From
an AP story I came across today:
"It's nice that adults know SOME things," says [Scott] Seigal, an 18-year-old freshman at Binghamton University in New York. He especially likes IMing with his grandma because he's "not a huge talker on the phone."
Increasingly, however, he and other young people are feeling uncomfortable about their elders encroaching on what many young adults and teens consider their technological turf.
Long gone are the days when the average, middle-aged adult did well to simply work a computer. Now those same adults have Gmail, upload videos on YouTube, and sport the latest high-tech gadgets.
Maybe I'm just feeling curmudgeonly and cranky because I'm twice as old as the kid quoted... but speaking for my 37-year-old self (who literally teethed on a computer keyboard — Dad was a programmer and we had a dumb terminal in the home office) and for my 67-year-old father, who received the Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professionals back in
1973 — uh, kiddo, who do you think created that technological turf you consider your own? I'll give you a hint: many, if not most, of them were born LONG before 1990.
I have a cousin (who's dead now) who would be 57 on his birthday this year -- right around now, in fact -- who had his PhD in computer science in '78. Bah. Dang kids. Gerrof my lawn.
Heh.
My mom used to do her best to crush the dreams of my starry-eyed friends. "If I can persuade you not to be an artist, I will." (The reasoning being, of course, that if she was able to discourage them, they had no business going into a field like art. Or theatre. Or music. Or anything like that that would involve putting themselves out there for rejection again and again and again.)
Admittedly, back in the day you really had to know computers, while these days so many vendors have made "point and click" solutions that it is trivial to do certain things. That just makes us older folks more arcane: ten to one Seigal doesn't know any assembly and couldn't find his way out of SoftICE without unplugging the computer.
Using Gmail or YouTube is not a sign of competence.