Things that children today no longer know
Since I I have a serious relationship with Instagram my Twitter account has become a hopelessly neglected page. There was a time when I was fanatically active, but now I only retweet things, repost my Insta photos, and very occasionally respond to a mention. But I still follow all sorts of people and use it as a news source, and this week #TodaysKidsWillNeverKnow went viral. Or trending, however you want to call it.
The hashtag is used to name things that children growing up now will never know about from the past. And that is quite entertaining, so we did a round of editorial brainstorming with our own things.
– How annoying the “computer science class” was in high school. Playing stupid “educational” games on a computer for the whole hour in a stuffy, hot classroom.
– How proud you were of your typing diploma. Kids today are born with a keyboard at their fingertips, but that wasn't the case back then. It was called Pica, and you can still take that typing course by the way, but I don't think anyone does that anymore. With all sorts of colored stickers on your keyboard, you learned to type blind. I hated it and quit early; it's a miracle that typing is now my job all day long.
– The dial-up sound of the internet. Now everyone always has internet all the time, but I still remember that you had to dial in, and I can still dream that sound. For those who can't, that's what it sounded like.
– Floppies. Haaa do you remember those? Ridiculously large ‘things’ where you could park your documents and then open them on any computer, so super duper handy!
– MSN-ing. Oh man, I think I spent 80% of my youth behind MSN. It was THE communication tool, and in your name, you could put a profound message that only the person it was about understood. Think of it as your Facebook status before Facebook existed. The dumbest part is that you had spent the whole day together in class and then agreed to sit on MSN at 7:00 PM. ’Hey hi, how are you?“ ”Yeah, and you?“ ”Good. What did you do today?“ ”Um, well, sat in the same class as you?!“ Really, what the heck were we doing? And ooooh my favorite: if you had a ”crush‘ on a boy, you would go online and offline all the time hoping he would say something to you.
– How brilliant Lizzy McGuire was. Really, it might be one of the best series ever made, and for that reason alone, I will always be a fan of Hilary Duff.
– How stressful libraries could be. You needed a book for your presentation at school, and you had to prepare that presentation based on information from books. You know, those paper things. And they were in the library. After you had spent hours figuring out which shelf they were on (A.b3.z8790, something like that), it was always exciting to see if it was still there, and if not, then you were in trouble.
– The first mobile phones had a memory capacity of a pea and could store a maximum of 20 text messages. After that, your phone was full, and you had to delete stuff. Hell.
– That H&M stands for Hennes & Mauritz. Nowadays it's just H&M, but back then we said, “we're going to Hennes for a bit.” You really never hear anyone say that anymore.
– That Peter Jan Rens was once a really nice man. He hosted a show called Geef Nooit Op, and it was the best ever. Now he's a crazy guy program. Danny Panadero kicks off the party at Costa. even crazier woman, but really, once, we were all fans of him.
