "cable tv" and similar old technologies. It's only been like 10 years since those still existed but it already feels like ancient past.
Can't speak about everywhere in the world, but broadcast media is pretty much dead. Radio still exists because of cars, but even that is moving towards streaming.
I sincerely hope that the people can reclaim the airwaves and a new fediverse-like ecosystem springs up for over-the-air broadcasts.
I'll have to dig out the TV antenna and show her what it can pull in. Not really good or bad, just one I wouldn't have predicted.
Here are some other fun ones.
Ask her what she thinks the save icon in Microsoft Word and other programs is. Betcha she doesn't know what a floppy disk is.
Ask her why her phone camera app icon is that circle with spiral lines and makes that "kscht" sound when taking a photo. Betcha she doesn't know what a film camera with a mechanical aperture is.
Find a video of an AI generated person talking and note the age at which people younger can immediately clock that it's AI generated and people older can't. Right now, my social circle is at about 40 and younger see it, 40 and older don't. 40-50 seem to be unsure and feel some uncanny valley-ness, while 50+ don't even suspect anything.
Then ask her to explain some current meme. Skibidi toilet? C'mon, do you honestly even want to know what that means? We're too old for that crap.
Then ask her to explain some current meme. Skibidi toilet? C’mon, do you honestly even want to know what that means? We’re too old for that crap.
🚽 😠 vs. 📺 👍. The epic of our times. It might not be what we wanted, but it's what we deserve. 3/10, complete brain rot, I heavily recommend it.
I'm always slightly saddened by my little boy's "why don't you just search it up" any time we don't know something.
I happily remember the days of pub conversations or just chatting shit and arguing with friends over random stuff like how far sound travels per second so you can work out how far away a lightning strike is, or whether it was Paul Rudd or Ryan Reynolds who appeared in an episode of the X-Files, or whether an Amax Eagle Autogyro is faster than an actual eagle.
He doesn't like to do that and knows I have my phone in my pocket so why don't't I just search it up?
I've loved getting older and getting more and more out of touch with young people's social media trends.
I wasn't even all that in-tune with my own generation, so seeing my peers' preferences recede into the haze of "the olden days" has occasionally been a bit of a relief and reset The idea of actual radio being baffling is amusing though.
The same happens with live TV and the amazement of having to accept and watch whatever is being broadcast.
I'm almost 40yo. I got a few good ones explaining stuff to my nephew, who's now 16:
- The opening in my older computer case, covered with cardboard. It was a floppy disk drive that stopped working, the case predates the marriage of his parents.
- Why we didn't simply "look it up" to know that the Mew under the truck rumours were false.
- What the fuck "paint online" is supposed to be. (Tibia, a MMO fairly popular among people in my generation, when we were at his age.)
- Weird popular names for money, like "pila" (after a politician, Raul Pilla), "cruzeiro" (old coin, replaced by the real in 1993), or "mirreis" (mil reis, after another coin).
Is it really a generation gap? Would you have wanted to listen to NPR when you were 11? And wouldn't you have been deliberately snarky to annoy your parents? She obviously knows what a radio is because... you use one every day?
This isn't a "generation gap", this is a teenager trying to rile up there parent. Do you tell her that her youtube shows are "godawful"? Because that's how you get into a coldwar of her pretending she doesn't know what a radio is to make you feel old.
EDIT: The good news is when she gets out the other side of being a teenager, she might even listen to NPR in the car because that's what her parents used to do.
I think you missed the thing they were referring to with the age gap - the kids called the radio a podcast. Not that OP being surprised that kids don't like talk radio
I think you misunderstood what I'm saying; I'm saying the kid is deliberately calling the radio a podcast to annoy OP. They know what a radio is because they've grown up with their parent using it day in day out in the car. So it's not an age gap as OP thinks, I'm saying this one is probably the early stages of the long war known as "having teenage kids".
As @glimse@lemmy.world said, I'm more interested in how something as seemingly pervasive as radio is a relic that she assumes is just one more streaming option. She approaches the world pretty literally, and just straight-up tells me that she doesn't want to listen to my stuff, LOL.
We're not quite into teen rebellion yet, though I can sense her beginning to probe at boundaries. She's a good kid with a kind heart, and she's finding her path, and I'll always support her wherever it leads, but by god I'm not listening to this when I'm trapped in a car with her. 🤣
I like it when my daughter shares her young people things with me. I don't always get them, but it's interesting to see how the environment she grew up in affects her tastes and what she values.
She was going through a playlist of her music online. I told her it's really cool she's able to discover so many different types of music, because when I was young, downloading one song took a long time. Grandma shared her stories about discovering music on the radio and getting music on cassettes. (And also the origin of what a "mix tape" is.)
Looking at the things I found humorous 20ish years ago, I don't think the kids are all that different really.