Posted on 04/15/2014 9:47:23 AM PDT by C19fan
Children's perplexed reactions to a Sony Walkman have been caught on camera, with the majority frustrated at operating clunky buttons over a touch screen. Los Angeles-based filmmakers Benny and Rafi Fine asked volunteers aged six to 13 to guess what the bulky device was, with suggestions including a 'walkie-talkie' or 'boombox'. 'What is this?' one nine-year-old girl quizzed as she investigated the Eighties-era cassette player, while another exclaimed 'I'm not going to give up, I'm a survivor,' as she determinedly tried to figure out how it worked.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
When I was growing up in the 1970s, I was still able to play 78 rpm records in my home even for decades, 45 and 33 1/3 (LPs) had become the norm. I also had a 1950s era Royal typewriter on my desk that I used for homework and my parents had this old Zenith black and white TV set from the mid 1960s - they didn't replace it until 1982! Back then, everything was expected to last.
During the 1980s and 1990s, I invested thousands of dollars in building an compact audio disc library as well as a VHS video library. At the time, I thought CDs and videocassettes were going to last for a hundred years and I'd be handing them down to my children. Now my kids laugh at them and I'm lucky if I can sell them for pennies on the dollar on Ebay.
Now even MP3s and DVDs seem outdated. For a few dollars a month, you can stream just about any song ever recorded and very quickly video content is going the same way.
Kids these days don’t know how good they have it.
They were clunky buttons, and yes it does mean something:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/clunky?s=t
awkwardly heavy or clumsy: clunky metal jewelry; clunky shoes.
They were huge and had to move mechanical parts around in the item so you had to put force in them and make sure you got the appropriate clicking sounds. Pretty much the definition of clunky. It’s not bigotry, it’s admitting reality.
These are always fun, and I suspect the kids are chosen for their cuteness rather than their tech savvy. But at their age, I was not only tearing about 10-50 year old technology but understood how it worked and could built it from scratch. This generation can’t even find the freakin’ cassette slot without help.
Better hope the interwebs keep on a running kiddies....
And if you lived under the landing path of a plane, the picture would sometimes get wonky.
Come to think of it, no kid would even know TV-related stuff like UHF and VHF dials, what V-Hold is, or what a “floor model console” TV looks like.
Do you remember the Princess rotary phones? They were smaller and available in pink. They were around back about 1962.
I have one of those that requires a huge case that you had to dock the “portable” player inside in order to actually take it away from a wall outlet. I think it ran off of 4 C-sized or D-sized batteries.
We don’t have cable and we generally sit down as a family to watch things on TV, which may be broadcast, streamed or a disc but it generally has to be something as least a few people are interested in watching.
The result is that my kids have at least a passing exposure to media not designed specifically for their demographic. My teenagers are just starting to realize how little their friends have been exposed to.
Wow. Exactly.
I seriously wonder if all of this modern technology is good for us. I often wonder what I did without it when I was growing up. I was happy and a lot less stressed.
It has to be especially hard on kids.
Mechanical switches work when you have gloves on. Touch screens do not. Just to make a point that old != bad.
"Old-Fashioned" and "New-Fangled" are equally idiotic responses to technological change.
And "clunky" is just a meaningless insult. The author should be honest, and say "I don't like it".
Right ... until you go off the network (or the network goes off). Then you're hosed.
Live by the network ... die by the network.
Remember when people said that computers could never replace the human brain? Well some still say that. They are correct. But they are wrong.
Frightening to what extent the nebulous internet/Google/antisocial media sites have become the repository of human knowledge, and are then used as substitutes for human memory, discernment, and intellect.
Many people are choosing to trust what is displayed from a gadget in the hand instead of thinking and using proper reasoning skills, or even plain old intuition and instincts.
It’s like Clark Griswold asking for directions in the ghetto.
That’s right you little punk ass kids, in the 80’s we didn’t have Ipods, internet, and .mp3’s, we had to make do with the Sony Walkman! We had to carry around cassettes and switch them in and out if we wanted to listen to something different, unless we made a mix tape. And that was alot of work. You little snots don’t know how good you got it!
Oh yeah, and we had to ride the bus uphill both ways in the snow too. No mommy taking us in the Lexus. We had to rough it!
Who is this "they" of whom you speak? My sister showed me this video and asked if the kids' reactions were exaggerated. I did a little digging, and as far as I can tell, of the four cassette manufacturers whom I patronized the most in my teens (Maxell, TDK, BASF, and Denon), only Maxell is still making them. And they're making only one grade of tape nowadays, Type I - not the higher-end chromium dioxide ones I spent all my money on in the 80s (let alone the really good "metal" ones that were usually beyond my means).
As far as I can tell, no one is making portable cassette players any more, and I'm not sure if there is still such a thing as a console deck or boom box that plays them, either. So it's not surprising to me that kids no older than about 13 have never actually seen one.
Yup, had one of those. May still have it buried in a box in the attic.
My Dad’s a complete gadgetphile. I had all sorts of neat electronic goodies in the 80s, either him getting them for me (one of my early Walkmans was the yellow “Sport” version with the sealed case, also had an early Watchman) or inheriting from him (the Discman, the larger Watchman with the built in 8mm VHS cassette system) ...
I think that’s a key point. In the 70s, after getting home from school, I’d turn on the tv and see old films of Abbott and Costello, Charlie Chan, etc., along with shorts of Three Stooges, Our Gang, etc. Made us relatively familiar (visually) with a lot of dated, ‘before-our-time’ artifacts.
I don’t think this kind of thing has been happening as much with the more recent generations.
I have my CDs too but I would have to move a lot of stuff around in the attic to get to them.
our house was three rooms and a path.
The neighbors lived on a piece of cardboard on the medium strip (Thanx to Monty Python).
We live in the sticks, a couple of years ago, the internet was down for 3 weeks after a storm and will frequently be down for a weekend.
Physical media is still appreciated in our house.
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