Living in the age of the digital recording has a lot more advantages from what most might think. Nowadays people often complain, rightfully, about kids spending far too much time indoors.
However, as a member of generation Y I feel we got the best of it all. We would go to a library to study. We would read thousands of books for entertainment, but even an average student would read dozens of books every year for school.
While we spent plenty of time outside, and got used to it, we did get to enjoy an era which was filled with good digital entertainment and technology. We still do. Thanks to our experience most of us still enjoy going to the beach, others do sports outdoors, and even in a café we would prefer, more often than not, to sit outside.
We were the first and only generation, as far as I know, to teach our parents, rather than only learn from them. By the time you were in elementary school, you might as well have been a licensed technician. Kids were the first in line to learn most new technologies. A 5 year old in the 90’s would be able to program and fix a VCR (or Beta Max if you insist), and later on elementary school kids could fix even a PC. Actually, many kids owned computers long before their parents did.
Every generation prefers its own entertainment, usually what was popular between the age of 15 and 30 for each group and country. But when you mention the 90’s, very few age groups argue against how amazing these years were. The atmosphere around the millennium, along with the big financial changes growing out of technology created a very unique era.
We witnessed the aftermath of the Berlin Wall falling down along with the end (or reboot if you prefer) of the cold war. We got to see the dot-com bubble inflate, blow up, and come back bigger and better than ever. We got to see more wars that we could ever imagine as saw the news grow out of any reasonable proportion, but that is a story for a different day.
I doubt there was a better time for television and cinema before 1985 or after 2006 (roughly). Quantity grew obviously, with the growth in population and rapidly increasing availability for media consumption worldwide, but what is most surprising is that quality peeked as well.
Same goes to computer games. Even though buying a good computer is about 3 times cheaper than it was in 1997 you would find tens of millions of people playing older video and computer games from the 80’s and 90’s even today.
But now it’s time the punch line. Obviously the childhood is the most positively memorable time for the vast majority of people. And we are a part of this generation which thinks it had the best childhood. So were probably right. We can teach the next generation the same.
All we really need them to know is the value of fresh air and reading a book, nothing more. This would go a long way in my opinion.
