If anyone has been to collegehumor.com, you understand that title. It’s a weekly post where college students and twenty-somethings from all over the nation send in their experiences with the older generation and their lack of understanding with today’s technologies.
Our online museum is not a ready as we had hoped, we are still waiting on server issues, but I spent last week putting some finishing touches on fonts, organization, etc. to make it pretty. But it’s almost done, and when it is, it’s time to move on to another project in our public history class.
This class is much more computer oriented than my experiences at my small county museum in Grand Forks. Sure, we are working on putting our artifact archives on a program called Past Perfect, but it’s less complicated than Omeka because it is not an online program. It is not accessible to people browsing on the web; one can only view our items if they are sitting at our computer in the museum.
But, being raised in the ’90s, my generation was not only raised on computers, but we are much more capable of adapting to new technologies than our parents generation. At the age of five I could find the programs I wanted on my parents very ancient Macintosh, and by the age of ten I was making signs for my mother’s daycare. Of course, I’m not as tech savvy as a computer science major, but I was raised to know where to find what I want.
Our parents had a major generation gap with their parents who were part of the Great Depression generation, the WWII and Korean War generation. They were separated from their children who were the “children of the revolution”. I remember when I was younger, my mom would tell me when ever she was angry with what was happening in the US, “We sold out the revolution for a pair of running shoes”.
But now it’s my generation’s turn to have issues with our parents, and this time it’s technology. It’s certainly not that they are incapable of learning such things, it’s just that they were not raised in an environment where they look at a computer and know exactly how to access the internet and browse the web….or how to unzip zipped files.
So this lead me to question….who are we aiming this online museum towards? My mother, whom I’m certain would be livid if she found out I posted her age on here, is 51 years old, and she’s the tail end of the Baby Boomers, which is the largest numbered generation in the US today. Even my older sisters generation, who were raised in the ’80s, didn’t get our training we received, and there is a fair number of them that are clueless when it comes to computers. By creating a strictly online museum, are we limiting our audience even when our goal is to expand it?
An experiment we want to do in the class is create a sort of electronic museum where anyone can contribute something to. This will most likely involve the students on UND’s campus. UND, however, has a fair amount of the “older than average” students. When we are sending out a call for, say, people to show us UND’s ugliest doors through their eyes, are we only speaking to a certain percentage? The percentage that knows how?
Morbidly, we eventually won’t have this generation gap. One day, my child will be a readily adaptable to technology as I am, so anything created now online will live on to generations to come. But with every move towards making stuff more “accessible” “easier” and “quicker” with computer technologies, it seems we are quickly leaving our parent’s generation in the dust, expecting them to keep up without any help, and labeling them unintelligent when they struggle to understand. Technology must move forward, and nothing will ever be as dramatic as replacing the horse with the automobile…but do we have to leave half of our population behind in order to move forward?
The Muses' Web 