Well, a telegraph did not mean anything to me from a practical stand point
growing up, but I knew what it was. I don't know a single current college
aged person (18-22) who does not know what an answering machine is - and it
would never occur to them to relate it to an iPod (indeed, they are
probably more likely to know really know what an iPod was).
In terms of general popular culture from decades before they were born, I
would say they are more spotty than ignorant. I think they know a hell of a
lot more about music from before they were born than maybe any generation
in history, because of how much access they have had to music. I have heard
them listening non-ironically to Motown and Swing and Classic Rock and
mid-century Broadway Musicals. Whenever I have braced them with the
traditional challenge ("How do you know that, you weren't even born
when...") they look at me like I am an idiot and ask if I have ever heard
of iTunes or Spotify or Youtube (or other things that I actually have not
heard of that allow them to listen to any music ever recorded whenever they
want to). They also have some pretty good exposure to certain kinds of old
TV - I suspect it is correlated to what is (or used to be) shown on Nick at
Night and the like. But there is also a lot that they don't know.
OTOH, I find that their (as a group, of course always exceptions) knowledge
of old movies is almost non-existent, and "old" here can be anything from
the 1990s and before. They have almost no tolerance for anything in black
and white (except for a certain kind of proto-hipster, who pretends to only
like black and white films the way some of my college friends pretended to
only watch silent films back in the day). And I agree that they often have
very little context for social history and old pop culture. I knew vaguely
about Raccoon coats and the Charleston and the Lindbergh Baby as a high
schooler, but the pop history knowledge of most college students today is
exhausted by the OJ Trial and maybe Monica's stained dress. I find they
know very little about things like Watergate, McCarthyism, the Manson
Family or anything like that.
On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 10:43 PM, Kevin M. <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've watched the first three episodes, only because I needed a dumb comedy
> in my life, one that makes no demands of the audience, and this series fits
> that bill. Besides, I'll watch Stephen Fry read the phone book, and he is
> basically phoning it in on this show.
>
> As far as portraying 20-somethings as stupid, they aren't, but they do
> lack the fundamentals of my generation's pop culture, and this might be the
> first generation that has done that. I can reference Bugs Bunny cartoons
> made decades before I was born, and I have a keen fondness for music of the
> 1920s, '30s, and '40s. I've read books written hundreds of years ago -- not
> as a class assignment, but out of interest. I can speak about the Kennedy
> assassination, Pearl Harbor, and other historic events long before my time.
> It isn't that the current crop of youngsters are stupid or intentionally
> ignorant of these sorts of things of my generation... to them it just
> doesn't matter. Why would an atlas matter to them? How does knowledge of an
> answering machine impact them?
>
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 9:41 PM PGage <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I worked closely with college kids until very recently and still have a
>> son in college. These are not the kinds of mistakes they are prone to make,
>> or the kinds of holes in their knowledge. In other words, they are not
>> stupid. There are some things they don't know that can strike old people as
>> funny - the two main things that always got me were, for maybe 15 years or
>> more now, many of them have no idea at all what carbon paper was, and have
>> trouble understanding even when explained to them why anyone would want to
>> use it. Also, while they know intellectually what a typewriter is, many of
>> them have never seen one, most have never used one, and they have no
>> intuitive sense of when it would be used. Just a few weeks ago a former
>> student texted me, genuinely perplexed by a grad school application form
>> that included the cryptic instructions "Do not print or hand write". After
>> she went on for some minutes with her frustration as to how she was
>> supposed to fill it out since it was not provided in any electronic form
>> and prohibited being filled in by hand, I just said "you need a
>> typewriter". She was quiet for a thoughtful minute and said "Oh, so that's
>> what those are for?", I told her that they were for a lot more than filling
>> out forms, but these days that was probably one of their last vital
>> functions. She told me it would be easier for her to turn it into a PDF
>> file that she could type in the blanks - and it turned out she was right.
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 9:03 PM 'Dave Sikula' via TVorNotTV <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Is anyone else watching this? I find it stuck in a time warp, like a
>> bunch of Bob Hope's radio comedy writers pitched a series on "these kids
>> today with their computers." I've been dealing with college kids this term,
>> and while their pop culture knowledge doesn't go back as far as I'd like,
>> they don't mistake an answering machine for "a first generation iPod" or
>> think an atlas is "Google maps printed out." (Actual dialogue from
>> tonight's show (I won't dignify the lines with the word "jokes.")
>>
>> I once read a description of Hope's late 60s specials that mentioned
>> actors like Hope, Jackie Gleason, and Lucille Ball dressed as "hippies" and
>> staggering around like drunken sailors after smoking marijuana. This show
>> seems the 21st-century equivalent of that.
>>
>> Though, I suppose given CBS's demo, this seems like cutting-edge comedy.
>>
>> --Dave Sikula
>>
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