A quick search in the 700+ blogs I have written since 2012 surprised me – I have already written a fair bit about evolution, much more than I recalled. I am what they call a Baby Boomer, one of the masses born after the Second World War and now becoming a burden, physically and financially, on those who are now called the Millennials. My three children are Millennials and I marvel at how well adjusted they are to life as we (and they) live it.
Recently, I have been helping my son with English texts to be used in legal correspondence. He will soon receive his Masters degree in Law (specialised in employment legislation) and about to get his first job in a law firm. Instead of composing each letter from scratch, he rather cleverly hit on the idea of hanging the sentences that fit best to a template designed for the topic in law. A bit like decorating a Christmas tree (template) with decorations (sentences). All three of my kids are Apple addicts and very adept at getting them to do exactly what they want them to do. Their poor father still stumbles along with his Android telephone and Windows on his PC/laptop. Watching Guus, I became extremely impressed by how he applied the Apple text commands so effortlessly and so effectively.
They all grew up in an age where the mobile (smart) phone was a basic, with Internet for communication and Google as a source of all knowledge you could reasonably need at any time. Or in other words, they are fully adapted to the world in which they were born. My childhood was in sleepy English villages, knowledge you found on paper, entertainment was woefully backward (I simply cannot bring myself to watch again on YouTube what I grew up appreciating so much).
People then were naïve, distant and showed little warmth. The telephone became affordable, as did the (black and white) TV, the portable radio was born and by the early 80’s you could buy and try to use the first personal computers. It was slow progress but there again evolution is slow, dreadfully slow. It amuses me to watch Dirty Harry, the 1971 movie starring Clint Eastwood, where he runs through a city park using pay-phones to communicate. The mobile phone arrived in 1973 but was so heavy Dirty Harry would have never caught up with the law-breakers. The incredibly fast evolution of the mobile phone into the smartphone was powered by the manufacturers rather than the users. The annual multibillion dollar business fuelled the investment and the users ditched their last phones for the new one. It amuses me to think that today’s smartphone with its so-advanced camera, internet connections and apps, is still used to actually call people!
As a small boy, the telephone was in the hallway, connected by a wire to “the wall” and connections were made by an operator. The circular dial stayed for a long time before giving way to push-buttons and my dad was so clever as to place an egg-timer next to the phone so that my mother spoke for no more than 3 minutes.
Oh it took so much effort to move from an old product to the new one, learning all those new commands and rules. My kids have no idea what I am talking about should I try to tell them this. User manuals are as out-dated as I am – everything now is so logical you are wasting your time on a manual. My apparent frustration as a Baby Boomer with adjusting to the rapid technological advances is elegantly summarised in a most readable article. It reassures me that I can point at evolution not equipping me fast enough to stay ahead but it does not explain why the Millennials have apparently no problems here.
I try to turn the tables round by claiming that Millennials are more and more superficial because they never learned to find knowledge “the hard way” in books and in encyclopaedias. They lean entirely on automated spell-checkers which generally are based on American English (Urgh!).
So now let’s be fair – Victorians would have had the same opinion about Baby Boomers as I have about Millennials. It is all subjective and depends more on you then them. If spelling is no longer taught because computers do it better, should I just accept this? If people no longer see the need to finish a sentence, so what? Listen to most of the idiots spouting on about Brexit (including people of apparent power) and listen to how badly they express themselves. Why let all this upset me? Maybe I will be less critical in the years that come…
dickwife 