My daughter (13) has never seen a CD or DVD, no tape of any kind, no floppy discs of any size.
She doesn’t know anything about anything broadcast radio, she never watched linear TV.
She never used a map. Never used a landline.
For some reason she likes paper books better than ereaders so there’s that;) But she has never seen phone book or encyclopedia.
My son, aged 12, doesn’t watch television like I do. I, a Gen X’er, turn on the tv to some random station, then will flip around looking for something to see. If I can’t find something, I’ll Just pick a channel and leave it there while I look at my phone.
He only turns on the tv to watch a specific video (usually on YouTube). The concept of just leaving a tv on for background noise is completely foreign to him.
The woman I just broke up with was similar. She was in her 20s, and would watch tv by going onto some app like Netflix and picking a particular show. It was weird to her that, when I watched broadcast tv, I had to deal with commercials while watching a show.
Back in the day we kids didn’t have “non-choking hazard, ASTM-approved” toys—we had ER co-pays with strings attached.
Clackers doubled as concussion grenades, Lawn Darts had Navy-SEAL accuracy, Slip ’n Slides mangled spines like medieval torture devices, and Gilbert Science Kits basically asked, “ever wonder what glowing in the dark feels like?”
We survived—mostly. A little shrapnel, some uranium stains, a few broken bones, and a mild case of glow-in-the-dark scalp built character. Today’s kids get helicopter parents; we got real-time lessons in physics, ballistics, and radiation.
This is the one part of your post (referring to a 13-year-old) that surprises me. Unless one is Amish :), doesn’t one encounter FM radio being played by a car’s driver, at least occasionally?
Doesn’t she watch YouTube videos? Some of those have commercials in the middle, albeit without any kind of intro or pause beforehand.
I’m 48, and it’s completely foreign to me, too.
Just two says ago I saw someone had thrown out an art cyanotype kit 
At least it looked like they had used it.
more mysterious items:
I listened to NPR on FM Radio while my daughter was growing up, but in my wife’s car it has been satellite radio or streaming audio from an iPhone since my daughter was quite little.
It was to me too until I went to see “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” One of the opening scenes was a bunch of people in a family room/kitchen talking to each other with the TV going in the background, nobody paying any attention to it.
I encountered it again with my partner’s 90-year-old mom. Very sad and annoying.
Ooooh, ein Mäusekino!
Ooooh, a mice movie theater!
That’s what we called them. My Atari 520ST, my first computer around 1987, if my memory serves me well, was a bit bigger. Pity they were no match for Apple and Wintel, I bet on the wrong horse:
Not really surprising - I probably haven’t listened to broadcast radio by choice even in my car for over 20 years. It’s been cassettes/CDs/phone most of the time when I’m in the car alone. Sometimes satellite radio.
Interesting. (and to @Mighty_Mouse and @The_Librarian)
In my car, I’d say it’s satellite radio 40% of the time, streaming through a phone 35% (of which half the time is podcasts, the other half a passenger “deejaying” via YouTube), and local FM stations the other 25%.
Y’know, I think it’s gotten back to the point where real Bugs are more common than the fake imitation Bugs from a few years back, again. Because while there aren’t very many real Bugs any more, they’re all owned by people who value them and take meticulous care of them. But the imitation bugs are just another car, that’s disappeared off the roads as they’ve gotten older.
In our car we listen to Spotify or a podcast.
Maybe she rode in a car with some friend’s mom where the radio was on, but she can’t name 2 radio stations or knows how to change the station.
Got it. Yeah, my 14-year-old kid wouldn’t know one station from another, either, but he must have a vague sense of what NPR is, having endured “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” during trips…
And to me. Why in the world would you want to do that? Aren’t your power bills high enough alresdy?
Obviously led a deprived childhood!
Modern television sets use only a small amount of power while in use. And some people, like my mother, live alone and have the TV on in the background mostly for the sound. If you’re OK with silence, that’s fine and I like it too, but sometimes background noise is helpful. Don’t be judgemental.
Maybe it was bad phrasing on my part.
For me, I turn the tv on and then find something to watch. My kid will only turn the tv on to watch something specific.
(And I do tend to put on something that I only partially watch, if I’m lounging around and can’t find a better option. On the weekend, it’s usually sports. In the evenings, while I unwind with social media or the dope, I might put on a marathon of some goofy tv show like family guy or bob’s burgers; it used to be the news pundits, but I’ve been boycotting that since the election)
My father-in-law used to nap on the couch with some variety of ball game. If anyone tried to turn it off or change the channel, he’d wake up and say “Hey, I’m watching that!”