I was contemplating the arrival of Sophie today – as I have been doing for the past 9 months – and something occurred to me. My daughter will grow up in a very different world.
She will be born in a post-iPad era. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn… hell, THE INTERNET would have always existed. The Internet.
Email will probably be a thing of the past by the time she is old enough to use it. Computers would have always existed as well.
She will probably give me hell about having ever listened to music on CDs… just like I gave my Dad a hard time about eight-tracks. I remember how funny they seemed to me then.
Sophie will enter a world without the Twin Towers. 9/11 will not be stuck in her psyche like it is mine. Perhaps that has become the JFK moment of my generation.
It is unlikely that she will ever greet a visitor at the gate as they depart an airplane – I barely remember it now.
Computers won’t be something she has to learn… they will just be a part of life. A Comodore 64 (and the accompanying 64 kilobytes of computation power) will seem like a joke!
Dial-up will be a thing of the past. Wireless Internet will be an expectation (everywhere!). Receiving AOL CDs in the mail to promote the Internet will be laughable. Floppy disks… pffft!
Jobs Boards, Skype, Cloud Computing, in-flight wireless connectivity – they all happened before her arrival.
The U.S.S.R. – a thing of history books.
The European Union would have always existed.
An African American President of the United States… it already happened.
My daughter’s life will be very different from mine. As I think about the past 31 years and the changes I’ve witnessed… it’s hard to conceive of what she may discover. It’s exciting and mind-boggling!
What do you think the next generation should be aware of? What changes do you anticipate?
“Tomorrow will give us something to think about” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
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