As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
An Age Without Elders, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
When I was sixteen, my grandfather died. It wasn't sudden; it took over a year after he first fell ill, and his death was simply the final step and a culmination of a lifetime of poor self-care. He had been a three pack a day smoker since his teens, and he was in his seventies by then. He eventually died of a stroke, or rather a series of strokes, due to a failing aortic valve that had only been replaced a few years earlier, though the real culprit was his non-compliance with his medical regimen; he didn't like the way his heart and blood medicine made him feel, so he stopped taking it and didn't tell anyone in the family until, ironically, the very night before he had his first big stroke.
I loved my grandfather. Everyone loved my grandfather. He was an inordinately kind man, and in sixteen years of knowing him I can't remember a single instance of him becoming angry or abusive, or speaking in hatred or bigotry, or extolling the virtue of a harmful belief. He worked hard as a mechanic and ran a small farm with cows and chickens right up until he became incapacitated, and never shirked a responsibility. He was also very poor and not terribly educated, having left school in the tenth grade to raise the young family he started with my grandmother (herself only sixteen, and they divorced twenty years later), and while his own family was large, they came from very little means, sharecroppers and ranch hands that eventually made their way over the generations from Tennessee down to East Texas, where the family cemetery still stands, with my grandfather interred there in the red iron dirt alongside most of his seven brothers, his parents, his grandparents, and so on . . . nearly all the way back to the days when Texas was a Republic and not yet a State. My dad will almost certainly be buried there. Probably my brother, too, though I hope to never see that day.
I'm now in my early thirties and I've been gifted with a long-lived remaining extended family; both of my maternal grandparents are in their eighties and as spry as they were thirty years ago, and my paternal grandmother has managed to survive three heart attacks and a broken back to ramble on into quite the busy social schedule for someone approaching octogenarianship. All of my great-grandparents passed on years ago, though all but one managed to get into their nineties. Combine all of this with the fact that my parents are still married, I think you'd agree I've spent a great deal of time with family in my time on earth.
And you know what? I'm kinda done with all that.
I don't speak much with my family these days. I mean, I have lately, but that's because I just had a baby and of course they want to coo and aww over the kid, but in general? No way. Why would I? My dad is an abusive asshole and a bully, and I can't even go to lunch with him without him making a scene in a restaurant for no goddamn reason. The first time he met my wife he told me that he didn't think she was attractive; the first time we all went out for breakfast, he yelled at her and made her cry (which, to date, he's done three times now). He's lazy, he's loud, he's rude, he's smug, he's a racist, and he generally spends most of his interactions with people trying to make them feel like shit.
My mom is more disappointing. She's the dean of a college, and she's always been the one there to encourage me when I wanted to explore interests in education or art or music. But she's let my dad walk all over her her whole life and stood by him when he's been abusive to his children or to herself, and never crossed him when he stopped his kids from pursuing their interests for whatever bigoted reason he could think of that day. Oh, and she's a religious nut. She once told me that she would rather have a radical Muslim in the White House than an atheist, and Obama was likely the Antichrist. She claims to be a feminist, just as long as you omit her views on equal pay, women's access to healthcare, traditional gender roles, and bodily autonomy.
My maternal grandparents are your typical kindly old folks; hardworking and self-reliant, and as pleasant and genteel as their Southern upbringing would dictate, just as long as you're not Black or Latino or gay or anything other than Christian. Or a Democrat. My paternal grandmother has dementia and believes she can talk to ghosts, has been married four times (twice to convicts that were currently serving sentences for murder when their vows took place), and is about as openly racist as a person can functionally be in polite society. Also, she slept with Hank Williams when she was a teenager.
So . . . yeah.
