I am mid-40s. My daughter is 11. I take her to school, among other driving things, and usually play NPR. Whenever she needs to refer to what she’s hearing – usually to ask if I’ll turn it off so she can pull up some godawful thing where a random Youtuber squawks discordant lyrics to a Pokémon video game score – she calls it a podcast. I’ve stopped correcting her, particularly since most of the “shows” release as podcasts by the next day anyway.
Sounds familiar. Our kids (9 and 7) asked us at dinner the other night what “over the air” meant and what “radio” was. All they know is streaming.
Not surprising. I’m 36 and it feels strange when someone talks about “radio”, “over the air”, “cable tv” and similar old technologies. It’s only been like 10 years since those still existed but it already feels like ancient past.
Can’t speak about everywhere in the world, but broadcast media is pretty much dead. Radio still exists because of cars, but even that is moving towards streaming.
I’ve loved getting older and getting more and more out of touch with young people’s social media trends.
I wasn’t even all that in-tune with my own generation, so seeing my peers’ preferences recede into the haze of “the olden days” has occasionally been a bit of a relief and reset. The idea of actual radio being baffling is amusing though.
Remember when we were young and we would say how we would make sure we’re always going to keep with the times and not grow old? Yeah, me too.
Speak for yourself, man. I’m’a go listen to some Zeppelin and read some Shakespeare.
Is it really a generation gap? Would you have wanted to listen to NPR when you were 11? And wouldn’t you have been deliberately snarky to annoy your parents? She obviously knows what a radio is because… you use one every day?
This isn’t a “generation gap”, this is a teenager trying to rile up there parent. Do you tell her that her youtube shows are “godawful”? Because that’s how you get into a coldwar of her pretending she doesn’t know what a radio is to make you feel old.
EDIT: The good news is when she gets out the other side of being a teenager, she might even listen to NPR in the car because that’s what her parents used to do.
I think you missed the thing they were referring to with the age gap - the kids called the radio a podcast. Not that OP being surprised that kids don’t like talk radio
I think you misunderstood what I’m saying; I’m saying the kid is deliberately calling the radio a podcast to annoy OP. They know what a radio is because they’ve grown up with their parent using it day in day out in the car. So it’s not an age gap as OP thinks, I’m saying this one is probably the early stages of the long war known as “having teenage kids”.
Ah I got you. I’ve seen similar things happen so often with kids hat hadn’t crossed my mind. My nephew thought his grandma’s cordless (landline) phone was a remote control and wouldn’t believe otherwise until I called it. “Why is it beeping???” “That’s called a dialtone” “what’s it supposed to do???”
As @glimse@lemmy.world said, I’m more interested in how something as seemingly pervasive as radio is a relic that she assumes is just one more streaming option. She approaches the world pretty literally, and just straight-up tells me that she doesn’t want to listen to my stuff, LOL.
We’re not quite into teen rebellion yet, though I can sense her beginning to probe at boundaries. She’s a good kid with a kind heart, and she’s finding her path, and I’ll always support her wherever it leads, but by god I’m not listening to this when I’m trapped in a car with her. 🤣
My 7yo son definitely would have no idea about physical formats if he didn’t see my N64 cartridges sitting alongside the Switch lol. I had to explain to him that we had to buy or rent movies and games if we wanted them. Blew his mind.
“We used to have to watch commercials”
“We used to have to wait til the next week to watch the next episode”
“We used to have to wait til we got home to call people”
“We used to wonder out loud about stuff and have to go to the fucking library to find an answer”
My son’s face screws up for all of these
One of the things my friends and I would do in the middle of our lengthy discussions about whatever was to call the library and ask them to settle some dispute or other. They were always sincerely thrilled to help, often to the point of needing to go do research and then call us back.
