[kiba]

For last couple of centuries or so, each generation grows up with unprecedented change in their lifetime.

For example, I enter elementary school, the internet started to take off and browsers were primitive. Nowadays, we can enjoy the convenience of movie streaming, fast browsers, and extraordinary rich video games(Dwarf Fortress, I am looking at you). So it doesn't make sense to me that congressmen are literal dinosaurs. Rather, I think they stop updating their model of the world and refuse to absorb any knowledge for the last couple of decade.

In any case, the situation with copyright is not new. If you look at the issue centuries ago, you would realize that we been having this debate for a long time. Today, the internet only make pirating easier than ever and bring the issue of copyright to the forefront of public consciousness.

We thought about "old versus new" business model because we lack an understanding of the history of copyright. In reality, it have much more to do about how your model of how to make money.

[pinaceae]

you're seriously too young to understand. i am 32 years old. the first time i went online was in 1999. before that i had personal computers, yes. but no internet whatsoever. can you even imagine a world without google and wikipedia?

i got my first mobile phone in that time frame.

my parents were born after ww2. your time as a youth shapes you, forms your understanding of the world. you translate everything you see into analogies of the past. a mobile phone is a like a normal phone without a cord. easy. but wrong for the generation that grew up with mobile phones.

my parents grew up with black and white tv. literally no computers in sight, anywhere. they got engineering diplomas while only utilizing a calculator (high tech for their time!) and pen and paper.

the majority of people (aka normal people) who where adults before 1985 do not "get" this new world the way you do. the outliers who build microsoft even didn't get it at first.

[rickmb]

I don't believe that for a second.

I'm 45 years old. My parents were born during ww2. I grew up with black and white tv (okay, partly because we couldn't afford color yet...). But my dad, an unskilled immigrant, ran IT companies for most of his life, and my mother, well into her 60's, got an iPad before I did. Hell, she was on Skype when I still had a landline... She even owns a friggin' Wii.

If there are people who don't seem to "get" this new world, it's not because because they are uneducated (both my parents' education ended with highschool) or because they are "old". It's because they don't want it. They've seen more change during their lifetime than you can imagine, some it they supported (or even made happen), some of it they were against. They're perfectly capable of dealing with changing times.

These politicians see a change that erodes their power and gives it to the people, and they simply don't want that to happen. That's why they belittle us by calling us "nerds", because they consider us a threat, not because they don't "get" it.

They get it quite well, thankyouverymuch, which is exactly why they say what they say and do what they do.

[keithpeter]

I'm 53, my parents were teenagers before the end of the European second world war. My Dad would have loved all this stuff. My mum's best friend was a telex operator in a large shipping company the 1950s and they had this thing called operator net. Facebook for 20something sweater girls, it sounds a hoot.

Here is my thought: the Internet (e.g. the IP/TCP protocols and http) can support either large centralised systems (Facebook, Google++, Twitter &c) or atomised individual 'presences' (shivaplug server next to your router and rss as microblogging tool). I suspect we are going in the centralised direction, and that our various governments are happy with that...

[bh42222]

You are all right!

I think that a lot of older people DO very much continue to keep up with all social and technological changes.

But the main point, that older generations are both socially and technologically conservative is not controversial.

I think that, despite many exceptions, this is a universal human truth.

[readymade]

Lets have a contest to see who is the oldest!!!!!

[MPSimmons]

Your parents spent their time learning technology.

The people in congress spent their time learning to be politicians. It wasn't until the last 15 years that you had to use a computer to do everything, so if you learned how to do what you do now more than 15 years ago, you didn't need a computer, so you probably don't know how they operate.

[dedward]

my folks, older than yours, also have their tech..... that doesnt mean they get how every detail works. there is no blanket statement here, but it is largely true that those who grew up with black and white tvs will not see things the same way. they may like the internet, but those of us a bit younger watched it hatch and explode globally. those even younger wont remember a tome without it and will have an even different perspective.

[rhizome]

Those elders who spent their time on ham radio and trains back in the B&W days acquired an inherent understanding of cellphones and the internet, respectively. :)

[jdietrich]

This isn't a generational thing, not in the least.

