JCC How the present generation will view "old people".

I recently spent an afternoon with a great uncle that I hadn't seen in a decade, and something very poignant occurred to me. Essentially, it is this: When the present generation of young/middle age adults see pictures of their grandparents, they are looking at a handful of black-and-white photographs, the surrounding milieu of which one can only abstractly conceptualize. This imbibes in us a sense of "that was then, but this is now", as if there were some sort of clearly delineated binary reality between the past and the present.

But it simply isn't so. Soon, the toddlers of today will be teenagers watching high-definition videos of their grandparents being young, handsome, and engaged in tomfoolery. Indeed, when even they are grandparents, their grandchildren will watch their great-great grandparents in such forms of media.

This is an observation that has been really sobering to me over the past few days...one day the house that I and my family presently live in will be the residence of a young, growing family in the year 2100, who can't even fathom how long ago the year 2000 seems. Previously, the past was always an alternate universe where "they" didn't even have TV, phones, and internet. But for the present generation of grandchildren, it will not be so.

Not terribly open-ended, but it's something that has really struck me as of late, so discuss further

 

It's cool, our present will eventually be an alternate universe where "we" didn't have the newest neural uplink superchip but "we got along just fine. Damn kids."

 

we also don't have gay abortion-marriages on demand like they will in the future

 

Uphill. Both ways. In the snow.

 

So your epiphany was "time rolls on"?

 

pretty soon artists like snoop dog and linkin park will be considered 'oldies.' oh the humanity.

 

This presumes that we make it to the year 2100.

 

We presume that the HD quality pictures and videos we routinely post on the internet are the apex of technology. Our grandparents thought the same about grainy black and white photos. It is difficult to imagine how things will change by the year 2100. The computers and smart phones of the future may not be able to view any of the pictures or videos that we take on our iPhone today. For instance, my car has a CD player and cannot play a cassette tape because the technology is obsolete. Soon, CD players will be obsolete. To the future generation, terms like TV, phone and internet will be analogous to phonograph, semaphore and cotton gin to the present generation.