Cultural items your age demographic should have knowledge of but you don’t

[Max Rockatansky]

Pokémon seems to be one for me.  The recent Ash Ketchum thread aside most people who know me are surprised I have little or more accurately no knowledge base about Pokemon.  I had a Game Boy during the starting era of Pokémon games and I liked RPGs dating back to the NES era.  I was more into PS1 era RPGs when Pokémon was becoming a thing in high school and seemingly totally missed the bandwagon.

In a more modern sense I guess Twitter would be something I don't understand.  I've never had an account despite almost everyone else I know having one.  The service didn't sound interesting to me given the gist I tend to get from users is that it is highly politically charged or is the den of stuff like NUMTOT group think.  Similarly, I'm not sure if I have an educated guess as to what Reddit is supposed to be other than a forum.

I'll also add Elon Musk to this.  The guy apparently is a a hot button topic in the road community and simultaneously a non-entity in my day-to-day life.

[formulanone]

Pretty good cultural example! Pokémon kind of sailed under a lot of folks near my age, but my kids got into it for a little while a few years back (2016 or so, because their cousins were into it). So if you'd asked me who Ash Ketchum was before that, I probably would thought he was a prominent cricket blogger. I'd never heard it until a movie came out in what...2001?

For a while there, I was killing time in airports catching them on Pokémon GO because the kids wanted some interesting specimens and I liked that it posted the city/town you caught it. I bumped into an (older) colleague at the Pittsburgh airport and asked him "what's going on?", showed his phone "...uh, catching monsters with my phone" and we had a good laugh.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

The biggest music hits and pop culture stars of the late 1990s and 2000s.`

[Max Rockatansky]

The biggest music hits and pop culture stars of the late 1990s and 2000s.`

That I can relate to as well.  New music basically stopped for me somewhere during the early 1990s.

[NWI_Irish96]

As a 48 year old white male from Indiana, I should be intimately familiar with QAnon, anti-vax, and stolen election conspiracy theories but I'm not.

[kphoger]

The NFL

[kirbykart]

All the social media apps, like Snap Chat or TikTok.

[hotdogPi]

All the social media apps, like Snap Chat or TikTok.

Given that you were too young to create an account on either one just a year ago, I don't think it's a problem. On the other hand, I'm 23, and I'm not familiar with them or with Instagram or Facebook.

[NWI_Irish96]

All the social media apps, like Snap Chat or TikTok.

Given that you were too young to create an account on either one just a year ago, I don't think it's a problem. On the other hand, I'm 23, and I'm not familiar with them or with Instagram or Facebook.

Facebook is more popular with people > 30.

[thspfc]

All the social media apps, like Snap Chat or TikTok.

TikTok is poison. I probably (definitely) spend too much time on YouTube, but at least there's plenty of decent, genuinely entertaining content to be found there. It's much easier to bypass the nonsense because you actually have to click on a video to watch it, whereas on TikTok, simply scrolling off of one video will bring you immediately to the next. And once the video starts, you tell yourself you might as well watch the whole thing, even if it's terrible, because it's only a few extra seconds of your life. That's how 5 seconds turns into 15, turns into 30, turns into a minute, turns into an hour of completely wasted time. TikTok is a time suck designed to do nothing but keep you scrolling. It's not supposed to be meaningful content, because if it was, you wouldn't scroll as much.

Snapchat is fine when used in moderation, but like all social media, it will hook you if you let it.

[formulanone]

All the social media apps, like Snap Chat or TikTok.

TikTok is poison. I probably (definitely) spend too much time on YouTube, but at least there's plenty of decent, genuinely entertaining content to be found there. It's much easier to bypass the nonsense because you actually have to click on a video to watch it, whereas on TikTok, simply scrolling off of one video will bring you immediately to the next.

The idea behind TikTok seems to be "hey, remember channel surfing?"

I don't have TikTok (the amount of data collected on you is alarming) but it seems Instagram has copied it, once you've caught up with your feed. Interestingly, my kids have no interest in TikTok, but I said the same thing about Facebook about 15 years ago.

[kphoger]

All the social media apps, like Snap Chat or TikTok.

