They are living in a world that only existed in the science fiction of their parents’ salad days. They are familiar and adept with devices and gadgets that in my youth were either too expensive or nonexistent. What my generation dreamt of having one day, the kids today take for granted: cheap cell phones, powerful laptops, high-tech video games, high-speed Internet, crystal clear digital music.
And with all this technology at their fingertips comes a new way of looking at things. The youth feels at home in this brave new world — it is their home. We, their Gen X parents, have to play catch-up. These kids are more different than we are compared to our parents. Technology made a quantum leap in the past 20 years and we have to realize that although change is constant, things are changing more rapidly than ever before.
Consider information. There’s way too much of it now and it’s all available to anyone with a computer connected to the Web. Readers of this newspaper don’t have to call or send us a letter to react to anything we print. They can now go online and post their two cents. Newspapers and newsmakers can get valuable (or damnable) feedback quickly, which affects the way news is gathered, how it is read by the public and how officials deal with reporters.
When I was hired by a Manila newspaper nearly 20 years ago, the fax was the technological wonder. Imagine that: you inserted a page into this machine and it would come out of another machine that could be anywhere in the world. It was like Star Trek! “Beam me up Scotty!” In the newsroom the secretary of the editors was still taking dictation from our correspondents in the provinces, banging reports on a bulky typewriter, word for word, the telephone receiver wedged between her shoulder and ear. For the very latest international news, we depended on the gray teleprinters, which disgorged stories from AP, Reuters, AFP, UPI, etc. My cousins used to call me just to ask for the latest score in an ongoing NBA game.
Back in the days, the pager was the coolest thing ever. They didn’t just beep once or twice. They were already alphanumeric. They transmitted words! All you had to do was to “dial” the pager hotline, indicate the pager number of the person who would get the message, tell the operator your message, and that was it. So state of the art, really. And then one day, a drunk told me that pagers were no good. It should be able to reply to messages, he said. I laughed. Less than a decade later, people were not only getting text messages without calling an operator, they could also reply using the same gadget.
Cell phones in the early 1990s were humongous contraptions that required a battery as big as the one you would usually see in a car. And people were still writing letters, now known as snail mail. The dying (if not already buried) art of letter writing is more intimate, more personal, more thoughtful than the instant messages we inflict on each other nowadays. Indeed, text messaging is so widespread that it has already infected e-mails and social network postings. U knw wht I mean.
Everything, it seems, is quicker, faster, easier. Hence, artificial, common, shallow.
But before we head to the wilderness, build a cabin or a hut and ponder the Unabomber Manifesto, we oldies have to remind ourselves that Socrates, too, was against this cutting-edge technology called writing — because he feared that the youth would no longer try to memorize the entire “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” Moreover, the Unabomber, lest we forget, is a few fries short of a happy meal.
This is a new century of a new millennium. We can only ignore modern technology at our own peril. The choice is either to rue the end of the world, our world, or to relax and try to win at least one game when playing Wii with our kids.
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