No amount of Walking Dead binge watching could bring today’s kids closer to Apocalypse then most of adults these days felt in the years approaching 2000. Y2K means nothing to teenager these days, but for us it was an alien and after world escaped this ‘bug’, every day seemed a blessing. And then comes the most exciting thing People had put their hands on up until that time, in 2001 First iPod came out. Facebook, Twitter, and Spottily were not even conceived, no body used Gmail, and technology had not advanced enough to produce Smartphones and tablets, but who cared? People had iPod, music on fingertips.
Most of the kids today are even younger then the first iPod, surrounded by their slick and ‘talking’ Smartphones, they have absolutely no idea about the first generation iPods. In an interesting video, Fine Brothers Entertainment presented the first iPod to a number of young teenagers, and the response of the kids is epic and revealing at the same time.
When iPod came out, it received the hail of praise for its innovative ‘wheel’ to scroll up and down the list as an amazing human machine interaction mechanism ever devised. However, when kids were given the same iPod today, they instinctively reached out to swipe screen and were surprised after finding out it doesn’t have touch screen. One should not miss this moment, straight out of a time travelling Sci-Fi, it seems an ancient artifact is given to a future human race that has no clue how it works. (appy geek)
This brings us to the amazing revelation, that how accustomed we have gotten with the touch screen and swipe technology. Visit a small town in China, India, or Pakistan and you will see vendors and garbage collector holding smart phones and swiping the touch screen. Everyone remembers the moment when Steve Jobs introduced the world with the Swipe screen technology and how audience roared with awe and excitement. From their onwards the whole world was trained to evolve with the new ‘tech genre’ with subtle training sessions spread out all over the technology outlets. For years Apple phones displayed ‘Swipe to Unlock’ instruction to guide its users before dropping it altogether in iOS 7 after we were all trained well enough to be left all alone with it.
Clearly, kids did not seem particularly excited about the iPod, some even mistaking it for a really old phone. None of them was willing to accept the iPod as a music player without a hundred others feature that today’s kid believe to be a integral part of a music player. Long story short, we have come a long way since 2001 but for teenagers who lived through the dawn of new millennium could never forget the ‘invincible’ feeling of having music just a ‘roll of a wheel’ away. Ah! The good old days.