Originally Posted by crewmeal
Can't customers do without it wifi in the air for 6 hours?
The past, they say, is a foreign country. Which makes us all become foreigners in our own cultures with the passage of time.
I recently read a review of a book entitled "
The End of Absence Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection". The review, presumably by a 20-something, was badly written and not worth quoting, but
the premise of the book goes like this:
"Only one generation in history (ours) will experience life both with and without the Internet. For everyone who follows us, online life will simply be the air they breathe. Today, we revel in ubiquitous information and constant connection, rarely stopping to consider the implications for our logged-on lives."
Basically he's saying something I have noticed with my own nephews and neice, aged 19 to 29; that the world has changed dramatically and that anyone born after about 1985 has no memory of how things once were. A world without connection is as foreign to them as a world without cars and telephones is to most of us.
My 29yo nephew (born 1985) in many ways lived a childhood closer to my own than to his siblings born in 1995. He was an adult before he bothered to get an email address and is a native of "the land before the internet". I've heard him discuss the attitudes of his younger siblings and the 20-somethings he employs and it is clear he is from our side of the divide, a "digital immigrant". I'm quite sure he doesn't fret about a lack of internet on long flights
Anyone much younger, the digital natives, genuinely feels a bit like they're being asked to walk through horse manure to the post office to post an aerogram written with a quill pen if they're disconnected for a few hours...
The
median age in the USA is about 38 and there aren't many places its much over 40. Within about ten years maximum, the digital natives will outnumber us.