Ok so what I suppose you would call an “elder zoomer” or whatever, born in the span of '98-'02, entering my mid-20s. Get all your geriatric chomsky emotes out of your systems, it’s fine. My parents were born in '71 and '72 respectively, meaning they just entered their 50s. My dad has always been a computer guy, played dnd back in the 80s, introduced me and my brother to pirating media growing up, etc. Basically, he’s a nerd. He’s always been a nerd. He also holds some weird contradictory views ranging from very based (like pirating and hating the US) to very chuddy but that’s unrelated for now.
My point is, my dad isn’t some tech-illiterate boomer who hates “the iphones and nintendos” or whatever. Despite this, he’s completely, and I mean completely oblivious to any and all internet culture. Hell, my mom runs circles around him in terms of being able to understand memes and me and my brother have even gotten her to start using “copium” correctly to my uncle (which is hilarious but also resulted in me having to explain to my extended family what it means during christmas dinner). It’s not like my dad didn’t get on the internet when it first came around, he was a super early adopter of both cellphones and the internet. I also know that he has spent a not-insignificant amount of time on various hobby forums and so on. He still doesn’t know what a “meme” is though, he sends me and my brother “funny pictures” which are all some rank-ass 2012 facebook-funny-page tier shit that always manages to be a bit problematic no matter how innocent the subject matter seems.
He’s also incredibly thin-skinned online. He’s tried playing online games because, well, he like playing games! He just can’t though; he gets so incredibly offended over any and all toxicity (yes toxicity is bad but he’s a grown-ass white cishet male he’s not exactly being targeted with violent slurs) that it would probably be incredibly humorous as an outsider.
His relationship to media online is also quite interesting. He’s fully aware of youtube, with the caveat that to him it’s still just the site where you “go to find a grainy video of some indian with a thick accent to fix an obscure tech problem” (paraphrased from him) or where you watch uploads of live concerts or clips from TV shows. Basically any video uploaded after 2010 doesn’t exist to him. Youtube is just for home-video amateurs, there’s no artistic merit in it, “why would you ever watch someone else play a game? are you stupid”-type-beat, etc. I think if I showed him something like a Jacob Geller essay he would just straight up not get it.
The same goes for video games. While he plays plenty of newer games, he thinks of all games as being either competitive match-based PvP games like counter strike or single player experiences where you play from the start to the end once and then the game is done. I’ve tried so many times to explain to him that the reason ESO is so weird coming from skyrim is that it’s an MMO, and MMOs are fundamentally different. He has no concept of roguelikes or other games that deviate from this standard form of a “cinematic” single-player experience. Just recently he started playing 7 Days to Die and it has been blowing his mind seeing this “super innovative gameplay loop”, but instead of contextualizing it in terms of other survival-crafty games, he thinks it’s cool because “it’s just like Fallout with the scavenging”
Idk people I don’t really have a big point to make here at the end. I love my dad even if our relationship is a bit strained, and the stuff I bring up here are not meant to be specific to him. My mom is the same minus the video games in many ways (not understanding that online videos are more than just charlie bit my finger etc). I’m also aware that framing it as a generational thing is a bit unhelpful and all that, but what can you do.
Do you people have similar stories with tech-literate people who are somehow completely out of touch in terms of internet culture? It’s somehow fascinating to me, and I think maybe talking about it could help me communicate with my parents about it better.
Your parents are prime Gen Xers. Here’s my perspective as a prime millennial with boomer parents and Gen Xer coworkers, including some who are as old as your parents:
Meme culture started in the late 90s-early 00s and was spearheaded by xennials on forums like SA. This was back when memes weren’t called memes but fads. So, you wouldn’t say the “all your base are belong to us” meme but the “all your base are belong to us” fad. I remember sharing fads I found on Newgrounds, albinoblacksheep, and Gamefaqs with my classmates in middle school. Meanwhile, your parents would be in their 30s raising you as a baby. This is the headspace they would be in when meme culture was born. If they’ve seen me in middle school, they would’ve just seen some weird 13 year old getting hyped about shitty animation they saw online and other weird 13 year olds being bizarrely fixated on the weird 13 year old’s poor attempt at trying to describe the shitty animation with a 13 year old’s vocabulary. It shouldn’t be that surprising that they don’t really get meme culture, that it gets filed under “weird shit that I’m not going to waste brain processing power to figure out.”
It’s a common adage among IT tech support that the most tech savvy generation are xennials and tech literacy gets worse the further you get away from xennials until you arrive at boomers and zoomers (no offense) who are mostly tech illiterate. So, your dad being tech savvy is just him being a Gen Xer. Part of the relationship Gen Xers have with technology is that they see it purely as a tool, no more and no less. Your dad’s description of how he sees Youtube is pretty much how Gen Xers see technology in general.
I’m super biased, but I actually prefer gen Xer’s relationship towards technology the most. The other generations have flawed relationships towards technology. Boomers are hopelessly addicted to online slop and fall for the most transparent scams, and zoomers have their sense of self mediated by social media, which by itself isn’t that bad except social media is completely governed by corporate algorithms. And as for millennials, I don’t like my generation’s relationship to technology either. I think millennials as a whole were far too naive in the amount of damage social media could’ve done and by the time many people within my cohort woke up, they’ve already invested so much in their particular social media site. It’s like “wow, Facebook is fucked up, too bad I’ve already uploaded 10000 photos, so I might as well continue to use Facebook.”
Your dad just has pleb tastes in games lol. His taste is honestly closer to some millennial dudebro who only started gaming when the Xbox was released. Elitist Gen Xer gamers act completely different from your dad. If anything, they would probably do nothing but play Rogue for like 30 years, rant about how Bethesda ruined Fallout, or play some inexplicably difficult RPG made by Polish devs. Or they would pretty much only consider arcade games to be real games. My boomer dad is really drawn into 80s arcade games like Pacman and Donkey Kong, going so far as to set up MAME for me, but he pretty much doesn’t consider console or PC to be “real games.” I guess the Gen Xer version of my boomer dad would be someone who really likes Street Fighter 2 or Streets of Rage or Metal Slug. But yeah, the gaming part kinda cracks me up because he doesn’t have the same taste as his generation.
Thank you for the long comment! I really like point 2, that sounds about right to me. I am quite tech savvy myself, but most of my peers really aren’t.
About memes, you’re correct in that they came along while my parents were busy having a baby, but to put it plainly, my dad is way more into social media than i am. I am a bit of an exception in that i have 0 social media presence and only scroll youtube and hexbear, but still. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it’s not like my dad is just not interested in internet culture. It’s more that he sort of thinks he is, and to some extent prides himself on being “aware” and gets really upset if I try to tell him that his entire understanding just doesn’t really line up with reality.