That's also because you have the political views and actually act like a 70 year old. You also came from what I remember is a not well off family. My family wasn't upper middle class but we weren't ever in financial issue, we learned computers in kindergarten in the early 90s, had a computer in the late 90s. Class has a lot to do with it.
Well we weren't poor, but generally middle class. My mom was a bank teller, my dad was a policeman. But yeah if I wanted a Playstation or N64 that type of stuff would have to be asked for my birthday or Christmas, in contrast to some of my friends who had that stuff when it was new in 1997, 1998. I didn't have an N64 until 2001 and a Playstation until 2002.
By the way, I can unequivocally say that I didn't use a computer until about 1997. Ever. Period. So I made it to 8 or 9 years old without ever using a computer. We got them in our classrooms in 1998, we got one at home in 2000.
I don't think it's just a class thing, or "having the views of a 70 year old," MasterJedi. I know a lot of you guys don't like Reaganfan and think he's a rube, but I can relate to what's he saying and he has a point.
I grew up in an upper middle to upper class household in Manhattan; I assume a setting worlds apart from his (based on how you describe it), but it wasn't necessarily all that different in terms of technology. Some of my friends didn't have computers until the late 90s, sometimes right up into the early 00s. A lot of it would depend on how tech-savvy (and interested in this stuff) your parents were. My dad was a bit of a computer hobbyist, so we always had a computer in the house, even from before I was born, an old IBM machine complete with 5 1/4 floppy drives.
But the computer was very much a work machine and for my dad's programming hobby and it wasn't something I messed around with much, and certainly wasn't part of the culture. We had an NES for that. Yeah at school we had a bunch of Apple IIe computers, but they were practically a novelty thing at the time and computers in the house were sporadic. I had some friends whose parents hung on to the typewriter for as long as they possibly could.
I'm older than Reaganfan, in the earliest set of years considered millenials, so I'm in a bit of a gray area where I probably have more in common with Gen X in many ways. Some of the stuff he's talking about (prevalence of texting, facebook, twitter, etc).. I was already through most of college by the time that stuff took hold. I was in law school when smartphones started to become popular, and at that time, it was still all about the Blackberry. So I understand my perspective is a little bit different, but then again, he's old enough to still remember the 90s and have a childhood pre-internet, pre-kids having cell phones, etc., which I think is the key.
By the mid 90s, we had several computers connected on a LAN and internet as well (dial-up, of course), but this was atypical and very much not mainstream. Tooling around on this stuff all day when your friends wanted you to come hang out at the arcade in the movie theater would cause you to be labeled a shut-in, geeky loser. Quite a far cry from today, when the average teen basically sits at home all day, preferring to snapchat on their phone over hang out with their friends in person (this isn't just my hot take, there are statistics to back this up- check out The Atlantic article I posted on the last page for more about this, it's an interesting read). These trends were already starting to become apparent among the younger millennials, and I don't think Reaganfan being old enough to spot them has much to do with his personal upbringing.
So when he says there is quite the cleavage point among millennial groupings, and people on one end may feel as if they grew up in a different world... well, I get it. It's not just a class thing MJ, and quite honestly, it's a little pejorative of you in suggesting that.
Thank you for the articulate response. It's true that I left public school following Freshman year and completed High School via online charter school. But I still went to public school from pre-school until finishing 9th grade. But yeah, Myspace came out the year after I had left public school, Facebook two years after. My first cell phone came in 2006, my first "smart phone" in 2014 and my first I-Phone in 2015, which I still have (An I-Phone 4 that my sister gave me for Christmas when she got a newer version).
I used to be considered the computer "whiz" of my family until I was about 19 or 20 years old. What changed was the notion of "social media". The smaller and trendier the stuff got, the less and less I knew about it. I won an Apple iPod shuffle a year ago in a contest, and it's sitting on my desk gathering dust because I don't know how to use it. I tried to read the instructions but they came in this tiny foldout glossy paper and I downloaded I-Tunes and I think I spent 86-cents on a song but nothing played. I honest to God have no freaking idea what the hell to do with it and it's an expensive new, trendy item.
That's when I feel old.
Had I stayed in
public High School until 2007 instead of an online charter school, then I would have been there for the MySpace and Facebook and YouTube days.
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