I sub­scribe to Dinosaur Comics. I read them most days. I find them vaguely amus­ing about 60% of the time and laugh out loud amus­ing about 2% of the time.

Today’s comic, and the asso­ci­ated dia­tribe about the way old peo­ple han­dle sto­ries about young peo­ple and tech­nol­ogy made me laugh. The story it’s respond­ing to is this one about a young guy who used an updated Face­book sta­tus as an alibi. You can’t get that from the comic…

But the asso­ci­ated edi­to­r­ial spells it all out…

But as that arti­cle goes on, it slides deep into “oh man OLD PEOPLE STEREOTYPES” ter­ri­tory. Joseph Pollini, who oth­er­wise sounds awe­some because he lists “hostage nego­ti­a­tion” as his pri­mary area of exper­tise, says that teenage HACKERS could have posted that pancake-centric Face­book update to Rodney’s pro­file while pos­ing as Rod­ney at his home com­puter, while Rod­ney was actu­ally out busy rob­bing at the time — which, you know, is pos­si­ble? But it’s not very likely, and it takes some knowl­edge. No prob­lem, says Joseph! Teenagers are really good at inter­net, because “they use it all the time”. “They [teenagers!] could develop an alibi. They watch tele­vi­sion, the movies, there is a mul­ti­tude of rea­sons why some­one of that age would have the knowl­edge to do a crime like that.”

ABC Radio up here in Townsville has an amus­ing weekly seg­ment with a local lady in her twi­light year (how do you say “old” in a polit­i­cally cor­rect man­ner?). Last night she was talk­ing about kids and their fat thumbs that come from an insa­tiable desire to play the lat­est great­est games.

I think future chil­dren are going to be play­ing the games their fathers give them. The old old gen­er­a­tion miss the point that the new old gen­er­a­tion embrace tech­nol­ogy the same way the new new gen­er­a­tion do. Though I sup­pose there’s a dif­fer­ence between the way even my youngest sis­ter approaches tech­nol­ogy and the way I do.

Mark Driscoll, when he was in Aus­tralia, made a com­ment about faith — one gen­er­a­tion wholly owns it, the next accepts (or assumes) it, and the next denies it. I think tech­nol­ogy works in reverse.

Let us, for a moment, take a look at my fam­ily as a case study…

My dad was a clas­sic early adopter. He was an elec­tri­cal engi­neer which put him at the front of the curve when it came to devel­op­ing com­puter tech­nol­ogy. So far at the front of the curve that he wrote a book about one of the first com­put­ers. This, through a vari­ety of cir­cum­stances detailed in that link, led to a life­time of early adopt­ing. His gen­er­a­tion (and to be kind, the one before it) built the com­puter industry.

This in turn meant that I grew up expe­ri­enc­ing a heap of new com­puter prod­ucts and games. I think I wrote my first assign­ment using the Inter­net (Com­puServe) in 1994. It was about Rwanda. It was, on reflec­tion, pos­si­bly the best assign­ment I ever wrote (except maybe for the self help guide to writ­ing self help books).  I like tech­nol­ogy. I use tech­nol­ogy. I find tech­nol­ogy incred­i­bly use­ful. I think, though this hasn’t really been tested, I could func­tion with­out it.

My gen­er­a­tion ben­e­fited greatly from the work of the gen­er­a­tion pre­vi­ously — and many of us (not me) are now inter­net mil­lion­aires and bil­lion­aires because we missed the first dot com boom and caught the sec­ond. We are also a gen­er­a­tion of hack­ers and pirates who believe tech­nol­ogy should work for us, not us for it.

Mean­while the next gen­er­a­tion down couldn’t really live with­out it. Lets take lit­tle sis­ter num­ber three as an exam­ple. I sus­pect if I stole her mobile phones (that’s right, plural) she’d go into melt­down. She can cor­rect me if I’m wrong.

Her gen­er­a­tion have grown up immersed in tech­nol­ogy — some of them have one mobile phone with a bunch of dif­fer­ent SIM cards based on who they want to call on free deals. They have adopted a new, and very stu­pid lan­guage where words sub­sti­tute num­bers for let­ters and acronyms and ini­tialisms flourish.

I’m friends with some of her friends on Face­book. And they’re all like “OMG, OMG!!! I’d totally die with­out my phone? I totes* need to update my Face­book Sta­tus with every mean­ing­less thought” and “where’s my pan­cakes?”… though that’s sans punc­tu­a­tion includ­ing apos­tro­phes. Because they don’t know how to use them.

Her gen­er­a­tion, well, they write viruses that carry pop­u­lar inter­net pranks onto the phone hand­sets of many of my generation’s geeks. Those peo­ple run­ning around with unlocked iPhones.

I don’t know if there’s a point to this dia­tribe. Except per­haps to high­light how silly it sounds when any gen­er­a­tion talks about the next gen­er­a­tion with­out com­pletely under­stand­ing where they’re com­ing from. Peo­ple older than me didn’t grow up with com­put­ers — though they design the com­put­ers and the soft­ware that I like to play with… To bring in another topic alto­gether, this is like music. Young peo­ple think any­one about ten years older than them must be out of touch with their music and what’s cool — and yet they’re all lis­ten­ing (with the excep­tion of Jonas Broth­ers fans) to music made by peo­ple ten years older than them.

I think it’s sad when peo­ple my age are excited by the prospect of see­ing Brit­ney Spears (who’s two years older than me) in con­cert. Don’t they realise she’s just a vac­u­ous exam­ple of our gen­er­a­tion? Why aren’t they lis­ten­ing to Radio­head or some­one respectable.

The other area this whole gen­er­a­tion gap expresses itself in is fash­ion. I want to know if I’m going to sud­denly start dress­ing like an old per­son — or if what I wear now, or what oth­ers of my gen­er­a­tion wear now, will sud­denly become old per­son cloth­ing at some point. I can’t wait for vin­tage vin­tage T-Shirts to be the cloth­ing of choice for vin­tage peo­ple. As some­one who grew up want­ing to find grandpa shirts in op-shops I sense some sort of irony in peo­ple buy­ing the t-shirts I wear now in op-shops in twenty years. All in a bid to be cool and authentic.

That is all.

*Totes is an actual quote from sev­eral of the next generation’s sta­tuses. It’s a dumb word. It means totally. This is the gen­er­a­tion gap at work people.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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