Me too.  Especially Instagram.

[zachary_amaryllis]

Pretty good cultural example! Pokémon kind of sailed under a lot of folks near my age, but my kids got into it for a little while a few years back (2016 or so, because their cousins were into it). So if you'd asked me who Ash Ketchum was before that, I probably would thought he was a prominent cricket blogger. I'd never heard it until a movie came out in what...2001?

For a while there, I was killing time in airports catching them on Pokémon GO because the kids wanted some interesting specimens and I liked that it posted the city/town you caught it. I bumped into an (older) colleague at the Pittsburgh airport and asked him "what's going on?", showed his phone "...uh, catching monsters with my phone" and we had a good laugh.

My friend has some sort of watch-looking-doohickey that communicates with his phone, playing GO.
Apparently, a lot of really weird monsters hang out around radio towers.

[1995hoo]

All the social media apps, like Snap Chat or TikTok.

Given that you were too young to create an account on either one just a year ago, I don't think it's a problem. On the other hand, I'm 23, and I'm not familiar with them or with Instagram or Facebook.

Facebook is more popular with people > 30.

I'll be 50 next year and I've never used Facebook. When it first rolled out, it was pitched as a way to get back in touch with, or stay in touch with, your high school friends, and I wondered why I would want to do that. Then as it became more ubiquitous I just never saw the point.

[1995hoo]

I just made a phone call and I got a busy signal. I found myself wondering how many people age 30 or below would not know what that sound means.

(Prior to this I don't remember when the last time I got a busy signal was. This call was to the butcher shop we use–in view of the weather forecast, we wanted to pick up our Christmas order a day earlier. Maybe other people had the same idea. I tried again a few minutes later and got through.)

[kphoger]

I just made a phone call and I got a busy signal. I found myself wondering how many people age 30 or below would not know what that sound means.

Fairly common when calling a business.

But, for people under 18, who rarely ever call a business...

[hotdogPi]

I just made a phone call and I got a busy signal. I found myself wondering how many people age 30 or below would not know what that sound means.

Fairly common when calling a business.

I don't get busy signals around here. I've called local restaurants to ask if they're open, and they typically answer after a short delay, or if they're closed, don't answer at all. Chains, both restaurants (e.g. Texas Roadhouse) and non-restaurants (e.g. Walgreens) will have their automated "press 1" routine, as do UMass Lowell and the hospital I go to.

[kphoger]

Hmm.  Yeah, every so often I get a busy signal when calling a business.  It just means they're on with another caller.

On a related note, I recently learned that there has been recent traction toward changing the ASL sign for "telephone" away from one that has nothing to do with how the younger generation uses a phone.  I'm pretty sure, for example, that none of my sons has ever picked up a telephone receiver and talked into it.  And my eldest son, who is the only one with his own cell phone, probably only actually holds the thing up to his ear when my wife and I are out running errands and have to call him for some reason;  other than that, there's no such thing as "picking up" the phone to him.

[formulanone]

On a related note, I recently learned that there has been recent traction toward changing the ASL sign for "telephone" away from one that has nothing to do with how the younger generation uses a phone.  I'm pretty sure, for example, that none of my sons has ever picked up a telephone receiver and talked into it.  And my eldest son, who is the only one with his own cell phone, probably only actually holds the thing up to his ear when my wife and I are out running errands and have to call him for some reason;  other than that, there's no such thing as "picking up" the phone to him.

ASL is quirky like that; I recall the sign for woman implied the wearing of a bonnet. Like a one horse open sleigh, how often does one encounter a bonnet outside of advertising?

There's attempts to make changes and add new words/signs, but that's way out of my wheelhouse. I have to imagine that the most commonly-used signs will remain for a very long time, but it's far easier to change or modify new signs from new words or terms, so as long as there isn't too much overlap with an existing sign that would cause confusion (or embarrassment).

[kphoger]

Like a one horse open sleigh, how often does one encounter a bonnet outside of advertising?

All the time in this area, as a matter of fact.  There's a fairly large Mennonite population in this area, so I see ladies in bonnets probably 20% of the times I go to a large store–with that percentage being higher the farther away from downtown the store is.  For example, if I go to three or four different stores near 21st & Greenwich Rd, then I'm all but guaranteed to see at least one bonnet.

