Having happily spent hours playing with the dirt under a bush in my front yard with Star Wars action figures when I was young, lost in my imagination, aided by props, I lament the complete shift that has occurred for many kids. It's a sea change, and I was ecstatic recently when my toddler niece played in the dirt on my watch - only got caught because she got dirt on her cheeks - I hope she never loses that curiousity - her parents were away...
Now my nephews - my sister has successfully resisted the introduction of video games for at least six years - hope she can continue to fight. For when the video game console gets in, it will change expectations forever.
There are no doubt kids who don't play in the dirt because of video games, but in my experience they're few and far between. Having watched my kids with lots of neighborhood friends, I'm inclined to think that if modern kids don't play outside as much, that's more likely to be because of lack of freedom (due to hysteria over child predators) than because of video games.
Many adults these days have very fond childhood memories both of playing outside and of video games — it makes me sad to think of a child missing out on either.
idk. I bought my son a Nintendo DS when he turned 3 (reward for potty training). I'm really glad I did as he's already showing off some cool mathematical and logical thinking ability. There's good games and bad games, plusses and minuses as with everything. I think the key is variety and moderation.
When I was a kid, house sizes were smaller and blocks were larger. The house I grew up in would have been < 100 square metres, and the block about 1000 square meters or so. This meant loads of backyard; we had a large workshop (loads of wood, tools etc), a chook run, a few fruit trees, some trees for climbing, paved area (concrete slabs) for bikes, some grass and a veggie patch. Now most houses are well over 200 square metres, and land much smaller. Many new housing developments near us call anything over 500m2 'large'
And beyond the house... when I was a kid there were large areas of natural bush land to play in/explore. Now they're pretty much all gone, replaced in part by (what we call) ovals - a grass playing area for footy/soccer and with perhaps a swing and slide in the sun. Not much fun.
Roads are busier too. We built a go-kart (non motorised) and my parents had no problems letting us tear down the local hill road in it. Street cricket or footy was also very common, but again, just not possible now
I'm only 25, and my parents steadfastly refused to buy me a video game machine when I was a kid, but this still flabbergasts me. Playing outside is something public service announcements on television are telling kids to do. What the hell?
I was never much of a play-in-the-dirt kid, if I wasn't building something I didn't see the point. (sure, you can build stuff with dirt, but my imagination called for a bit more than dirt could manage as a building material)
Not in 1990, that's for sure. Heck, in _1981_ we had ATMs all over my small town of Vernon, BC. Wikipedia (which _wasn't_ around in 1990, and I would sorely miss) tells me the first ATMs came into the United states around 1969 - and browsing through that article, the appear to be fairly common by 1975)
I was working at a bank in 1977 (in the systems/apps group) when they installed the first ATMs in Tampa. It was an interesting time. The original development unit had to be moved across the street, from the data center to the main branch. So one Saturday, 6 guys got out there and pushed it down the sidewalk and across the crosswalk. Good thing no one from IBM was around, they would have freaked out. (it was an IBM 3614 ATM)
I still make that joke when I return DVD's sometimes. I would open it and look at the DVD as I return it, and say 'just checking that I rewinded it' - the 18 year old clerks have no idea what I am talking about.
It's interesting though that the most common 6-sided pencil would fit perfectly for the cassettes. Had the hole been just a bit bigger or smaller and it wouldn't have worked.
I remember a friend in junior high using a pen to rewind to spare his walkman batteries…
In my opinion, the real generation gap begins close to the current age of 22. People 22 or younger very likely had the internet in Elementary schools, a computer before they entered middle school (probably with the internet), video systems with 3D accelerators, broadband before they got out of high school, and Wikipedia for the entirety of their college career, among other things.
I think I was the only person who was in my freshman college class in 1998 that knew you didn't need disk up to connect to the Internet. Sharing that single T1 with 2000 other students sucked.
I am about to take off on a plane so I don't have much else to say, but this was really bothering me.
Really?
How about today's white self-hatred? I lived in Japan for quite a time, and it is a breath of fresh air not to year people go on and on about how ashamed you should be because god gave you a white skin (and that all social ills of other groups are due to you).
Maybe I didn't express myself clearly enough, but I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out that you're only seeing one side of the story.
> year [sic] people go on and on about how ashamed you should be because god gave you a white skin (and that all social ills of other groups are due to you).
Also, maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd, or don't watch enough CNN, but I have never experienced this in my life.
Rumors, lies, media manipulation, thwarted by a few seconds of research. If more people bothered, it would be a better world.