I like to think I started to find my moral center some time in my early twenties after moving to New York City (strongly against the wishes of my myopic family, obviously). It was there where I first started to see for myself just how wrong and uncultured and unworldly the worldviews that were enforced upon me as a youth were. Not surprisingly, it's also when I began to realize that I wasn't "sick" or "perverted" or "wrong" for being transgender, it's just who I am, just like lots of other nice, normal people who also happen to be LGBT. Finding your moral center and finding a sense of self-identity is possibly the most important step anyone can take for themselves, and I don't think I would have ever been able to do that without leaving my family behind. I was raised in a strongly conservative home in a deeply red part of a deeply red State, and the most important messages I can remember being instilled into me by various family members were:
- do well in school
- be as popular as you can
- always have a popular, attractive girlfriend
- be successful in sports
- go to church twice a week
- get a good-paying, steady job
- vote Republican
- stand by your family, no matter what
- own a gun
My family's most enjoyed pastime was hunting and watching sports, neither of which I was ever very fond of. I don't want my kids growing up in a home with guns, and I don't want them growing up in Gun Culture. I also don't want them to grow up thinking the playing of sports is the pinnacle of personal achievement and watching sports is the pinnacle of cultural achievement. I don't want them to be brought up around bigotry hedged in religiosity, and I don't want them to be constantly told that anything less than total conformity is perverse and undesirable. I want my children to understand that the key to forming your identity is empathy and gained experiences, and that familial love isn't performance-dependent.
Because here's the thing: the internet is our new nuclear tradition.
I don't need my dad to show me how to change a flat tire.
I don't need my mom to show me how to bake a cake.
I don't need my granddad to teach me how to roof a house.
I don't need my grandmother to teach me how to be a lady.
I can get all of those things and a million things more, on-demand, with just a simple use of my phone. I can get on my computer at home and access the libraries of a thousand universities. I can sit on my toilet and be part of communities that just mere years before its members would have to live in isolation thinking they were all alone in the world. When my kids ask me a question I don't have the answer to, I won't have to bullshit them, I can just pull up Google and enrich them and myself in the process. And what's best is that I can do all this without being subjected to a harmful worldview in exchange. It's knowledge, unfiltered.
We don't need our families to act as our skill resources anymore. With wi-fi access and enough diligence, anyone can learn how to do virtually anything, and this access is transforming the family model whether we care to admit it or not. I met my wife on the internet before we ever met in person. I've met more of my life-long friends online than I've kept from without. Several of the most important relationships I've made in my entire life were made right here in the Penny Arcade D&D forums.
My parents are the people that raised me, but the internet? That's where I found my family.
I don't think the traditional family model is going anywhere any time soon, but it's sure as hell evolving. I'm interested in hearing the thoughts and experiences of you guys out there, how you feel the "normal" family institution has helped or hindered you, and how you've seen technology changing those traditions in your life.
I loved my grandfather. Everyone loved my grandfather. He was an inordinately kind man, and in sixteen years of knowing him I can't remember a single instance of him becoming angry or abusive, or speaking in hatred or bigotry, or extolling the virtue of a harmful belief. He worked hard as a mechanic and ran a small farm with cows and chickens right up until he became incapacitated, and never shirked a responsibility. He was also very poor and not terribly educated, having left school in the tenth grade to raise the young family he started with my grandmother (herself only sixteen, and they divorced twenty years later), and while his own family was large, they came from very little means, sharecroppers and ranch hands that eventually made their way over the generations from Tennessee down to East Texas, where the family cemetery still stands, with my grandfather interred there in the red iron dirt alongside most of his seven brothers, his parents, his grandparents, and so on . . . nearly all the way back to the days when Texas was a Republic and not yet a State. My dad will almost certainly be buried there. Probably my brother, too, though I hope to never see that day.
I'm now in my early thirties and I've been gifted with a long-lived remaining extended family; both of my maternal grandparents are in their eighties and as spry as they were thirty years ago, and my paternal grandmother has managed to survive three heart attacks and a broken back to ramble on into quite the busy social schedule for someone approaching octogenarianship. All of my great-grandparents passed on years ago, though all but one managed to get into their nineties. Combine all of this with the fact that my parents are still married, I think you'd agree I've spent a great deal of time with family in my time on earth.
And you know what? I'm kinda done with all that.
