It's All Geek to Me!

Generation gap -- why does it even occur?

Every generation has disagreements with generations that come before and after itself on a number of subjects, both trivial and important. We will not dwell too much on the disagreements of importance, because they arise as a result of the changing values of successive generations. Values are tricky to pin down and any treatment of them here would make me ramble, something I am already prone to doing. However, before moving on to talking about discussing inter-generational disagreements on trivial subjects, I'll leave you with two quotes to think about:

It is possible for a man to go from being a liberal to a conservative in twenty years without changing even one of his opinions.(Unknown)

Any man who is under 30 and is not a liberal has no heart; and any man who is over 30 and not a conservative has no brains.(W. Churchill)

Is there any reason why it makes sense for generation gaps to exist? When I took a class with Prof. Marvin Minsky, I came across a reasonable explanation. Early in our lives, it is essential for us to learn about the world around us because our own survival depends on it. In learning about the world and satisfying our natural curiosity, we pick up the trends and values of the time uncritically, because we're in learning mode. Somewhere along the line, a switch flips and we stop learning, so that we are not so overwhelmed by the continuously changing world around us that we cannot teach what we have learned so far to our kids. When this switch flips, our perceptions of the world start to ossify slowly and everything new seems to start being strange, weird or unnecessary. In practical terms, this translates to the generation gap.

The Technological Generation Gap

Now, on to the real subject of this post. According to a recent Slashdot poll, most readers agreed that 25 is the age when the music of the present-day starts to sound weird. In other words, according to the Slashdot readership, a musical generation lasts approximately 25 years. What about clothes? Clothes seem to change basically every decade. Perhaps they change twice every generation! What about technology, specifically computing technology? Computing technology offers an interesting case study at the moment because the IBM PC came out less than 25 years ago. This interval would mean that we, in 2005, are at a point where a generational changeover is taking place in computing technology.

In the good old days, my father worked quite comfortably with Microsoft Excel on MS-DOS. Several of the other people I knew were comfortable working with an MS-DOS command prompt, *cough* minimalistic *cough* as it was. However, once computers started to come with Microsoft Windows pre-loaded, these same people shrank in horror from the same applications now reincarnated as parts of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. In some cases, the reason was an unwillingness to learn the new versions of the applications because it was no longer necessary to use them. In other cases, however, it was the fear that has stayed with humankind since before the beginning of time, the fear of the unknown.

I have myself had an interesting experience with the technological generation gap. I was introduced to computers in India, which was then about 5 years behind the hot new developments in the United States. My first computer, in 1992, was an 8086/88 at my school, which had to be booted from a 5.25" floppy disk. When Pentiums were just coming out in the United States, 386DXs were state of the art in India. I saw my first copy of Windows 95 in late 1997. I also got on the Internet for the first time in late 1997. Then I left India to attend college in the United States. This was an extremely abrupt shift upwards in terms of technological sophistication. Just before I left India, we bought a 333 MHz computer for my family so they could be in touch with me. As soon as I arrived in the United States, I bought a 600MHz computer, which wasn't even state of the art back then. Back then, the 800 MHz Coppermines and Xeons were just coming out. From Windows 95, I directly jumped to Windows 2000 (I know the two OSes aren't genetically related). From praying at the keyboard that an Web page would download completely, I went to a blazing fast T-1 connection where 200 kbps download speeds were not uncommon. In generational terms, it was a warp from being 40 to suddenly being 14. Of course, the other 14 year olds you run into don't know that you've recently been 40. They certainly have no idea how cool the music or culture of youf former generation was. In a similar way, I found that people my age in the United States were extremely uncomfortable with a DOS prompt and had no idea what cool beasts terminate and stay resident (TSR) programs were. I, on the other hand, cut my teeth on PCs using a DOS prompt and had written a couple of TSRs myself. Needless to say, I wowed a few of my friends who weren't Linux hackers with long strings of computerese that I could type at a command prompt to make things happen. Overall, this sudden generational warp was an extremely singular situation in which to find myself, but a very fun one, nonetheless.

I found myself on the losing side of this generational warp as far as cellular phones were concerned. Ordinarily I tend towards early adoption of technology, money and other resources permitting. However, my reluctance to include cellphones in my life bordered on Luddism. Meanwhile, most of my friends and peers were constantly on cellphones, chatting to family and friends. Soon, the cellphones began to have an effect on our social conventions. Meetings were hardly made for a set time and place. Groups of people began to pick meeting times and places fluidly once they were in the same area. Eventually, so many of my friends got cellphones and I heard so much about how quickly they become indispensable that I decided to try one out. Since then, I have never quite realized how I lived life without one before. I am at an age in my life when I will begin to notice these generation gaps in technology and other aspects. As a imperfect human being, I too will be prone to the effects of the technological generation gap. However, I hope fervently that every so often, I'll have the good sense to get out of my comfort zone and try out new technologies like the cellphone. Or else, people might start communicating with brain waves next and I might be stuck staring at a blinking instant messenger button on *my* taskbar for the rest of my life.