This evening I stumbled upon an article about a young Gen Z woman who genuinely wanted to know, “what did you [old people] do before you could look something up?”
It was quite amusing but it also got me thinking…
…about how I recognize so many songs for which I never knew the name of the artist. I would hear something on the radio and enjoy it, but it didn’t trouble me that I couldn’t identify the artist. Now Shazam is helping me fill in the gaps of my knowledge.
…about how I would wait until the last three days to do the term paper for my music history class, then go to the library and walk out with a stack of ten or fifteen books. Because you had to deal with actual books — nothing online, nothing digital. And that meant actually reading (or — if you had only three days to read, analyze, organize, and write the paper — skimming) every book. Oh, and then I had to type the paper, marking the bottom page margin with a pencil so that I didn’t go too far.
…about how I freelanced throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and as far as Monterey, Modesto, and Santa Rosa with no cell phone and no GPS. I had directions, a map, and my intuition.
…about how a movie would come out and you either went to see it or — you missed it. And that was that.
So, yeah, I can see how this would boggle the mind of someone born in 1997. 😂