Were they wrong?

nerevarthelame 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When I was a kid in the 90s, my grandparents never wanted to get cable television, despite watching a lot of local broadcasts. Their children (and grandchildren) thought they would truly enjoy it: more live sports, history documentaries, and so on. They thought it would be low quality trash.

As a birthday gift, my mother tried to give them a lifetime cable subscription so they could see what they were missing. When the technician from the cable company showed up at their door, my grandmother stared at him through a slit in the blinds and refused to let him in or otherwise acknowledge him. I pitied them, and we joked behind their backs about how stuck in their ways they were. (Writing this as an adult, I can't imagine why my mom would insist on trying to give them a gift that they had overtly rejected.)

Years later, my grandparents gave in to cable. We were right: they did enjoy watching more Big 12 football. But they also enjoyed watching endless hours of Fox News. They became increasingly isolated, paranoid, and overtly racist. I won't blame 100% of this change on Fox News, but their transition toward hate absolutely poisoned their relationships with most of the family. I don't think that's exactly what my grandmother expected when she refused the cable man on her birthday, but she was still right.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Their cutoff point for where technology stopped being good and exciting was prior to when this author thought technology was fun and exciting.

It’s a personal feeling. Once you get comfortable with the way the world is, you start wishing it would stop changing.

	▲	mrdependable 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Perhaps people that are older have seen that sometimes new technology is not all benefit. You are trading something. Once you are old enough, and have seen it happen enough times, you start considering all the good and exciting things that have been traded away over the years.
	▲	sickophancy 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It goes beyond that: what we call technology is inherently "abstraction of service", (ultimately all of which is related to boiling water for some reason???) and at a certain point too many layers of abstraction is more complicated than helpful in terms of reducing the amount of time spent interacting with the "work reduction layer". Your grandparents complaint is essentially that "github is good, but writing tests, and using CI/CD is too abstract and complicated". Which is fair, especially if you aren't talking about something for intelligent people in specific. Compare ordering milk with a milkman vs. the modern way. Previously the loop was 1. call milkman 2. get milk & pay for next milk now it can be a number of various paths (all of which are correct, confusingly!) to get milk delivered to one's door. Too much abstraction is no longer serving as a means of replacing work at this point, and managing the abstraction becomes a form of work. That's the real complaint. Happy 2 hear ur thoughts about this 1.

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glitchc 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Short answer is yes. Most grandparents resisted computers, internet, cellphones or online banking until the network effect left them with little choice but to participate. You also see them glom onto popular platforms (Faceboook, WhatsApp) and not experiment much with alternatives (Discord, Snapchat). Driven by the same effect, they're only there because that's where their families and friends are.