At dinner tonight I was talking with my friend Kati about what it will be like to raise kids from a generation that is so technologically advanced. Granted, every generation goes through a lot of technological breakthroughs, but our generation took quite the large leap. As I plan to tell my children one day, "When I was a kid, we didn't even have the Internet!"
I mean, think about it. If you're anywhere from 20-30, you went from listening to cassette tapes to listening to MP3s. That's going from sitting in your room (or your parents' car) listening to 16 songs, tops (8 songs if you are too lazy to flip the tape over) to having access to about 20,000 songs on one device that is about the same size as a cassette tape. And those damn tapes were hard work. Want to listen to a song again? There's no quick touch of a button--you had to rewind! Don't have a fancy rewinding tape player? You better be able to jam your pinky finger into those little holes in the tape player and wind back that extremely sensitive magnetic tape. I mean of course we didn't go straight from cassette tapes to iPods. There was that fancy compact disc that some of us still use. We were still limited to about 16 songs, but at least you were able to pinpoint where they started and ended.
Now let's move on to the digital revolution of video. We all remember the VHS tape. Stored safely in a nice cardboard sleeve, or if it was a Disney video, your VHS came nestled in a big plastic case with brightly colored pictures and extra padding to protect the virtue of characters like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Pop in that video, and you had to fast-forward past the previews, and maybe even make some adjustments to the tracking so that you didn't have weird fuzzy stripes floating across your screen for an hour and a half. And if you rented from Blockbuster (remember Blockbuster?), you had to actually rewind the video in order to return it. "Be kind, rewind!" There was no skipping to certain scenes! Bonus features?! Puh-lease. The bonus was pulling that VHS tape out of the sleeve and realizing you didn't have to rewind it for 15 minutes before enjoying your feature film. And forget about subtitles or skipping to certain scenes. Hard of hearing? Turn up the volume. Want to skip to your favorite part? You better be willing to search around for 20 minutes. And let's not forget about the Laser Disc. You know, the huge DVD. Maybe you watched educational movies on this digital media in middle school or high school. If you personally owned one, you probably don't want to admit it. Then of course, we made the leap to the lil' laser disc aka the DVD. Digital Video Disc. Brilliant. No rewinding, unless you wanted to. You can watch your movie in English, in captioned English, in French, in Spanish. Find your scene easily by switching through tiny pictures of the actual movie! And now, you don't even have to go to the store to rent a DVD. You can order DVDs online and have them mailed to your house, or rent them from a vending machine!
And then of course there are video games. Always having to sit a little too close to the TV so that your controller could stay plugged into the Super Nintendo, the N64, the Atari if you're on the more vintage end of things. Having to take the game cartridge out and physically blow the dust out of it to keep it from shorting out in the console. And remember those massive memory packs? Like a USB drive for your controller, but 6 times as large and about 1/10 of the capacity, if that. And then the Rumble Paks! So you can really feel like you're in the game, which you're probably playing on a 15-inch cathode ray tube television in your basement. Nowadays you barely need a controller. You just dance around in front of the game console and it actually detects your movements and then accurately interprets them into virtual motion! No more jumping up and down in a pixelated 2-D environment. You're a real virtual person now. Your game has depth.
So as I sit here, typing on my lap top computer and reminiscing about Windows 95 and games like Treasure Mountain, thinking about how when I wanted to know something in elementary school, I had to look it up in a book, a paper book, I fantasize about forcing my kids to relive the ancient days of cassette tapes, Sony Walkmen, VCRs, and Sega Dreamcasts--about making them truly grateful for what they have. But then I think about how I still listen to vinyl records, read paper books, and capture photos on film, and I think to myself, in 10 years, kids will probably refer to cassette tapes and CDs as vintage and actually think they're "cool". So, when you're cleaning out your basement, or your apartment, and you come upon a cassette tape or a VCR, think about keeping it. Because one day your kids will be curious, and let's be honest--unless you have physical evidence, they'll never believe what you had to go through to listen to your favorite song or watch a movie. And having to google "Playstation" as proof--well that's just embarrassing.
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