Rise of the Google-Boomers

It's a bit mad...and a bit marvelous!

If you hand any 12-year-old a brand new cellphone, you’re likely to find that within two hours they’ll have the entire thing figured out. The ringtone will have been selected, apps will have been downloaded, and they’ll already be using the bomber birds on Angry Birds: Rio. Youngsters these days seem to have a natural flair for technology. In fact, technology has become so deeply ingrained into their brains that apples are being told they’re no longer a fruit. It’s the ‘Pluto is not a planet’ crisis all over again. 

Kids of the 21^st century have been dubbed the ‘G-Generation’ (G as in Google, of course). Now, one of the inborn G-Genes of these youngsters is the tendency to have a giggle at the older generation as they watch them trying to decode the latest technology - especially when their attempts to flip the touch screen display look more like the way you shake your toothbrush dry after brushing. But what they have to remember is that the older generation – or ‘Baby-Boomers’ as they were named – have had to deal with a lot of change. They have moved from records to iTunes, floppy disks to flash drives, black-and-white to HD LCD, and Facebook’s old format to Facebook’s new format. But let’s be fair, that last one is a challenge for us all! 

It’s not just the rapid change that is hard to keep up with, however. Technology works a lot like language. It’s easy to pick up if you have been surrounded by it since birth, but much harder when you have to learn it using phrase books and dictionaries – which in this case would be device manuals. The main difference between the G-Generation and the Baby-Boomers is that the Boomers are often too afraid to put down the manuals and just play. Youngsters will click around and search until they know the device backwards, while most Boomers launch into a range of colourful expletives if they hit a wrong key. But if you look at the technological devices the Boomers once used, it’s not hard to see why. Misspelling a word on a typewriter meant having to start from scratch, while a ‘daa’ instead of a ‘dit-daa’ on a morse code machine could mean the start of civil war.  The closest equivalent we have to this last one is perhaps our autocorrect feature. Just the other day my friend told me to have a ‘gyrating day’. 

The older generation should be applauded then, since they have had to learn and adapt to every new cellphone and computer since the first one was introduced. But what they still need to do is gain the confidence to toss out those manuals and just explore. It’s not like their natural technological abilities aren’t there. Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Steve Jobs are all Boomers, after all. Tell that one to your folks and you’ll soon find them picking up that iPad with a new sense of superiority. Throw in the fact that Bill Gates earns around $300,000 per second and there will be a definite rise of new Google-Boomers giving the youngsters a run for their money – literally.

Becoming a really living person

Marvelous, Marvelous, Marvelous!

If you have walked into a bookstore lately, you may have noticed that there has been a rekindled interest in classic children’s books. Both Penguin and Collins have released a large variety of popular titles at very reasonable prices. Now, in a world where we are paying ridiculous prices for just about everything, ‘reasonable prices’ doesn’t seem to tickle us with excitement anymore, but I am being serious when I tell you that these books are selling from anywhere between R25 to R40. Perhaps you’re being tickled now. Of course, the books aren’t filled with the illustrations we may have known as children, but the plus side is that this time we are being forced to actually read them. Well, the eternal child in me simply couldn’t resist, and so I stacked myself up with this small collection:

Louisa May Alcott: Little Women & Good Wives
Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist
Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island
Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows

Now, I’m going to be honest and admit that I have never actually read any of these. This makes me think of something Mark Twain himself once said, when he defined a classic as ‘a book which people praise and don’t read’. Point proven. But in my defence, these books were all first published at a time which was highly inconvenient for me. I wasn’t born yet. Then, after I was born, technology had developed so much that I relied largely on the film versions. I know Little Women’s Amy as the young Kirsten Dunst and The Wind in the Willows’ Mr Toad as the Disney drawing. But, since it is impossible for anyone who has ever met any form of Mr Toad to forget about his exuberant love of motor cars that go ‘poop-poop’, I decided to start with Kenneth Grahame’s book first.

