Overheard a kid at the hardware store ask his dad what a 'landline' was

I was picking up some pipe thread sealant last week, standing in line behind a father and his son, maybe eight years old. The kid pointed to a display of old rotary phones they had up as decoration and asked, 'What are those for?' His dad said they were phones, and the kid just looked confused and said, 'But where do you plug them in?' It hit me right then how much basic, shared knowledge has just evaporated in one generation. I'm only in my thirties, but explaining a dial tone or a busy signal to that kid would be like explaining a horse and buggy. It's not that the tech is gone, it's that the whole idea of a phone being a place, not a thing you carry, is gone. Has anyone else had a moment like that, where you realized your normal is someone else's history lesson?

3 comments

3 Comments

white.blair13d ago

Shared knowledge evaporated" is a bit much. Kids not knowing outdated tech isn't some big loss, it just means stuff got better. My normal is a VCR, I don't expect a kid to get it and that's fine.

shane_fisher3713d ago

My buddy tried to show his niece a DVD last month and she kept tapping the screen like it was a tablet. She asked where the apps were. He had to explain the whole concept of a menu on a disc. It's wild how fast that stuff flipped. I get what white.blair is saying about tech getting better, but it's still a weird feeling when you see that gap up close. The basic rules of how you interact with a thing just vanish.

rosebarnes5d ago

Ever try showing a kid a CD? They'll look for the skip button like on a streaming playlist. My advice is to treat it like a history lesson, not a tech demo. Start with the physical stuff, like how the disc spins and a laser reads the tiny bumps. Then show the menu is just a list you pick from with a button, not a touch screen. It clicks for them way faster when you explain the machine part first.