Not understanding the internet transcends all ages and social classes. It isn't a symptom of age, but of ignorance and incuriosity. The people we're talking about haven't even tried, they haven't bothered to look up "the internet" in an encyclopaedia, haven't bothered to ask a savvy intern to explain it to them. They're people who habitually hold strong opinions on things that they know less than nothing about - c.f. climate change.

[lelele]

> your time as a youth shapes you, forms your understanding of the world.

Only if you stop learning. And by learning i mean challenging your ways of thinking and acting (think about a computer geek learning salsa dancing), not learning something similar to things you already know (think about a computer geek learning yet another programming language).

> the majority of people (aka normal people) who where adults before 1985 do not "get" this new world the way you do.

Don't be a sheep. I mean, do not get along only with people in your age bracket. Keeping an open mind, socialize with younger people: they'll teach you things, if you let them.

Disclosure: 37 year old fart here.

[saulrh]

  For last couple of centuries or so, each generation grows
  up with unprecedented change in their lifetime.

I'd argue that this generation's changes aren't just unprecedented, but in an entirely different category. Not just in size, but in speed and extent. The cell phone alone is the most fundamental change in society in human history; suddenly, every person on earth can communicate instantly with almost any other person, and can broadcast an image to almost the entire planet in a matter of hours. And we couldn't do that twenty years ago. We couldn't even do that five years ago.

[dalke]

Consider someone who died in 1955 at the age of 70. In their life they saw the introduction of: home electric providers, telephones, radio, movies, automobile, air travel (from nothing to the jet age!), nuclear energy, the polio vaccine, penicillin, color photography, frozen food, and more. There are also less known changes with deep impact: the introduction of municipal garbage service cleaned up our cities and improved health, the vertical filing system revolutionized data management, Linotype made it possible to have newspapers more than 8 pages long, the tractor, artificial fertilizer, and a mass of farm inventions opened up agriculture. Home refrigerators lets people keep fresh food longer and more cheaply than ice boxes could. Modern foods ranging from cornflakes to PEZ were invented during that time.

And you think the cell phone is more fundamental than, say, the widespread deployment of telephones in the first place? Before then, there was no way to have a voice conversation with someone more than a 100 meters away.

When the polio vaccine was invented "church bells were ringing across the country, factories were observing moments of silence, synagogues and churches were holding prayer meetings, and parents and teachers were weeping. One shopkeeper painted a sign on his window: Thank you, Dr. Salk. 'It was as if a war had ended', one observer recalled." (Wikipedia for Jonas Salk.) That vaccine still saves the lives of 100,000s of children every year even when compared to the 1800s. For that matter, before penicillin you could die because of a rose thorn accidentally scratching your mouth, as the sad story of Albert Alexander shows.

Tell me, how is the cell phone a more fundamental change than these?

[SoftwareMaven]

It is very hard for people to understand the impact of changes before their lives. All those things are "just the way the world is" for them. Conversely, I think it can also be difficult to understand how profound changes in the current day are if you aren't paying attention, and the world is big enough that there are profound changes happening somewhere that I may know is happening, but I don't understand how profound it really is.

And then, every once in a while, a polio vaccine is created, and the world is different for everybody. I certainly think the WWW is one of those. Facebook might be (800 million people under one roof is something, but I'm not convicted it is really changing the world).

[scott_s]

These are all excellent points, but I personally think that Facebook is a fundamental change on the order of phones in everyone's homes. That is, it is changing the way that most people communicate.

But, yes, overall, I think people tend to underestimate the radical changes that happened during the first half of the 20th century. By 1950, the "structure" of daily life was much closer to it was in 2000 than it was in 1900.

[molmalo]

You have a very valid point. I can't think of the enormous change the introduction of the home electric providers must have been. I mean, from candles to bulbs!

But then again, I think that the main difference now is the current rate of adoption of the new technologies. How many years took to build the electric system? How many years took the use of the mobile phone to become widespread? Everything moves faster and faster, and that's what is letting lots of people behind. They just can't adapt fast enough.

