It’s hard for kids today to realize that we didn’t always have ubiquitous access to the internet. We didn’t walk around with phones in our pockets that could connect to the internet and get any answer we were curious about. We didn’t have hundreds of TV stations pushing content to us around the clock. In fact, we had very few radio stations that actually were on the air 24×7. Most radio stations where I grew up went off the air in the late evening and didn’t come back on until drive-time started the next morning. Every television station went off the air every night for hours at a time.
It was normal to have no electronic devices on for a good part of the day.
Today, my kids freak out if the internet goes down for 15 minutes. They lose their sensibilities if our cell service drops off for any amount of time. I’m not talking for hours, but rather for a few minutes. It’s like their world has come to an end. And for them, in an odd way, it has. Really.
Kids today have the entire world at their fingertips. Friendships are made (and broken) over electronic devices. Many stages in the courting process are utterly dependent on continuous communications. If a text is responded to quickly enough, all sorts of ideas pop into the heads of teenagers!
- “OMG, is he mad at me?”
- “what is she doing that’s taking forever for her to reply”
- “is he talking to somebody else”
- “what is going on, it’s been five minutes since she texted me”
- “was I too forward, texting first”
On a regular basis, I’m extremely thankful that I didn’t grow up in this age of continuous connectivity. I’m not sure that I could take the stress…and knowing my personality I would have obsessed over any and all of the questions I listed above. My teenage years were filled with enough angst, I didn’t need always-on communications to speed the process!
Sometimes it’s hard to relate to the kids of today. They have it so good…and they have it so bad. It’s like A Tale of Two Cities, all wrapped into a digital framework. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I’ll admit to loving the ability to do my work from anywhere. I’m blessed with instantaneous communicate with my kids, no matter where they are located in the world. During a recent summer one daughter was in Ireland, another in Belize, and a third in Argentina. Whenever time permitted, they were able to pick up a smart phone and shoot off a text. When they had WIFI, they could Skype or FaceTime and we could not only hear them…we could see their faces. At one point we even did a Skype multi-person call with people in four countries and seven states. It was awesome. Heck, one daughter went to Antarctica and had amazing WIFI and internet connectivity. We got to talk to her twice while she was on the southernmost continent. Awesome.
But with that kind of connectivity also comes a heavy price. We’re never turned off. It’s pretty hard to convince people that you’re incommunicado when everyone knows that cell service covers the better part of where anybody actually is. Even Antarctica is within the reach of the internet.
While I have the freedom to work from my home, I’m also on call for whomever needs me (or wants me) pretty much all the time. And that’s a lot different than it used to be.
I was fortunate to grow up in the 1960’s and 1970’s in Chicago, IL. It was a great place to be a kid, especially since we lived in the far off suburbs of the city. At the time it was called the super boonies, indicating how far away we seemed. It was roughly 40 miles to get to the heart of the city…but I had the best of both worlds. We had semi-rural living with all the conveniences of the city within easy reach.
One of the biggest advantages lay in television. Chicago was considered the entertainment center of the Midwestern US, and the number of TV stations did a lot to help promote that. There were ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates as well as WGN and WTTW. There were also a couple of UHF stations, some of which had some patently weird programming. From roughly 6:00am until 1:00am there was a constant stream of entertainment, sports, and news that was available.
From a television perspective, we lived in a virtual Heaven in the Chicago metro area. We had five TV stations to choose from. For any normal person, at that time, that was more than enough. But at the end of every broadcast day, the stations all signed off. They played the National Anthem, and then they discontinued broadcasting. Several of them did continue to display a TV Test Pattern though.
I remember waking up on the couch, after having fallen asleep watching Creature Features, and discovering the test pattern on the TV. I was fascinated by this image, but I never really knew what it was used for. It just meant that I was in trouble because I’d stayed up way too late and had left the TV on when I finally fell asleep.
The test pattern meant that the station was offline. No programming. No news or entertainment or sports were being streamed into the house. When the test pattern came on you turned off the TV. You actually had to interact with anybody who was around…or you could go to sleep. No getting on the computer to check Twitter. No Facebook on your smartphone. No e-mail barging into your house. No Snapchat. Just plain old conversation.
It was the best of times.
Today, neither the radio nor the television programming stops. Every station is on all the time. You can pick from hundreds of television stations. Even in our somewhat rural part of Kansas in the center of the US there are dozens of radio stations that come in. Obviously we have internet, so there are more options than you can imagine for entertainment and distraction. Cat videos, anyone?
It’s the worst of times.
There is no time to think. No time to really get away from it all without making a conscious effort. In many ways, that’s too bad. There used to be a time when you were automatically pushed back into the real world. The make-believe world of TV and Radio went silent. Your offline family and friends were the forefront. Sure you could escape into books, magazines, newspapers, or your imagination. But at least you were doing something more active than having stuff pushed mindlessly into your brain.
Go grab your TV remote and flip through the stations. What do you see? Entertainment, Trash, Sports, Trash, Junk, News, Trash, Documentary, Trash, Junk, and finally More Trash. There may be close to 200 stations, but how many of them actually have anything worth watching? And how many of them have things worth watching that you haven’t seen before?
This is the world our kids live in.
They don’t know any different. When you talk to them, they don’t understand. They don’t have a frame of reference. This year’s high school graduates, the Class of 2015, have only known a world where the iPhone and Android phones are present. They cut their teeth on the iPhone. It debuted when they were 9 or 10…and smartphone usage has exploded since then. They don’t really know a world without WIFI either. So they have a hard time imagining not having constant, fast connectivity.
And it’s only getting worse.
WIFI is becoming available everywhere. Cell service is getting faster and faster. The processing power in our smartphones, tablets, and wireless computers is increasing at an astronomical rate. We store files in the cloud, without really thinking about it. We have a question…we search for an answer. In fact, we don’t even call it searching anymore. We Google it. That’s how much our lives have been invaded.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Luddite. Don’t know what a Luddite is…well Google it!
But seriously, there is still a lot of beauty in the offline world. There is so much worth doing among things that take time. The creation of a meal. The crafting of a musical piece. The thoughtful composition of a handwritten letter. To accomplish those tasks properly…you need time. Time that isn’t filled with mindless prattle coming from the TV. Moments filled with your thoughts, not the ever-present notifications from your phone telling you that “Suzy just ate a bagel”. No Snapchats of your friend’s silliest face they could muster.
Time in the real world…without the digital world encroaching all the time.
It’s something I’ve been trying to explain to my kids for quite a while now…and I fear that it’s a losing battle.
So here’s my task to you, dear reader. Take a while today and go on a data fast. Not hours on end. Just a little while. Pick something to do that doesn’t involve the constant flooding of stuff into your brain. Just do something that lets you act and think without the crush of information overload that we’re so used to.
Honestly, it’s quite refreshing…and a bit scary!
I love this post! I was born in ’82 but I remember there being no TV after a certain time at night with either test card F or ceefax pages. The only access my kids have to TV shows is over the internet so with Netflix etc there is ALWAYS something to watch, unless the internet is down then none of them are really sure what to do with themselves! But I have to admit that I am the worst for continuously Googling anything that comes to mind so I should really take your advice and have a little down time everyday 🙂