Posted by
Grampus on Thursday, January 25, 2007 1:29:15 PM
A
report from Universal McCann about the new "digital divide," not
between rich and poor or black and white but between this generation of
teens and adults. So while there may not be as much of a cultural
generation gap amongst teens and their wannabe hipster parents, there
may be a technology gap.
To me, the reason for the technology gap is less about the technology
and more about the different developmental phases in teens' lives vs.
their parents. Teens are all about their peers, identity formation and
socializing. The new technology has given them tools to do all of this
digitally. Just like the annoying cell phone commercials that show
teens gabbing away or images of parents rolling their eyes in any
sitcom when a teen literally leaps on top of a ringing phone, parents
tend to forget how important these social connections are for teens (or
how important they were when they were teens).
Cartoon by Ted Wallace.
[ Link ] For his site.
These
cartoons are not as "surface" a joke as it seems. The "gap" between
generations is not just the naturally different views of life as seen
through the eyes of the younger or older viewer. It is also because of
the different times that we've lived through.
I was a kid when
the Nazi extermination camps were liberated, and later when the State
of Israel was declared. I was an adult during the six-day war in 1967
and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Most of us see events that took place
before we were born through the eyes of history writers and not as
current events.
It was to get around that problem that I decided to run "golden
"oldies" every week. And whether you are "old enough to remember" or
young enough to be surprised, I hope you enjoy and are somehow
enlightened by reading them.
-Israel’s cartoonist since 1973-
A report from Universal McCann talks about the new "digital divide,"
not between rich and poor or black and white but between this
generation of teens and adults. So while there may not be as much of a
cultural generation gap amongst teens and their wannabe hipster
parents, there may be a technology gap.
To me, the reason for the technology gap is less about the technology
and more about the different developmental phases in teens' lives vs.
their parents. Teens are all about their peers, identity formation and
socializing. The new technology has given them tools to do all of this
digitally. Just like the annoying cell phone commercials that show
teens gabbing away or images of parents rolling their eyes in any
sitcom when a teen literally leaps on top of a ringing phone, parents
tend to forget how important these social connections are for teens.
Now, on to the crux. In addition, a rise in apathy of younger Americans
about history, arts, science and the effects of government in their
lives, replacing those things with celebrity worship and entertainment,
etc., has numbed them to the dangers that our society faces. The
neutrality with respect to religious truth has become the highest
ordering principle of society...forgotten are the substantive truths
and values...natural, social and spiritual-on which society has
historically been based.
Thus, the steady extension of state power, the liberal rule of
neutrality spread to more and more areas of society where men had once
been free to assert and order their lives according to traditional
beliefs.
Today’s liberalism strips all religious expression from the public
square; at its cutting edge today’s liberalism openly seeks to abolish
religious belief itself—or rather, because of the double standard
inherent in the belief in equality, it seeks to abolish our religious
belief, while welcoming, praising, and lauding the religious belief of
our mortal enemies. Consider the respective status accorded
Christianity and Islam in Public Television documentaries, and in the
curricula of many of our public schools.
We have thus arrived at the radical liberal society of today,
a society that is in demonic rebellion against the fundaments of its
own existence.
Oh, and the phone without the dialor the buttons:
Grampus