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Oct. 7th, 2016 03:08 pmI have a theory about life in the internet age. As I expounded it to a table of coworkers yesterday and they seemed to think it a good one, I share it with you.
I think people of my generation and the one after are immigrants to the Internet, expatriates from Unconnected Land, which I like to call “1980”. The world of landline phones—which were just called phones, because there was no other kind. The world of watching TV programs when they aired, or if you were rich enough, recording them on a VCR to watch later.
People of my daughter’s generation? They are natives of the Internet. They are fluent in its rapidly evolving language and mores and swim happily in its milieus. We immigrants can adopt the new technologies, learn the new language, and adapt to our new country with varying amounts of success, but we’ll never be native. There’s always something we just don’t quite get.
Some of us are eager immigrants, and some of us were shanghaied; some of us never stop wishing we could just go home again. Some of us are all those things at once.
I think people of my generation and the one after are immigrants to the Internet, expatriates from Unconnected Land, which I like to call “1980”. The world of landline phones—which were just called phones, because there was no other kind. The world of watching TV programs when they aired, or if you were rich enough, recording them on a VCR to watch later.
People of my daughter’s generation? They are natives of the Internet. They are fluent in its rapidly evolving language and mores and swim happily in its milieus. We immigrants can adopt the new technologies, learn the new language, and adapt to our new country with varying amounts of success, but we’ll never be native. There’s always something we just don’t quite get.
Some of us are eager immigrants, and some of us were shanghaied; some of us never stop wishing we could just go home again. Some of us are all those things at once.
