Generation Gap Goes High Tech

It’s dinner time circa 1972 at the Smith household. Dad lashes into Junior about the length of his hair. Junior accuses Dad of being part of the Establishment. Mom dishes up the mashed potatoes as a peace offering, but it’s no use. Junior storms away from the table, heading off to an anti-war protest, while Dad angrily goes off to his Rotary Club meeting.

Flash forward to 1992.

Junior is visiting and agrees when Dad rails against higher taxes and bigger government. Then Dad complains that Junior never calls anymore, so Junior tells Dad to turn on the answering machine that was last year’s Christmas gift. Dad says it’s still in the box. Junior storms away from the table, heading off to his car phone to check the service for messages, while Dad angrily stares at the blue “12:00” blinking on the VCR.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your parents’ house, the generation gap has cracked open again. This time it’s technological instead of ideological. Twenty years ago, you argued about the stories on the nightly news. Now you argue about how to videotape the nightly news.

The baby boomer generation has grown up reveling in the joys of VCRs, answering machines, automatic teller machines and microwaves, while their parents have become the rebellious ones, shunning new technology.

“My parents have no answering machine because they don’t want to return any calls. And they would never get call-waiting. Still, they complain that I never call,” complains comedian Cathy Ladman, whose parents’ techno-phobia is a staple in her act. “My mother is even afraid of the food processor. I think she’s afraid of technology. My dad’s just contemptuous of it.”

Ladman bemoans the fact that her mother has just gotten over her habit of hanging up on her answering machine rather than leaving a message because “she didn’t want to waste the space.” When she did get around to saying something, it was, “I hate this machine.” And it was only recently that her parents finally ditched their sturdy old rotary dial phone to get with the touch-tone ‘90s.

Even something as seemingly simple as a microwave oven causes Angst. Take Isabella Ironside, for instance. The 23-year-old USC student complains that her mother has trouble with the microwave in her new condo.

“She looks at it in total confusion,” says an exasperated daughter.

Recently, her mother was given a word-processing typewriter to help her write a romance novel she hopes to sell. The newfangled machine remains in its box. Mom is still using her manual typewriter and correcting mistakes with a bottle of correction fluid.

Cos Goldsberry, co-owner of a Los Angeles media information service, can’t get her parents on-line either. They’ve had gentle disagreement for years about her folks’ refusal to get an answering machine. On one particular weekend a few years ago, she tried and tried to call them, but there was no answer.

Eventually, she was able to reach them and learned they had just gone out for the day. When she broached the topic again, however, they steadfastly refused to give in.

“They said, ‘If you call and there’s no answer, you’ll know we’re not here,’ ” Goldsberry says. “And when I told them, ‘Everyone has one,’ I got that old parent argument, ‘Not everyone has one. We don’t.’ It is very frustrating. It drives me nuts, but I know they’ll never change.”

Perhaps the most frustrating thing for kids victimized by this generation techno-gap is the fact that parents don’t share their frustration.

“Maybe I’m a little backward, but I enjoy things the way they were,” confesses Goldsberry’s 66-year-old mother, Vy. “I don’t want to change.”

She makes no apologies for her answering machine philosophy. If the person she’s calling answers, she’ll talk. If not, she just hangs up and tries later. Nor is she sorry about her dislike of automatic teller machines. She simply prefers seeing human beings, rather than machines, handle her money.

Ironside’s mother, 47-year-old Faith Wood, isn’t bothered by her inability to handle anything from a VCR to a gas pump. She figures her generation is stuck in its ways for a very simple reason.

“I certainly don’t like to admit this, but I think I’ve gotten to a certain point where I feel my way is the right way,” says the restaurant hostess. “This new technology is an obstacle to some adults who didn’t have it growing up. If they didn’t have it, they don’t need it.”

Meanwhile, she figures that a younger generation “is very conscious of the here and now, of status. It wants to be hip, and technology is hip.

“When I grew up, it was much less that way,” says Wood. “When your parents said, ‘Jump!’ you said, ‘How high?’ There was an old-world feeling. Younger adults now feel more pressure, more competition. That means needing more knowledge and a need to be hip.”

Naturally, all of this has not gone unnoticed by the makers of the technology in question.

Citibank, for example, has been working on ATM card innovations for years to lure older customers. According to bank spokesman Bill Ahern, about one-quarter of the population is generally older and “wants nothing more advanced in its home than a telephone.”

“Because an older person’s experience has always been to just cash checks every Friday, they figure, ‘Why stop now?’ ” he explains, noting that even at his mother’s house, the most sophisticated gadget is a clock-radio.

To work with that generation, Citibank has been creating ATM machines that “seem less technology-oriented,” he explains. Since most older bank customers at least have a television they’re comfortable with, Citibank ATM machines are designed to look more like TVs.

The same holds true for the makers of VCR Plus+, a new device designed to make taping a TV program foolproof. Louise Wannier, chief operating officer for Gemstar Development Corp., says the idea from the beginning was not to require anyone to learn a new way of doing something.

“Most technology creates new processes for people,” says Wannier, noting that one of the first guinea pigs for the device was her own techno-phobic mother. “What’s different about our product is that it doesn’t require you to change the way you do anything.”

As a result, the company has received a number of letters from parents saying how grateful they are that they no longer have to rely on their kids for VCR assistance. One older business executive wrote that the last tie with his son had been severed and that the kid had moved out.

One techno-place to which older folks aren’t rushing is the Sharper Image, a store known for its high-tech gadgetry. There, the average shopper is well under 50 years old.

“Older shoppers don’t seem as enthusiastic about trying new products,” says Greg Randall, assistant manager at the store in Sherman Oaks. “I’ve been here a year and a half, and I still see a pattern of aversion on their part.”

All these modern gadgets have apparently come along too late to be adapted into the lifestyles of anyone who grew up in a world where automatic transmission was considered a major breakthrough. It isn’t so much fear that keeps parents from technology. It’s the lack of interest.

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, I guess,” says Randall. “I think they just don’t want to know about it. Maybe they’re intimidated by the fact that they were left out of all these changes.”

Faith Wood certainly sees the ramifications of the technological changes of the last two decades--changes that are just as threatening as the culture ones that divided families during the ‘60s.

She realizes that her children mean well when they criticize her dislike of modern machinery. Still, she can’t help feeling hurt.

“It leaves me feeling inferior. When they throw that at you, you feel like a failure,” she says. “The overriding feeling among parents of my generation is that they think their kids look down on them, that they’re not smart enough.”

If that’s the case, her generation will be glad to know that Revenge Time is coming.

Their kids might think they’re such smarty-pants, having absorbed all that technology. But what about their kids’ kids, who probably learned to play Nintendo in their cribs? Think how tough they will be to live with.

“I got into my car the other day with my 6-year-old nephew,” says Greg Randall. “He looked around and said, ‘Where’s the car phone?’ ”