The Growing generational gap(s)

This blog post is a lot more ramble-y then my previous few, less focused. Do be warned!

I work retail as a day job, and it lets me meet and talk to a lot of primarily older people, that, combined with the older people who I know a lot closer in my life have gotten me thinking about the growing gap of experience between the generations.

Think back to a couple hundred years ago. Say the frontier years. Those days, a father would be able to teach their child exactly what was going down in the area. As society has advanced, it's began to change faster.

These days, what the world looked like for a boomer is so foreign they often have trouble integrating and society has many services and amenity offerings for them to have some remaining familiarity. It's fascinating to think how this is basically a problem humanity has never had, as humans just haven't been advancing fast enough in the past for this kind of situation to arise.

My work, being retail in the modern day, has some points system you have to access online to work. Not one older person in a month shopping at my work can accept the fact they need to check, on the internet, for their own account. It's been like this for years. A lot of older people categorically refuse to learn simple tasks on a computer yet desire the benefits of doing so. 

I wonder how much people who were, and continue to be, unfamiliar with the internet influence the design of modern websites. Modern websites are sterile and boring, for what purpose? To be easily understood to somebody unfamiliar with that website. They create websites that, if you've navigated a previous one, you can almost certainly navigate the new corporate husk you've found yourself wading through.

This doesn't really matter to people who were born with the internet as a concept, from their birth. We've been exploring the web in some capacity since we first learnt what electricity was in elementary school for the most of us. A differently designed website means nothing to us, but for people unfamiliar with the internet...not born with it an established concept, it seems they can't quite form the same pattern recognition for website design and online navigating as people born in the internet age can and do.

I know several older moms who have been using facebook longer then I've been alive, and they claim not to know how to turn on or off the wifi on their phone, a task which is one swipe, and one tap on modern phones.

UI could be so much crazier, so much more complex, useful, or even just....cool looking and fun, if it didn't need to cater to people who don't know how to google an issue, or can't type 'settings' into a search bar. Can't click on a volume icon to make their computer quiet.

The internet is the most relevant to this particular blog, due to previous subjects mentioned, but, this gap extends to other subjects such as finances and employment. The world has changed so much and the older generations haven't kept up by and large. "Respect your elders" isn't a phrase I've heard for a long time, and I do not blame people. What it meant to be wise centuries ago is simply not the same as what wisdom is today. Perhaps things will go back to a historical 'normal' soon. A slower pace. The advancement of computer specs have slowed to a near halt in the previous years, and no truly crazy tech inventions has been happening. Perhaps we will be seeing a plateau for at least a while, and this gap will shrink.

The sociological studies (Think brain development and the like) and science that will be possible once internet age people are the only people on earth is frankly going to be really cool and likely really crazy...perhaps optimistic, perhaps dreadful, perhaps a bit of both.