I have to admit, I was surprised. Some of it was entirely incoherent to me. Now, this sounds strange, considering that the book is simply a charming tale of four friends: A Water Rat, a Mole, a Badger and a Toad. Grahame has used a technique known as, and here’s your word for the day, anthropomorphism, which basically means that animals are given human qualities. They can speak, cook, row boats and drive cars, but this is not what was incoherent to me. I haven’t drifted that far away from childhood. It was the chapter entitled ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ that had me stumped. The Water Rat and the Mole encounter some sort of fawn creature playing a pipe. Both animals are totally entranced by the music, when the shaking Mole asks the Rat:

‘Are you afraid?’
‘Afraid?’ murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. ‘Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet – and yet – O, Mole, I am afraid!’

Not even a paragraph later and the fawn creature has disappeared and the Rat and Mole have no living memory of what just happened. They carry on as normal. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around this one. The analyst in me tried to interpret it as something deeply symbolic, but then I realised that perhaps it really is just a fawn playing music. And that’s the beauty of children’s literature. It doesn’t require logic and coherency, but simply plays melodies to the imagination. Children’s literature works a lot like music, after all. Music doesn’t require a thorough knowledge of notes and rhythms to be enjoyed. It only requires that it is enjoyed. Children remember this, while adults drive themselves into frenzies trying to make sense of everything. Perhaps Grahame wasn’t far off when he said that children are the ‘only really living people’.

So, for my next read I am going to ensure that I become a really living person and surrender entirely to my imagination. Since I’m going to be tackling Dickens’ non-musical Oliver Twist, perhaps I will need it.

Call Me Old Fashioned...

Mad or Marvelous?...Definitely Mad!

Our television network lost quite a few viewers this festive season, and it's not because they screened any distasteful or controversial programs. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The SABC decided to broadcast a selection of old films, which apparently was just 'not on'. Now I'm not saying that 1985 Sylvester Stallone films are what make my Christmas either, but it's surprising to me that people rather opt for more recent films. Granted the painfully unrealistic effects of Jaws are a turn off for the generation that created Avatar, but I would far rather watch a great classic such as Annie than...say, Borat. It's probably a little offsides to compare such a renowned musical with a film about a man in a lime green one-piece, especially since we have made many brilliant films of our own. But what I'm trying to get at here is that at least amongst the classic films of older generations there isn't any vulgar trash, such as we have between our Slumdog Millionaires and Inceptions. And sadly, more and more films are heading in this direction.

Just the other day I saw a trailer for a new Ashton Kutcher film entitled  No Strings Attached. The film's tag line is: 'Can Sex Friends be Best Friends?' Oh, well now here's a lovely film for the whole family! Kutcher would have been handy to have around during the attack on Pearl Harbour with all the F Bombs he drops in this film.
It seems that current films are becoming far too comfortable and open with what is crude and, previously, taboo. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to break some old boundaries - after all, this is how we have achieved positive movements such as democracy and feminism - but what has happened is that initial acts of liberation introduced by icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Madonna have some how turned into a gross generalization that sex sells. Hollywood has reached a point where they believe that sex jokes are the only form of humour out there. They don't have the capacity to understand a knock-knock joke until it's reworded into a knock up-knock up joke. Humour can be clean, just look at Ghost-busters or any Pixar film, and you'll in fact find that such humour is more widely applauded because of the actual skill and ingenuity behind it.

One of the greatest falsehoods of all time is that sex is all everybody wants. Just take a look at the most celebrated film icons of all time, and you'll find it's those who have made wholesome, feel-good films - Audrey Hepburn, Gene Kelly, Julie Andrews. Hollywood needs to find its eye for quality that it some where along the way lost for its one of quantity. Get this back, eliminate the trash, and I will then understand why current cinema rakes in the greater ratings. Until then, I'm keeping a copy of My Fair Lady in the DVD player for whenever Dance Flick comes on.