For example, my mother. Every time she has a new mobile phone, she asks me to teach her how to use it. I start saying, "Read the screen, think, decide and then press the buttons." Because, i tell her "if not, what will you do when even your TV has more and more menus?" Of course, she grumbles, but at least tries. And when she REALLY needs help to learn something, i help her.

And I see this pattern everywhere. Tech changes so fast now, that while a few people adapt extremely fast, and to some it takes it a little longer, to the rest, they're just tired of learning how to use new stuff, every now and then.

[dalke]

The complaint that people "just can't adapt fast enough" has been a near constant refrain for over a century. Read even the Wikipedia page about the "Roaring Twenties" and then tell me that the amount of change in that decade was slower than now.

Let's take some examples. Your baseline is the cell phone. The first commercial mobile phone was in 1983, so you're suggesting a time span of about 25 years. (Before 1983 it was possible to connect a two-way radio through to the phone system, but that's not the point you're trying to make.) By 1988, friends of mine had car phones. The StarTac phone came out in 1996 and marks the start of "widespread consumer adoption." But I would say that it took until 2005 where it started to supplant having a land line.

The first commercial (pre-built and for consumer use) radio receiver was in 1920. That marks the start of the "golden age of radio", which ended when TVs became more popular in the late 1950s. Surely that was as fast as the uptake of cell phones.

Semiconductor transistors were invented in 1947. "Transisterization" was so fast that crew of the Minnow had a transistor radio (in 1964) and no one was surprised by it. Transitors made entirely new categories of technology possible, so that we had a transistor-based game console (Pong-style "tennis" and "racquet-ball") in ~1975.

The first commercial (synthetic) detergents were introduced in 1933 (that's when Dreft was introduced) and "by the 1950s, soap had almost been completely replaced by branched alkylbenzenesulfonates." Not bad for 20 years! Actually it was bad, because we then found out it wasn't that biodegradable and had to find a replacement.

The neon light was first presented in 1910 and "became very popular for signage and displays in the period 1920-1940."

Prohibition lasted for 13 years in the US, and had a huge impact on daily life. That surely counts as an enormous change.

Cosmetics didn't become popular in the US until the 1910s, and the flappers of the 1920 used it with a vengeance. (WP says that previously it was too closely associated with prostitution, but the post-war trend was a reaction to the previously popular demure look, and that "[a] skewed postwar sex ratio created a new emphasis on sexual beauty, and because of the influence of Hollywood.)

All these big changes took place on the same time scale as the cell phone. How then do you measure the amount of change now, and compare it to (say) the amount of change in the 1920s? When was the last time that most people were not "tired of learning how to use new stuff"?

[molmalo]

You are right in most of your comment. And yes, people always has been tired of having to learn how to use new stuff (I can imagine a caveman grudging about having to learn how to start a fire. LOL)

But the scale and complexity is important too. You can't compare a radio with two dials, and a smartphone with lots of screens. It's a whole new level of effort to learn how to use it. It takes more time, and it stack over previous knowledge you are supposed to have. But I know lots of elder people who don't even know how to turn on a computer. And sadly, they reject smart phones and other new things because they just gave up.

[dalke]

I'm presuming that you've not heard much about the earliest radios. They had two or three batteries in them ("A", "B", and at the beginning, "C" cells.) Don't mix up the batteries when you wire them in and make sure you have the right polarity as otherwise you might fry the tubes. Batteries could easily leak, so check them out for problems. If you're on a farm, you might want one powered from your car battery, which meant you could take it back to the car or a generator in order to recharge it. Then there's antenna setup. And tube replacement (since tubes go bad). Also, the early radios (excepting crystal sets) usually had three or more dials. For example, when you change the frequency you need to change the impedance of your antenna to match it. (Raise the lid or read the owner's manual to find the chart of how those correlate.)

Radios got simpler to use, in part because of the strong demand to make them simpler. They got simpler to use sometimes at the expense of more internal complexity (a starter motor for an automobile, instead of a crank) but sometimes because we just figured out an easier way to do things (Wozniak's Disk II controller is a classic hacker example) .

