Thursday, May 05, 2005

Here are some ways that my daughter's life will differ from all previous generations, technologically speaking:

  1. TiVo. For as long as my daughter has been allowed to see TV, she's always been able to select her program from a list of prerecorded shows. She doesn't understand the concept of channels, or just watching whatever crap happens to be on. There's always a Rolie Polie Olie or a House of Mouse for her (oh, and lots of educational programming, of course). When we encounter normal TV, like in a hotel, she's baffled. "Where's the list? Pause it! Oooh, rewind that part!"

    Similarly, commercials are both alien and fascinating to her. She's seen so few, that she's mesmerized more by them than by the shows.

  2. Phones. They're omnipresent. Want to call Grandma from the grocery store? Done. Also, I don't think my daughter has ever used a corded phone. We have one or two in the house, but they never get used.

  3. Information Superhighway. Information is available to my daughter at the parental press of a button. There is always at least one computer turned on in our house that has a high-speed connection to the Internet. The immediacy of information is startling to me, but expected to her.

    Any time our family wonders something, my daughter will suggest that we look it up at dot com. For example, I'll say something like "I don't know how to build a time machine" and she'll say, "Oh, just go to time machine dot com!". (FYI, that's a crappy site. Virtually no information on time travel.)

  4. ATMs. I think my daughter has been in an actual bank once. It's possible that it'll never happen again.

  5. Music. When there's a song she wants us to get, she understands that it'll come from a computer. She'll probably never buy a CD, and certainly not a tape or a record.

  6. Blogging. Her life will be excruciatingly documented for dozens of readers by an amateur writer. One day soon she'll realize this and be pissed.

  7. Travel. Soon, she'll use nothing but flying cars, jetpacks, and teleportation for trips to the store, or downstairs.
I love my cyborg daughter.

4 comments:

Mike said...

Vixen, were you one of the voices on that cartoon? You're famous!

And, although you may hate that show, I gotta say that it's the most palatable out of all the crap that my daughter watches.

Bird On A Line said...

Mike,
Happy Ass Friday to you too. I caused some embarassment in the household, thus the removal of the pic. Oh well. :)

Mike said...

Victoria, understood. We men get that way about our asses.

Mike said...

It's well known in the industry that nobody throws down the lunchy like Rolie Polie. That bastard is an eating machine!