Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

The nature of boredom changed permanently at some point during the past 20 years. In the 20 years prior, the technology of personal distraction had changed very little. In the '80s, people already had cable TV, the Walkman, video games, VCRs. By 2000, little had really changed: more channels on TV, Discman instead of Walkman, better video games, DVDs instead of VCRs - but basically the same set of options. Who'd have thought nostalgia for boredom would be a thing.

Did the nature change? Netflix instead of DVDs or Channel 342 on cable, different videogames, Spotify.

The big difference is the sending each other memes, but I carried a paperback everywhere because I couldn't handle being bored in line for two minutes without something to do - the nature of filling those gaps is the biggest change but the gaps still existed.

now we have podcasts to fill every moment that our eyes can't be occupied with screens

well, and even those moments too tbf

I was a very late adopter... I think I started using a computer in '97, a cellphone in 2004 or 2005....

Had my first phone in 2000? Was the last girl in my year to get one as well. Not properly online until 03.

Cable TV since 1977 (we lived in a very remote area that had had it since the early Sixties), computer since 1979, microwave since 1980, online since 1989 and Internet since 1995. Cell phone since 2000 or so because of work, PDA around the same time so I could have books to read at work.

I think I got mine in 2002. I almost always called and never texted anyone until I moved to France in 2008, which is when I realized there was a massive divide in terms of cell phone use between Europe and North America (no idea how the UK fits into this tho). The intervening years have all but it erased it, of course.

Literally bought my first cell phone because my wife had been unable to get in touch with me on 9/11.

xp 2008 is proof of boomerism being not just an age but a mentality

Touché.

Never texted anyone until the iPhone came out, unless paging someone with 80085 in the '90s counts.

first celly in 2005, until then I borrowed my mother's. Cingular, a shitty flip phone that the internet stopped working on in one month and never again worked.

the plan was something like 2 minutes per night, 3 on weekends, $300 for every minute you went over

I was often bored but that was when I daydreamed, read, and smoked weed as a teenager. And watched weird movies in my parents' basement.

All I did in my teenage years was study in my room, read novels and have unrealized sexual fantasies. I was so determined to achieve something. I had friends but didn’t do that much socializing. It wasn’t bad though, I was never bored

I was was also on the wrestling team in my high school and the matches in my weight class against opponents from other local schools were exciting and terrifying

First Nokia mobile phone c2000 I think. About a year or so before, a friend got one for her birthday and I thought "why on earth would you need that? you going into stocks and shares?". But by the time I got mine, most people I knew had one. It happened very quickly, so that by end of 2001 it was weird if you didn't

When did you get a smartphone? I had a cell briefly for work in the late 90s and then got a flip phone in the mid-2000s. First iPhone in maybe 2011. Been trying to escape the Apple ecosystem ever since. Unsuccessfully.

all i did in my teenage years was Master the Blade

I had a mobile phone in the late 90s that was a huge brick-like thing that I used for work, my friends laughed about it but were also amazed, it's hard to believe in retrospect that mobile technology started that long ago

You likely have brain cancer. Those old bricks were super powerful because there weren't many cells around back then.

:)

I remember my dad's car phone from the late 80s; it was a gray thing, not super huge/bricklike but made of two triangular halves hinged together, and it plugged into the cigarette lighter.

haven't thought much before about the evolution of mobile technology

This was the one (1996, apparently):

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/53/f4/0d/53f40d971282e94f2af191abaa5d02c5.jpg

Those motorola StarTACs were dope

the one I had was way bulkier and much more brick-like. I would like to post a picture of it here but nobody on ilx has ever been willing to really explain for us luddites in detail how to do it. Daniel Esquire years ago showed me how to use tinypic to reduce size and post images, but that is now defunct. I wish he would come back, but he won't

.....for images, just use: http://www.website.com/image.jpeg

what the fuck does that mean

that weird square that came out in my post was supposed to be the designated formatting help for images

I do it like this:

> use Google Image Search to find a picture of the thing I want
> "Open Image In New Tab"
> copy the URL of the image
> insert it between image tags like so: (img)urlofyourchosenimage.com(/img) but using square brackets instead of parentheses

While I'm here, the way to embed a YouTube video in a post is to copy the whole URL, not the shortened version, paste it in, no tag brackets or anything, and then change it from https to http. Like so:

http : // www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIM83vaFWSY

Eliminate the spaces and you'd be watching this video of Cecil Taylor and Sam Rivers playing live:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIM83vaFWSY

thank you unperson

still don't understand though, really, the image is always attached to a website, how do I just post the image by itself

Each image file has to be hosted by a server. ILX can’t afford the bandwidth to host images itself so you have to paste the link to the image from somewhere else.

The satisfaction of flipping a phone closed in anger is something an iPhone will never be able to give future generations.

xp that doesn't explain it for me. clicking on a google image leads me to a website. how do I copy the individual image on that website that I want? what url?

you want a link that ends with .gif, .jpg, or .png

so, http://https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/a4c75e8/2147483647/strip/true/crop/629x419+70+0/resize/2400x1600!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2Fcellpics-37.jpg

ok no

I don’t know how you did that.

https://i.imgur.com/M8Z07RX.jpg

I clicked on the google image I wanted. A website came up. I right clicked on the image address in the website. it was a jpg and I posted it here.

fuck you burrito, you haven't made any attempt to explain this coherently

trying again

https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/a4c75e8/2147483647/strip/true/crop/629x419+70+0/resize/2400x1600!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2Fcellpics-37.jpg

ok, that was the cellphone I had in the 90s

Let’s just not use any links from whatever newatlas.com is

sorry! it was just an image that came up on google that looked like the right cellphone.

this wouldn't have been worth the effort except for my learning how to post images here again, thank you unperson and el tomboto

;-P

I've had the same problem posting images lately too. They're all attached to websites - where are all the jpegs? Something's different bc I used to post images all the time with never a problem.

think my first smartphone was c2009 or 2010.

I'm "I remember when WAP stood for Wireless Access Protocol" years old

I’m old enough to remember it stood for sexless White Anglo-Protestant - though my memory might not serve me that well there anymore.

Those were usually referred to as WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).

In the '80s, people already had cable TV, the Walkman, video games, VCRs.

uhhh I feel like that's a retrospective over-generalization, also "cable TV" didn't mean you had "the cool channels" -- my middle-class family had "cable" because of the geography of where we lived, but that consisted of 2 PBS stations (yes, we lived in a nice place, we had 2), ABC affiliate, NBC affiliate, CBS affiliate, and two independent channels that played like, re-runs of Brady Bunch and CHiPS, and had stuff like "Dialing for Dollars" with mediocre social issues movies. I think CNN got added to this at some point in the 90s, as well as some other movie channel that at one point around 1989 showed Rio Bravo every day for a month. I did really like Rio Bravo, but I don't think that when you say "cable TV" you mean, watching Rio Bravo every day for a month because that was the most interesting entertainment choice available.

most people I know didn't get a walkman until like late 80s (at the earliest), but we had boomboxes.

video games: people tended to have maybe a dozen games, tops? These tended to be the families that had two or more male children. We had the tank game that came with the Atari and Pitfall. I got pretty good at Pitfall.

VCRs: depending where you lived, renting movies was "an expedition" and often required parental supervision. ... or you could record stuff from TV ...

Idk I feel like there is this ret-conning (?) of the 80s based on like, John Hughes movies and sitcoms featuring affluent families, where teenagers had all the cool gadgets, because they were aspirational portrayals of life in America.