“The times, they are a’changin’,” Bob Dylan said. How right he was…is. My parents were square, conventional, obtuse, conservative and boring. They didn’t believe in going to concerts, let alone pre-marital sex or ‘the pill’, living together or smoking pot as a ‘harmless recreation’.
So, I can imagine the children of the sixties child, the seventies girl, the eighties man, generation X’ers, Y and Z’ers probably think the same about us. Their parents.
Here I am on the other side of the coin, if you will, thinking how much I just don’t care about the stuff that my kids waste their time on. I don’t care about having thousands of songs piped directly into my ears thru a pocket-sized boombox with earbuds. I never cared about twits before, so why should I care about their tweets? Not completely inept, I blog as you can see, and I shop online, but I don’t find anything appealing about random youtube videos or endless hours of online gaming with anonymous opponents in China.
Having breakfast with a fuddy-duddy buddy of mine, he eschewed facebook’s sheer entertainment gold of voyeuristically monitoring the lives of people you know, used to know, want to know, or the 7 degrees of separation between you and their friends and, if the theory holds true, everyone else in this world.
Like looking in someone’s medicine cabinet, I see interesting social patterns on facebook – some have remade it as a ‘prayer chain’ or for religious affirmations; some offer confessions up to universal therapy; still others use it as email, and some as a political forum. I use it as almost all of the above, really, depending on the mood I’m in, and hopefully with more wit than woe. But I admit I am facehooked, sipping my first cup of coffee while scrolling through my east coast friend’s feeds to make sure I haven’t missed anything.
I wonder if we could have predicted which of our parents, now possibly in their 70’s and 80’s, embraced the computer and are now enjoying a newfound hobby futzing around in email or some whom, like my mother, aren’t going anywhere near electronics.
As technology keeps changing more and more rapidly, I’m sure I won’t be able to keep up or will lose interest or just simply will lose the ability to understand things so advanced and foreign. Technology speeds up, while our aging brains slow down. For now, I may not be in completely in synch with today’s plugged-in generation, but I’m not too far behind either.
Taul, a rant 
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