On the other hand, you are omitting all of the difficult, complex things we used to do, which we don't do now. Do you sew all your clothes, bedsheets, and curtains? I sure don't. Sewing isn't easy. That's a "whole old level of effort" I don't need to know. Do you regularly can or preserve your own foods? A few do, but it's easier and cheaper to buy things from the store. Until the last 1800s, many engineers and scientists learned draftsmanship (as different than art, mind you) because that was the best way to make a visual record of what you saw. Of course, the camera has nearly completely replaced that requirement, which we use to learn different things. Evolution, thermodynamics, Maxwell's equations, and more have simplified what was previously a bunch of unconnected concepts.

Our culture rides the wave of "just complex enough." If it's too complex, like early microcomputers, only a few people make the effort to learn it. It it's useful enough, then there's a lot of work put into making it simpler. When it gets simple enough, there's widespread use. So widespread use happens when something is just barely simple enough for most people to understand.

The idea you are talking about is at least 45 years old. Alvin Toffler wrote "Future Shock" in 1970 about this very topic. It popularized the phrase "information overload", which was coined in 1964. Note how someone who was 20 then would be an "elder" now.

Again I ask you, how do you judge that the rate of growth is more now than it was in the 1920s, or the 1970s? What meaningful metrics do you use, and how do you correct for you own biases of what is important? As far as I can tell, excepting the Great Depression, the amount of change and the turmoil over the amount of change has been constant for over a century.

[dalke]

(typo: "even when compared to the 1980s", not 1800s. The polio vaccine "reduced the worldwide incidence from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 1,652 cases in 2007"; Wikipedia: Polio)

[zem]

"human history" covers a lot of territory. in terms of fundamental changes, nothing comes close to agriculture (let population densities skyrocket, enabled pyramid-style social setups) and writing (let knowledge accumulate rapidly from generation to generation).

[patrickk]

Not to mention the wheel (that ubiquitous cliche), the discovery of bronze (an alloy of copper and tin that allowed for more durable weaponry), the Haber-Bosch process; and so on.

[desas]

Unlike computing none of those things reached near-ubiquity within one generation though.

[dspillett]

* > I'd argue that this generation is seeing a larger change than any before.*

I don't think the cell phone is that significant on its own, though it is up there with the changes others have mentioned.

What this generation is seeing isn't one massive change: it is seeing a greater concentration of significant changes than previous generations, and some of those changes when grouped together have greater impact than they would individually.

[timthorn]

> The cell phone alone is the most fundamental change in society in human history

What about the railways?

[noonespecial]

Railways and phones are part of the same change. The ubiquitous, ever-present global network. They just had a bit less penetration and a ton more lag.

[iliis]

Oh, trains are pretty fundamental and changed a lot. But a device so small it fits into your pocket, let's you communicate in real time with almost everybody, takes pictures and even movies (and sends them around the world), precisely calculates not only time but your location on the whole earth, can recognize speech, songs, books and other stuff, is able to translate fast between common languages, oh, and it let's you access the whole knowledge of our entire species wherever and whenever you want...

I mean, I love railways, I really do, but compared to a thing like our cell phones? It would even be possible (altough quite cumbersome), to entirely live just from this thing! (Do some programming/webdesign/consulting/whatever to make money, order food and everything else online and you don't have to do anything else.)

[timthorn]

Clearly mobiles enable much faster communication - but in terms of societal change I believe the railways were much more important. Not only did it enable news/mail to travel much more quickly, but for the first time large numbers of people could easily visit areas beyond their immediate neigbourhood, and goods could be transported large distances within a day. It revolutionised farming and enabled the growth of cities.

[scott_s]

Railways were more of a fundamental change than where smart phones are now. (Note I'm allowing them to be a more fundamental change in the future.) Not because of individuals taking the train, but because it allowed goods to be mass transported easier - it built fundamental infrastructure. Smart phones aren't part of fundamental infrastructure (yet!).

[nitrogen]

I'd argue that this generation is seeing a larger change than any before.

So long as we continue on our trend of exponential technological growth, this will be tautologically true.

[MPSimmons]

Despite what Ray Kurzweil thinks, I don't believe that the rate of growth is maintainable until strong AI is developed, and when that happens, we'll be irrelevant. Prior to strong AI, I think we'll level out a bit.