Off topic, but obligatory Monty Python piece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
The rankings give disproportionate weight to opinions of the activists and enthusiasts that may be at odds with the views of the larger public. It's as if the United Nations General Assembly made all its decisions by referring the question to whichever nation cares most about the issue: the Swiss get to rule on watchmaking, the Japanese on whaling.
That seems quite prophetic now. And there are links between gaming the system for political gain then and now. [3]
Oh, and the feedback loop [4].
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/03/antiwar_slogan_coine...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/weekinreview/18NUNB.html
[3] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/28/web_politics_how_rea...
[4] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/26/britannica_slaps_goo...
I remember as a kid being told by my father to go play somewhere else, because I was bothering my mother who was on the phone long distance.
Even when I went to college in 1999, I remember it being an issue since not everyone's cell plan featured long distance included, but everyone came with a cell phone that had a number local to their hometown. People would end up racking up long distance charges on their cell phones just to call a friend in the next building over.
Thought: mobile data charges are the next generation's "long distance" (or are at least headed that way).
http://www.skytel.co.cr/advocacy/research/1991/0817.html
And for hacking fun, I was enamored with Steve Jobs' NeXT computer. Among other things, I worked on the Tetris port:
http://www.artizia.com/tetris/contributors.html
A year later, I found my first developer job via the Internet and ended up in the NYC area. About a year out of college I bought a used 386 computer, got Linux running and a PPP connection, then I was back on the Internet.
Today, the Internet is just bigger and faster, while Steve's NeXT computer fits in your front shirt pocket.
I remember two technological developments that year: I saw email for the first time at the Boston public broadcaster WGBH, and one of the larger American airlines installed phones in the backs of economy seats (I still see them every now and then, but don't think they work anymore). The calls were expensive as hell.
Some people had car phones, and "beepers" had spread out from professional occupations to youth culture (the Tribe Called Quest song "Sky Pager" references this) but I did not know anyone who had a mobile phone in the US in 1990. I saw my first mobile phone in London in 1991.
GUIs were very widespread on campuses, but there were still a surprising amount of command-line based software being used in the workplace. At one of my first jobs at a UK record label in 1991 they had me using Word Perfect (?) which involved green text on a black screen, and lots of keyboard shortcuts. Aside from the email example mentioned earlier, every business I dealt with in 1990-1991 used faxes or the post to send documents.
EDIT: added beeper/mobile phone/GUI/fax recollections
Laser printers were a frightfully expensive piece of equipment and wasting toner bothered me. So went through ghostscript code to realize for the first time how beautiful code can truly be. Patched a part of the driver to handle economy mode.
Had it not been for FSF and open-source, I would perhaps have never learned programming. I did not major in CS, but for those who did, without FSF it would have been unaffordable.
I had to dress up to go to church.
From the time I can remember forward, the rule was that I just had to be home...eventually. I couldn't actually spend the night in the woods, but I could explore them to my heart's content.
I rode my bicycle everywhere. I rode my bike to school starting the summer of 4th grade, 3 miles each way down a highway and through town, but I didn't even get killed a little bit.
Twenty years ago was (late) 1990, not $700 VCRs, no video games, or people kicked off of airplanes for wearing sweatpants.
Seriously though, I'm grateful to my brother who's kept my nephews on a strict time limit and filter when it comes to TV and video games. They play outside and put their amazing imaginations to use.
If you think about it, it's all before super cheap labor/parts from China, not just a technological gap.
One of my more earlier memories is standing in line for Star Wars. It went clear around a building or two and as a child it was the most spectacular thing to see that many people in a row.
Oh and I remember being given a nickel to buy a bagel. Damn I've gotten old :-(
- I got my first computer: an Atari 400 computer with 16k of RAM and no storage, so I would write a program and then just turn it off. The OS and a BASIC interpreter also fit in that 16k so it wasn't hard to write a program that would be too big to fit into memory.
- The APPLE ][ was a spark of pure genius. The first time I played with it, it changed my life. I would walk a couple miles to the computer store on weekends so I could work on one. (I rememeber the Lisa and then Macintosh coming out and somehow not being impressed.)
- Software piracy was rampant. Software was sold through publishers, like books.
- Elephant memory was the cool makers of floppy disks. I had this big poster in my room: http://home.comcast.net/~kevin_d_clark/ems/ems-mag-ad-2-smal...
- My first modem was 300 baud. That was so slow, it took a second or so for each character to appear.
Note: my memory is a bit fuzzy, this might have happened anywhere from 1990-1993.
Basically:
You had to be more diligent when taking care of business; You had to be clean when going places (no pajamas on a plane); There was no bull security theatre when travelling; There were fewer distractions for children.
