Growing Up

I was late in getting up today.  So, when I turned on the radio, I found The Grill Team in the middle of a funny segment about what 18 year olds have missed out on in their lives.  One of them said that when 'Pulp Fiction' was out on the big screen, they weren't born, and Kirk Cobain was never alive for them; he was already dead and buried.  It made me realise that I read another blog yesterday where the manager of it had to teach her children how to use a phone book.  And once they found her friend's home phone number and called it, she was shocked to find that her daughter hung up on them quickly.  She asked her why and her young 15 year old said that a man answered... the man was her friend's father.  

This got me thinking that a lot of what kids see and do now is lost on them if they were to lose their technology tomorrow.  If the internet was to drop offline for a week, if Foxtel was switched off, if their x-box was taken off them, if their smart phone was taken off them... what would they do?  Some of them - for the first time in their lives - would step outside and look around.  While others would become the worse kinds of teenagers around for a while before realising that life isn't that bad really.  

After all I grew up without that much technology around me.

I'm an X-Generation.  I grew up with a television that didn't have a remote control, saw most of my childhood shows in black and white (until around 1976 when they turned into colour; and how beautiful they were!).  Then, I learned to play games with my brother and the neighbourhood kids until the street lights turned on.  The family sat around the kitchen table and ate dinner together, talking about what we did in the day, taking our time eating our dinner and not rushing through it so we could watch a television show.  Actually most of the time, the television was on, but we'd have it turned down low.

While my brother played soccer for the church I read books from the local library.  On the weekends, we made milk shakes in the blender from milk that came from glass 600ml bottles.  These bottles were delivered by a milk-o who left them on the bottom step of our house in the afternoon on Friday - all 6 - 8 bottles! - and we'd find a place in the fridge for them.  By the time the weekend was over, most of those bottles were empty, washed and ready to return to him.  He'd pick up the milk money which was left at the bottom of the step in an envelope under the empty bottles to pay for the milk.  It was really something to have the milk delivered to our homes.  The truck was always full of milk, there was a bell and at Christmas, there was some poor guy dressed in a Santa suit handing out lollies to kids on the week before Christmas sweating like you wouldn't believe.  But kids wouldn't know this as milk-o's aren't around anymore. 

It's not just milkmen that are missing from our lives.  I've noticed it's other things such as bookstores and banks and insurance companies are going online as well to save money.  So, it's pushing people to be online.  However, what happens when the net crashes and we can't get online to pay our insurance or buy that book we need - or want - to buy.  Or is it all just something I've been thinking too much about with technology?  I know I'm writing this on a big technological interface, however, if I didn't have this, I would have just written this down in my personal journal.  It would have still had the same affect down the line.  So, leave your opinions and let me know what you think.  Until my next post, take care, keep warm and safe and remember, I'm always here.