I have no problem grasping the concept that modern teens have never seen a typewriter IRL. There really isn’t much reason to. While I can grasp the concept if modern teens having never seen a movie or TV show where someone was using a typewriter, I find the idea personally bleak and depressing. (And kind of hard to believe. On a similar note a friend mentioned on Facebook how she was cleaning out her attic and her late teens son didn’t know what the Walkman she found was, but there is a roughly 100% chance he’s seen the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.)
Funny, I have no problem believing it. What shows being shown now, that would be of interest to teens or younger, would have someone using a typewriter at least somewhat prominently? Someone in the background of a newsroom doesn’t count, it probably wouldn’t even be noticed.
I said I didn’t have a problem believing it, it just makes me sad, in a “kids today didn’t grow up the way I did so they are growing up wrong” way. When I was a teen or younger I was very familiar with TV and movies that were filmed years and decades before I was born, and the obsolete technologies in them. I never used a party line on a candlestick phone, but I knew what they were. I never used a car that needed to be hand-cranked with a tool from the front, but I knew what they were. I never used a glass-domed paper tape stock ticker, but I knew what they were. I just find it sad the idea of teens and younger having no interest in anything that isn’t extremely recent.
(ETA quickly before the edit windiw is closed, I see I did say something about it being hard to believe.)
They don’t have interest in old objects. But when it comes to taste in music, say, modern teens are all over the map. The other day, one of my classes (16 students total) all shared their favorite musical artists, and all 16 answers were different, and three of them were from the 70s.
I just so hope the three were the Ramones, Motörhead and AC/DC, but I’m afraid I’m wrong.
Not “interest in” but “awareness of”. Think of the vast number of TV shows and movies filmed before the 1990s that show typewriters in use as contemporary tools and the vast number filmed after that that show them in period pieces. We aren’t talking Roman dodecahedrons here.
I suppose those children would not recognize the percussion instrument being played here. (YouTube video of the British musician and comedian Bill Bailey performing The Typewriter by Leroy Anderson at the Last Night of the Proms a couple of weeks ago.)
Wednesday (Addams) uses one.
My kids have never used a CD or DVD. I’m not sure if they even know what one is. We played DVD’s for them when they were little, but they don’t remember actual disks. DVD’s were already declining, we only had them because certain kiddie titles weren’t streaming, they had to be purchased or pirated.
CDs had already been killed by streaming at that point, and DVDs were already declining. My kids will know these as “hard backups” if they ever know them at all.
You’re absolutely right. The trip was before that show aired, I’m guessing their reaction would have been different otherwise.
A few thoughts replying to some of the comments over the last week.
Young people still channel surf, it’s just called scrolling TikTok or YouTube. Anyone who talks about the “low attention span” because of bouncing from video to video has completely memory holed the entire channel flipping viewing style of the 150 channels of shit era of cable tv (1980s-2010s?).
Last night I was at a primarily Gen Z concert. The headliners where The Oh Hellos (10s indie folk rock), and opening was Rabbitology (20s “girl with a guitar (but it’s an ipad)” folk rock). We were there to take my Gen Alpha kid, whose current favorite bands are My Chemical Romance (00s rock) and Green Day (90s punk/rock), who was wearing a David Gilmour shirt (70s heyday prog rock).
The line for the merch table was huge, going from one side of the venue to the other, then up the stairs to the balcony, and snaking around that a few times. There was no line for the bar. Point being that the young people would much rather spend $10 on a band pin than a pint.
I still buy CDs, generally by importing them, once in a while. There are many foreign artists which are not available on streaming services in the US.
It’s exactly a percussion instrument here. Very cool. And Leroy Anderson was a clever composer.
And anyone who complains about the youth these days texting in class has forgotten the paper notes they passed in class when they were students.
actually I remember back in 50-60’s, stores did that with soda bottles
I wonder how many kids have seen one of those skinny point and click 110 film pocket cameras that were popular in the 70’s and 80’s? If you grew up then one of those was probably your first camera.
Or the tiny “spy cameras” that basically just fit in between the two spools of a 110 roll.
This weekend, I spoke to 2 of the no-longer-teens involved in the typewriter encounter. They now claim they knew what it was, but had never seen one in person before and had no idea how it worked, hence their wonder and questioning, and amusement with it once I’d explained it. That’s not how I remember it, but I may have misinterpreted their initial puzzlement.
Now that’s fully believable. Back in the 1990s my mother bought a travel typwriter in a handled case at a flea market for purely nostalgic reasons. To the best that I can recall, that’s the last time I saw one in person.
I still have, in my house, the Sears brand electric typewriter my mother bought when I was about nine years old. It still works — I took it out to show my son a few months ago — but I haven’t actually needed to use it in decades. I wrote some high school papers on it.