That's presuming strong AI is possible, of course, which I think it is.

[schrijver]

or birth control

edt: i meant this to appear underneath the comments with other pretty meaningful inventions that caused huge social change

[DanBC]

What about soap? (And other cleanliness inventions)

Or the transistor?

[mdonahoe]

I dont disagree with your thesis, but your example spans a mere twenty years.

[forgottenpaswrd]

My parents saw airplanes take off as a transport form anybody could use, it really changed the world.

Before that, it was affordable cars, it changed how people live, work and relax.

Before that TV.

Before that the discovery of the nuclear bomb, nuclear energy, the world would be never the same.

Before that penicillin, filtered water(no diseases in water), radio, telephone, polymers, natural gas pipes, electric light...

[kule]

My Nan remembers seeing the first car coming into town - she's only in her mid-seventies. When she was growing up it you had a coal shed (heating was just the open fire in the living room), outside larder on the north side of the house (no fridge), outside toilet (at the end of the garden no less).

I find it amazing to think of the amount of changes that have gone on in the last 70-odd years - in just one life time!

[kiba]

Well, I only exists for twenty one years.

[yason]

I just realized I'm mere ten years ahead of you and when I entered elementary school, it seemed like a whole century before the age of internet and browsers. Some friends had C64 for gaming and the bravest daredevil users learned how to write scrollers in 6510 assembly. This makes the baby boomers come from the Middle Ages in computer/internet time.

[robryan]

I recently found a book from primary school where I was writing about Netscape pretty much as if it was the Internet. I have a folder of screenshots from about 10 years ago where I am using IE 5.5 I think on 800*600 and a terrible looking MSN messenger. How quickly times change in Internet terms.

[RyanMcGreal]

This thread is starting to feel a bit like the Four Yorkshiremen, but it is fascinating to see how people's exposure to/experience of/feelings about the internet vary with even a few years' difference in age.

For my part, I was born in 1973 and got my first computer (a Compaq Deskpro Portable) when I was twelve. I taught myself to program GW-BASIC and later QBASIC, and then pretty much abandoned computers until about 1999, when I abruptly found myself making an internal website for my department in a large corporation. (I've been building web applications for a living ever since.)

I was aware of email and the internet during the 1990s but must confess that I didn't pay much attention. I certainly didn't buy the hype coming from enthusiasts about it heralding this epochal shift that was going to transform how we all live, work, play, socialize, organize and get civilly engaged (oops).

I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, and as a result, it fascinates me in a way that my teenage son can't really understand because it's just there for him in the same way that telephony was just there for me as a child (though I'm also old enough to remember rotary phones).

But my fascination with the internet goes beyond the fact that I watched it arrive: it fascinates me because it really is transformative in a way that other new technologies that arrived during my childhood were not. When I was growing up, our family got cable TV (remember the brown box "converter" with a line of buttons running from channel 2 to 23?), an Atari 2600 and a VCR. They were all nice consumer appliances, but none of them had anything like the transformative impact of ubiquitous internet connection.

Cable TV is already passé. When I'm consuming media rather than producing it, I prefer a la carte to the all-you-can-eat buffet. I canceled my cable ten years ago and never looked back. The internet is simply a better content delivery system than cable/satellite.

Video games are fun and entertaining, have risen technically and thematically to the level of an art form (on par with literature and film) and may yield some insights that can help us learn and stay motivated. However, the technology doesn't really drive a broader cultural shift. At most it has crowded out board games and is encroaching on TV watching as a more entertaining drop-in replacement. In any case, some of the most compelling video games owe their success as much to their online connectivity (over the internet, of course) as to their intrinsic gameplay.

VHS is not only obsolete in the particulars of the cassette technology, but in the more general sense that physical media are slow, cumbersome and wasteful compared to unlimited broadband access to digital content. The last dedicated physical media player connected to my TV was a DVD player. The next device I'm going to connect to my TV is an internet-connected media server. BluRay is simply a last-ditch effort to double-down on an already-archaic distribution system.

[bengarvey]

"literal dinosaurs" hahaha. Sorry, this is amusing me.