Digital Generation is Empowered While Parents are Lost in Cyberspace
The generation gap never was so vast, nor so symptomatic, as the one created by technology. Truly. It’s not like I’m some whiny Baby Boomer, convinced that we parents today have it worse than every generation before us.
It’s that in a world where access is power, we are the trainees.
Our status has been downgraded simply by virtue of the fact that when it’s time to download photos and send eCards, we have to ask our teenagers how.
In a serious reversal of roles, they hold all the usernames, while we sit paralyzed over our laptops, digital cameras and cell phones, screaming in primal pain for them to rescue us. Google, for God’s sake, was started by a couple of 23-year-olds, each of whom are worth $18.6 million, give or take an image search.
“Chris!” I shriek from the kitchen, where I am hunched over an ever-darkening computer screen. “Something’s wrong with my battery power.”
“I think you need a new cord,” calls my son, all of 19 years old, from the other room.
“What? What kind of cord? What do you mean? Can you do it for me?”
“Don’t you think it would be better if you ordered it yourself? You need to learn, Mom.”
See what I mean? That used to be my line.
The Natural Order Has Flipped
Back in the old days, when the natural order had the elders presiding over the tribal councils, parents wanted nothing to do with their kids’ culture. If anything, they held Elvis, rock and roll, flapper dresses and goldfish-swallowing in disdain.
Nowadays, we not only want our kids’ digital culture. We have to have it to turn on the stove.
Their culture is the heart and soul of the universe, where knowledge is power but first you have to know how to Google.
Sure, we get a little of that knowledge all on our own. But that’s all we get is a little, leaving us at the mercy of anybody born after 1988. They are the ones who instinctively know when to right-click and when to left-, which documents to avoid and why an Adobe reader popup is not a threat to security. Technology and change is second nature to them, while we still refer to making a phone call as “dialing” somebody up.
“You know,” I tell my son. “It’s really not so much that I’m a techno dunderhead. Think of me as Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
I’m the kind of person who once made an entire quilt top by hand, I tell him, rather than machine. I chop vegetables with a knife instead of a food processor, wash with bar soap instead of soap in a dispenser. Give me firewood over fire starters, wood over linoleum and George Clooney over Matthew McConaughey. I like process. I like touching the film that goes in the camera.
So I had a digital camera for a month before I finally summoned the courage to ask my son to teach me how to download pictures.
To his credit, he was very patient. He allowed me to interrupt a movie he was watching in the basement three times while he came upstairs and told me the same thing: “Click on `computer,’ then go to OS (C:). After a few minutes, right-click and drag.”
Right-click and drag. Right-click and drag. If I close my eyes, I can imagine I am walking the film to the drug store with my subordinate two steps behind.
-Debra-Lynn
Tags: kids and technology, parenting story, parenting tips, tech kids, techy teens, Teenagers (13-18), teenagers and technology