Older generation needs to embrace social media

editorialStop me if you’ve heard this one from any person over the age of 40: “Kids these days are so glued to their phones, they can’t enjoy what’s going on around them!” Or “back in my day, ice cream was only five cents and I didn’t have any of those Apple phones!” If you haven’t heard that before, I would be shocked.

Older human beings seem to have some sort of superiority complex when it comes to technology, among other things.

Spencer Grant
Spencer Grant

Recently, at a Diamondbacks Major League Baseball game, the announcers focused in on a group of girls in the stands who were all taking selfies, roasting them by using terms like “glued to their phones” to describe a spectacle that, to their highly evolved and wise adult minds seems inconceivable, but to anyone younger than the age of 40, is more common than just about anything.

What the announcers fail to realize is that this makes them seem like bitter old douches.

The story was everywhere the next day, and the icing on the cake? The organization offered free tickets to the girls who the commentators were mocking, only to have them refused and instead re-routed to a charity organization in a completely classy move by the “selfie girls.”

Baseball is not America’s pastime anymore. It’s football, with its over-the-top macho masculinity, or basketball, with brandable stars like Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook invading Oklahoman’s living rooms every other commercial break.

Baseball hasn’t been able to harness the power of the millennial generation — or social media — it would seem. How can you blame young women or, in this case, anyone, for looking at their phone during a sporting event where, the majority of the time, the players are standing still, there are multiple breaks in the action and nine total innings to boot?

There are plenty of routes to take in this situation. There’s obviously some sort of male sexist idea about the proper way to act at a sporting event that these girls were somehow violating with their perceived “frivolity.”

The modern world and current generations could not care less about people telling them they look silly on their phones. Take a look around the Internet and you’ll find evidence that history doesn’t quite favor those who hearken to “back in my day” sentiments.

There are pictures of Nixon giving speeches with practically everyone in the crowd clutching a huge, gaudy flash camera. There are pictures of everyone on a public bus with their heads stubbornly buried in a newspaper.

Amateur chemist and photography enthusiast Robert Cornelius is actually widely regarded as the man who took the very first selfie in 1839.

On a question-and-answer thread on Reddit, there was a woman interviewing her grandmother, who was around during the advent of home electricity. She mentioned that electricity was so new and wild at the time, many people thought “I lived my entire life without this here eee-lectricity, and you can too!” We all know how that turned out.

Sure, people are skeptical and curious about iPhones and selfies, but just remember, at one point in time, people felt the same way about electricity.

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