Comments on: I’m So Sorry, Dad, I Had No Idea

By: joyeuse13

joyeuse13 — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:58:57 +0000

Well, it’s not just a function of age, though. There seems to be a certain personality type that reaches out for new innovations and ways of doing things.

My grandfather embraced every new gadget that came down the pike, and I’ve no doubt if he were alive today he’d have his own website. His daughter, my mom, got her A+ certification several years back. She manages her and her husband’s website. Aaron’s dad owns more computers than socks, it seems, bc he’s constantly upgrading.

My friend who teaches French in NJ–only a few years older than I–is afraid to leave a comment in my LJ for fear she’ll “mess something up.”

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:30:21 +0000

Probably because we’ve lived their lives already, so to speak, but not the lives of those as old as we hope to become. They’re easier to understand and therefore we have more in common with them.

Pop

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:28:16 +0000

Not by way of defense, but of observation. Cost is always an issue (resources are finite, wants are infinite; I have more wants now than I can satisfy), especially for the parsimonious among us, but more important is one of philosophy. As George Smiley observes in *The Spy Who Came in from the Cold*, people often confuse means and ends. Many of us born (or who came of age) under a mushroom cloud share a view of technology that is simultaneously pragmatic and leery. Neither luddites, nor technophobes, nor technophiles, we ask whether the technological means help us achieve a desired end, whether the end is worth the price in a variety of venues, whether other means offer equal or superior results, whether deprovements are likely, and whether anything’s to be gained by being first to market. Some of us trust people more than technology, and prefer to live as simply and self-reliantly as possible. So, unless there’s a need (like the need for tone rather than pulse when adding home-based internet access), we prefer proven reliability to unnecessary technological innovation.

By: sargentjr

sargentjr — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 21:42:32 +0000

Oh my goodness.

As far as I know, the only reason Dad and Mom have touch-tone dialling now is that the phone company stopped giving them the choice.

By: quadrivium

quadrivium — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 21:29:22 +0000

But, yet we have more in common with those that are younger than us than those that are older than us. Interesting break points in technology.

By: domesticat

domesticat — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 18:03:16 +0000

Hey, my mother still doesn’t have touch-tone dialing TO THIS DAY.

Still costs extra out there in da stix.

You think a dialup modem will drive you crazy? Imagine a 33.6 dialup modem set to pulse dial, and the ISP modem number starting with 778.

Snergh.