Where's The Mouse?

Today, Tuesday, I learned not to fill a post with random semi-interesting things going on in my life too early in the day, because odds are something more interesting will turn up within half an hour of posting it and then I have to schedule it for tomorrow and yaddah yaddah yaddah.


http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/04/born_digital.php

My dad sent the above link to me and said "I'm so stuck on this idea of the digital world accelerating and effecting the youth in such remarkable ways.   When I was your age they talked about a generation gap like it was a difficult concept that people might not even accept.   Now we have a generation gab between you and Oscar where his world is already substantially different than yours."


Oscar being my neighbor who was born in August. It's not just between me and him, though. A friend of mine teaches piano to 11 year-olds who don't know what a VCR is. 
At least record players are easily-recognizable so my generation can recognize them even though we've never had them, but a VCR is just a metallic-colored box. I guess maybe the thing of our generation is the white iPod standard-issue earbuds? Those are pretty iconic.


My dad's right, though. Progress is nothing new, but progress is speeding up considerably, and that is new. According to history, I shouldn't be that much different from someone 15 years younger than me, much less 4. Yet I am, and it's weird to think about.


I've always felt that I was born right on the boundary between two different "generations." I watched the TV shows all the 90s kids watched, but I didn't get a gaming console until all of my cousins' Game Cube games were old news (hence why I got it- ha). Harry Potter (which is according to Wikipedia part of "Generation Y") is my thing, but I was too young to be into Lord of the Rings while the movies were coming out.
Remember when I mentioned my 8 year-old neighbor asking me who Ron Weasley was?


There's even a slight difference between my sisters and I, and the oldest of the two is only 15 months younger than me. They use different slang and have different mannerisms and different idioms and different fads going around their school... I'm not supposed to understand my future children when they talk. These are my siblings. (So I may be exaggerating a bit in this paragraph, but it's just to get my point across.)


I mean, I don't think the "generation gap" is bad-- just a bit strange to think about.