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Haha, certainly there were some brilliant boomers that built the internet, but the vast majority of boomers missed on the biggest applications of the internet.

Haha, certainly there were some brilliant boomers that built the internet, but the vast majority of boomers missed on the biggest applications of the internet. I used to sell cell phones to boomers back in the early 00's. It was difficult to sell them on more than an emergency plan and then to get them to make the leap further that they needed a wireless internet plan? They thought it was a toy that they didn't need. Now, of course, they all have iPhones, but in the early days it was a tough sell. I would say my generation never even questioned the value of having a cell phone or an internet connection or texting.

mulmen 6y ago
Ok but was that unreasonable at the time? My dad is a boomer and eagerly adopted technology into his business at that time. I can think of many examples of this. How many boomer parents of millennials provided us with computers and Internet access? Maybe I’m just sensitive to the ageism but I don’t buy in to these generational stereotypes.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  It's not an insult. But there is fundamentally different worldviews that form based on the time you were brought up in, and these worldviews persist as "memes" across the population. Of course there were savvy boomers that understood some or most of the implications of the internet, and will readily purchase the latest game console and are interacting with DeFi already...but my experience as a former computer technician and cell phone salesperson is that broadly speaking, that generation learns and experiments with technology at a slower rate. For boomers, network television and radio were the primary forms of entertainment in their formulative years. Because PCs either didn't exist or were so expensive and hard to use, very few boomers grew up with this stuff. It's like being a native speaker of a language. You master the language in a way that is very difficult for non-native speakers to achieve. That's nothing on "non-native" speakers of a language, but it's just that your earliest years shape how you think and use these tools and that's hard to overcome. @mulmen - can't reply to your thread below, but understand that these generational differences are broadly recognized and apparent in consumer behavior and well-documented. I'm not making up the generation gap with regards to digital technology. The fact that people close to you happened to be savvy with tech (were they mining BTC in 2011? were they crowdfunding Oculus in 2012? were they on Instagram in 2010? did they do a startup during the mobile boom?) doesn't discount broad demographic trends. Like the example I used above, the existence of non-native speakers that speak perfect English does not discount that fact that vast majority of people that learn a language past childhood struggle to develop that mastery. PCs did not reach mainstream adoption until the 90s. For boomers, they were already in their late 30s to 50s by the time this happened. You can even see this example in the cryptocurrency space. How many bloggers, podcasters, developers, etc in the blockchain space are boomers? Relatively few compared to their representation of the world population. This space has been largely driven by younger generations. That's a fair statement.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Honestly it sounds like your worldview is the one skewed by experience. Having worked retail sales and tech support I don’t think there’s such a difference in the generations. I have millennial friends who are worse at troubleshooting tech problems than my parents. Some people “get it” and some don’t. I don’t think the year you were born has much to do with it. My entire family eagerly and reasonably adopted technology. The first computer I owned was an old model given to me by one of my dad’s coworkers when he upgraded. He demanded I use it to learn something. He completely understood the benefit. All of our family friends adopted technology in their own ways. All my classmates had access to technology on par with my own. It was widespread. Millennials were not in a financial position to bankroll the internet revolution. Boomers did that just because they were the right age at the right time.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  there are always exceptions. my parents aren't stupid. they can do all the basic things with a computer that are necessary to do a non-technical job these days. but they really haven't internalized a lot of stuff that's second nature to most younger people. just this weekend I helped my mom troubleshoot an issue with severely degraded zoom calls. I ran a speed test and determined they were barely getting 5% of the plan speed. I ran another test and discovered the connection had >20% packet loss. the solution was to turn the modem off and turn it back on. I asked my mom how long this had been going on. she and my dad had been living with severe packet loss for weeks and just assumed there was nothing they could do about it. btw, my work has nothing to do with networking. this is just my workflow for diagnosing connection problems for counterstrike.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    I don’t see how this has anything to do with age. I know boomers who can do this kind of troubleshooting and millennials that can’t.
analog31 6y ago
I'm a late boomer, and I bought my first cell phone in 2000. The thing that finally pulled me in was that the price came down. Way down. I was able to get basic cellphone service for 7 bucks a month. The younger crowd do a lot more on their phones, granted, but they're also comfortable paying more. A lot more. But still, germane to the parent post, at my workplace almost everybody has heard of things like the blockchain, machine learning, and so forth. And people talk at lunch about the wonders of the blockchain, and the wonders of machine learning, as if those things are magic. The colleagues who dug into how those things actually work, beyond superficial explanations in blogs, are all older than 55. We are also the ones who deeply understand how our own products work. Maybe this is good or bad. Needing to understand how something works in order to believe it may be a mental block in some situations. At home, I'm still the only person who can diagnose IT problems, the only fluent programmer, and can fix a toilet. The young generation is more comfortable as users of technology, but haven't experienced having to dig deep into the innards of something to make it work. This is something that can't be forced. There has to be an interest. Naturally these are generalizations, and not everybody in my generation was a techie, but I don't know if a larger percentage are techies today.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Yeah, I agree with this, because if you were an early user of tech in the 80s and even 90s to some extent, you had to be somewhat savvy. In the 90s, being a user of tech implied being a "nerd". There was still some level of stigma with spending much of your time engrossed in tech. I found it common for people to even brag about their ignorance about technology. It was common in popular culture, like movies and shows, even. But surely the folks that learned tech before it was as user friendly as it is today have an advantage over even younger people who aren't curious enough to learn.
  - analog31 6y ago
    It might be OK. Hopefully the kids are still curious, but maybe about different things. I'm happy to keep their infrastructure running if they're willing to do great things with it.