[formulanone]

Like a one horse open sleigh, how often does one encounter a bonnet outside of advertising?

All the time in this area, as a matter of fact.  There's a fairly large Mennonite population in this area, so I see ladies in bonnets probably 20% of the times I go to a large store–with that percentage being higher the farther away from downtown the store is.  For example, if I go to three or four different stores near 21st & Greenwich Rd, then I'm all but guaranteed to see at least one bonnet.

Ooh, fair enough.

[kphoger]

In fact, I shouldn't be surprised if the number of bonnets I've seen while living in Wichita is greater than the number of hijab I've seen here.  In both cases, I couldn't even count on two hands the number I see in a given year.

[CoreySamson]

Despite my status as a member of Gen Z, I don't really have a care in the world about:

- Rap music
- Pop music
- Anime
- Twitch streaming
- TV shows/Netflix/movies
- Snapchat
- The NBA

[J N Winkler]

Pokémon seems to be one for me.  The recent Ash Ketchum thread aside most people who know me are surprised I have little or more accurately no knowledge base about Pokemon.  I had a Game Boy during the starting era of Pokémon games and I liked RPGs dating back to the NES era.  I was more into PS1 era RPGs when Pokémon was becoming a thing in high school and seemingly totally missed the bandwagon.

All I really know about Pokémon is that the current version has to do with people going to parks and other public places with their phones to chase rare creatures.

I can also guarantee you know more about electronic games of whatever kind than I do.  I don't have any game apps on mobile devices, I move the preloaded Windows games out of sight whenever I get a new computer, and I live in a house that has precisely zero video game consoles.

In a more modern sense I guess Twitter would be something I don't understand.  I've never had an account despite almost everyone else I know having one.  The service didn't sound interesting to me given the gist I tend to get from users is that it is highly politically charged or is the den of stuff like NUMTOT group think.  Similarly, I'm not sure if I have an educated guess as to what Reddit is supposed to be other than a forum.

I have a Twitter account, though I have been all but inactive since 2016.  The things you mention are part of Twitter but not all of it.  It really is a question of who you follow.  The ones I picked that I thought were the most valuable were ones I had come across organically and who inspired me to go beyond the here-and-now implications and think more deeply about whatever was under discussion.  I ultimately left not because I thought the platform was somehow evil or beyond redemption, but rather because it takes a significant amount of curation to get the signal-to-noise ratio to a level I personally consider acceptable, and I no longer wanted the responsibility.

I've had an account on Reddit for years and have actually been fairly active over the past few months.  I'm edging away from it now, however, because I don't really like who I am on it.  You get a karma rating and it is thoroughly gamified--there is virtually no screen where your karma is not displayed and updated almost in real time.  You are less likely to get karma points when people don't see your comments, which creates an incentive to sort each subreddit with newest posts first so you can get a take (however hot it may be) in ASAP.  If you do this with a really popular subreddit like r/AmItheAsshole, the rush is the same that a person predisposed to gambling addiction feels when he or she visits a casino in person and has his or her first big win at a table.

This said, archived discussions on Reddit also function as a useful information bank, a bit like StackExchange does with tech questions.  I picked up the hack that gave me restored access to Transports Québec construction drawings through a Reddit comment thread.  And if you have really unusual or off-the-wall questions, such as what the day-to-day is like for a private investigator, or where teenagers go in your city these days when they want to fool around without adult supervision, Reddit has places to ask.

I'll also add Elon Musk to this.  The guy apparently is a a hot button topic in the road community and simultaneously a non-entity in my day-to-day life.

Elon Musk is a hot-button issue in the world in general, not just the roads world, and that is because Twitter has become fundamental to how the news is reported these days.  Of the four online media sources I follow regularly, he gets little coverage in the Wichita Eagle because of its local focus, but Slate, the Washington Post, and the Guardian have had one story or another on him for months now.

[Max Rockatansky]

If I'm understanding everyone correctly regarding Elon Musk there is a Charles Foster Kane/William Randolph Hearst thing going on with him and Twitter?