Technical generations
“What’s a fax machine?”
There are people working today who don’t know.
In the 1980s, I produced a book about VCR tapes and video stores that’s so obsolete, you can’t even find a used copy any more.
Technical generations keep getting shorter–A hard drive from ten years ago is probably not going to work with your new laptop.
Contrast this with us. Human generations have been chronicled for thousands of years. We know who begat who.
Lee De Forest, father of radio, was raised by people who voted for Abraham Lincoln, but he died when Bruce Springsteen was twelve years old. That’s not many handshakes from “The Battle Hymn” to “Blinded by the Light”… During that same period of time, we invented and moved on from radio, live TV, nationwide magazines, color TV, cable TV, Compuserve, Yahoo, GeoCities, The Globe, MySpace and 10,000 other steps.
I’ve lived exactly half my adult life in the 20th century and the other half in the 21st. The cycles keep getting faster, but not the human generations. This means that we’re either bringing a bit of insight and wisdom to the changes, or allowing ourselves to be whipsawed, brainwashed or blindsided by all of it.
Up to us.