I just read
this report on teenage media consumption habits, written by
some spotty-faced intern at Morgan Stanley.
Is this really the world my daughters are growing up in?
How sad.
In my day we didn't download music illegally – we paid
good money for it. Using the spare change we made washing our dad's car we would buy cheap-ass Sonotech cassette tapes (or wait until our birthday for our aunties and uncles to give us two-packs of high-quality BASF or TDK tapes as gifts), and use those to make copies of the taped copies our friends made of albums that one of their friends' older siblings had bought on sale at CNA.
In my day we didn't NOT listen to radio – we listened to it all the time. Especially during high school physics class (particularly younger old farts like me, who were in high school during those magic years of post-isolation cricket, when our nation's cricket heroes were mostly likeable, but still all white); during afternoons when we were supposed to be studying for history tests (when, instead of studying, we'd wait for new songs to come on, and then record them onto tape); and on Saturday mornings when Shadoe Stevens presented the American Top 40 (and didn't talk while the songs were playing, like the other Radio 5 and Radio Kontrei DJs did).
In my day we didn't watch TV "seasonally" – we watched it all the time. And why wouldn't we? We had shows like
MacGyver,
The A-Team and
Magnum PI. And there was none of this bollocksy Grey's Anatomy or Desperate Housewives for us – we had compelling adult dramas (which we sometimes recorded on VHS tapes, or on Beta if you were in my family) like
Twin Peaks,
Doogie Howser and
Murder She Wrote... plus a brand-new show called
The Simpsons. And in my day we watched the ads. Because in my day the ads were good – and we didn't have multi-billion-rand cellphone companies spending huge sums of money trying to make their ads look as "authentic" (i.e. cheap) as possible.
In my day we didn't waste our time on gaming consoles like Wii, Xbox or PS3. The sun was shining outside, and the air was clean... so we were, of course, indoors trying to install
Kings Quest III onto our monochrome-monitored PCs using all nine floppy discs which our Uncle Dave had pirated from some guy at his work who'd just come back from a business trip to the United States.
In my day we didn't read the newspaper either – but we understood its value to society as a liner for the bottom of our hamster cages.
In my day we didn't know what an Internet was. But we watched the Matthew Broderick movie called
War Games, and we knew that one day computers (or the Russians, or the ANC, or the Nats, depending on which uncle you asked) would kill us all.
In my day we used public payphones when we had an emergency. And we knew that when Dad came away on holiday with us, nobody at his work could contact him, and we would have him all to ourselves.
What was hot? Summer.
What was not? Winter. And having to watch TV shows dubbed into Afrikaans, with the original English soundtrack available on Radio 2000.