mulmen 6y ago

Ok but was that unreasonable at the time? My dad is a boomer and eagerly adopted technology into his business at that time. I can think of many examples of this. How many boomer parents of millennials provided us with computers and Internet access? Maybe I’m just sensitive to the ageism but I don’t buy in to these generational stereotypes.

chrisco255 6y ago
It's not an insult. But there is fundamentally different worldviews that form based on the time you were brought up in, and these worldviews persist as "memes" across the population. Of course there were savvy boomers that understood some or most of the implications of the internet, and will readily purchase the latest game console and are interacting with DeFi already...but my experience as a former computer technician and cell phone salesperson is that broadly speaking, that generation learns and experiments with technology at a slower rate. For boomers, network television and radio were the primary forms of entertainment in their formulative years. Because PCs either didn't exist or were so expensive and hard to use, very few boomers grew up with this stuff. It's like being a native speaker of a language. You master the language in a way that is very difficult for non-native speakers to achieve. That's nothing on "non-native" speakers of a language, but it's just that your earliest years shape how you think and use these tools and that's hard to overcome. @mulmen - can't reply to your thread below, but understand that these generational differences are broadly recognized and apparent in consumer behavior and well-documented. I'm not making up the generation gap with regards to digital technology. The fact that people close to you happened to be savvy with tech (were they mining BTC in 2011? were they crowdfunding Oculus in 2012? were they on Instagram in 2010? did they do a startup during the mobile boom?) doesn't discount broad demographic trends. Like the example I used above, the existence of non-native speakers that speak perfect English does not discount that fact that vast majority of people that learn a language past childhood struggle to develop that mastery. PCs did not reach mainstream adoption until the 90s. For boomers, they were already in their late 30s to 50s by the time this happened. You can even see this example in the cryptocurrency space. How many bloggers, podcasters, developers, etc in the blockchain space are boomers? Relatively few compared to their representation of the world population. This space has been largely driven by younger generations. That's a fair statement.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Honestly it sounds like your worldview is the one skewed by experience. Having worked retail sales and tech support I don’t think there’s such a difference in the generations. I have millennial friends who are worse at troubleshooting tech problems than my parents. Some people “get it” and some don’t. I don’t think the year you were born has much to do with it. My entire family eagerly and reasonably adopted technology. The first computer I owned was an old model given to me by one of my dad’s coworkers when he upgraded. He demanded I use it to learn something. He completely understood the benefit. All of our family friends adopted technology in their own ways. All my classmates had access to technology on par with my own. It was widespread. Millennials were not in a financial position to bankroll the internet revolution. Boomers did that just because they were the right age at the right time.
leetcrew 6y ago
there are always exceptions. my parents aren't stupid. they can do all the basic things with a computer that are necessary to do a non-technical job these days. but they really haven't internalized a lot of stuff that's second nature to most younger people. just this weekend I helped my mom troubleshoot an issue with severely degraded zoom calls. I ran a speed test and determined they were barely getting 5% of the plan speed. I ran another test and discovered the connection had >20% packet loss. the solution was to turn the modem off and turn it back on. I asked my mom how long this had been going on. she and my dad had been living with severe packet loss for weeks and just assumed there was nothing they could do about it. btw, my work has nothing to do with networking. this is just my workflow for diagnosing connection problems for counterstrike.
- mulmen 6y ago
  I don’t see how this has anything to do with age. I know boomers who can do this kind of troubleshooting and millennials that can’t.

analog31 6y ago

I'm a late boomer, and I bought my first cell phone in 2000. The thing that finally pulled me in was that the price came down. Way down. I was able to get basic cellphone service for 7 bucks a month. The younger crowd do a lot more on their phones, granted, but they're also comfortable paying more. A lot more. But still, germane to the parent post, at my workplace almost everybody has heard of things like the blockchain, machine learning, and so forth. And people talk at lunch about the wonders of the blockchain, and the wonders of machine learning, as if those things are magic. The colleagues who dug into how those things actually work, beyond superficial explanations in blogs, are all older than 55. We are also the ones who deeply understand how our own products work. Maybe this is good or bad. Needing to understand how something works in order to believe it may be a mental block in some situations. At home, I'm still the only person who can diagnose IT problems, the only fluent programmer, and can fix a toilet. The young generation is more comfortable as users of technology, but haven't experienced having to dig deep into the innards of something to make it work. This is something that can't be forced. There has to be an interest. Naturally these are generalizations, and not everybody in my generation was a techie, but I don't know if a larger percentage are techies today.

chrisco255 6y ago
Yeah, I agree with this, because if you were an early user of tech in the 80s and even 90s to some extent, you had to be somewhat savvy. In the 90s, being a user of tech implied being a "nerd". There was still some level of stigma with spending much of your time engrossed in tech. I found it common for people to even brag about their ignorance about technology. It was common in popular culture, like movies and shows, even. But surely the folks that learned tech before it was as user friendly as it is today have an advantage over even younger people who aren't curious enough to learn.
- analog31 6y ago
  It might be OK. Hopefully the kids are still curious, but maybe about different things. I'm happy to keep their infrastructure running if they're willing to do great things with it.