I don't speak much with my family these days. I mean, I have lately, but that's because I just had a baby and of course they want to coo and aww over the kid, but in general? No way. Why would I? My dad is an abusive asshole and a bully, and I can't even go to lunch with him without him making a scene in a restaurant for no goddamn reason. The first time he met my wife he told me that he didn't think she was attractive; the first time we all went out for breakfast, he yelled at her and made her cry (which, to date, he's done three times now). He's lazy, he's loud, he's rude, he's smug, he's a racist, and he generally spends most of his interactions with people trying to make them feel like shit.
My mom is more disappointing. She's the dean of a college, and she's always been the one there to encourage me when I wanted to explore interests in education or art or music. But she's let my dad walk all over her her whole life and stood by him when he's been abusive to his children or to herself, and never crossed him when he stopped his kids from pursuing their interests for whatever bigoted reason he could think of that day. Oh, and she's a religious nut. She once told me that she would rather have a radical Muslim in the White House than an atheist, and Obama was likely the Antichrist. She claims to be a feminist, just as long as you omit her views on equal pay, women's access to healthcare, traditional gender roles, and bodily autonomy.
My maternal grandparents are your typical kindly old folks; hardworking and self-reliant, and as pleasant and genteel as their Southern upbringing would dictate, just as long as you're not Black or Latino or gay or anything other than Christian. Or a Democrat. My paternal grandmother has dementia and believes she can talk to ghosts, has been married four times (twice to convicts that were currently serving sentences for murder when their vows took place), and is about as openly racist as a person can functionally be in polite society. Also, she slept with Hank Williams when she was a teenager.
So . . . yeah.
I like to think I started to find my moral center some time in my early twenties after moving to New York City (strongly against the wishes of my myopic family, obviously). It was there where I first started to see for myself just how wrong and uncultured and unworldly the worldviews that were enforced upon me as a youth were. Not surprisingly, it's also when I began to realize that I wasn't "sick" or "perverted" or "wrong" for being transgender, it's just who I am, just like lots of other nice, normal people who also happen to be LGBT. Finding your moral center and finding a sense of self-identity is possibly the most important step anyone can take for themselves, and I don't think I would have ever been able to do that without leaving my family behind. I was raised in a strongly conservative home in a deeply red part of a deeply red State, and the most important messages I can remember being instilled into me by various family members were:
- do well in school
- be as popular as you can
- always have a popular, attractive girlfriend
- be successful in sports
- go to church twice a week
- get a good-paying, steady job
- vote Republican
- stand by your family, no matter what
- own a gun
My family's most enjoyed pastime was hunting and watching sports, neither of which I was ever very fond of. I don't want my kids growing up in a home with guns, and I don't want them growing up in Gun Culture. I also don't want them to grow up thinking the playing of sports is the pinnacle of personal achievement and watching sports is the pinnacle of cultural achievement. I don't want them to be brought up around bigotry hedged in religiosity, and I don't want them to be constantly told that anything less than total conformity is perverse and undesirable. I want my children to understand that the key to forming your identity is empathy and gained experiences, and that familial love isn't performance-dependent.
Because here's the thing: the internet is our new nuclear tradition.
I don't need my dad to show me how to change a flat tire.
I don't need my mom to show me how to bake a cake.
I don't need my granddad to teach me how to roof a house.
I don't need my grandmother to teach me how to be a lady.
I can get all of those things and a million things more, on-demand, with just a simple use of my phone. I can get on my computer at home and access the libraries of a thousand universities. I can sit on my toilet and be part of communities that just mere years before its members would have to live in isolation thinking they were all alone in the world. When my kids ask me a question I don't have the answer to, I won't have to bullshit them, I can just pull up Google and enrich them and myself in the process. And what's best is that I can do all this without being subjected to a harmful worldview in exchange. It's knowledge, unfiltered.
We don't need our families to act as our skill resources anymore. With wi-fi access and enough diligence, anyone can learn how to do virtually anything, and this access is transforming the family model whether we care to admit it or not. I met my wife on the internet before we ever met in person. I've met more of my life-long friends online than I've kept from without. Several of the most important relationships I've made in my entire life were made right here in the Penny Arcade D&D forums.
My parents are the people that raised me, but the internet? That's where I found my family.
I don't think the traditional family model is going anywhere any time soon, but it's sure as hell evolving. I'm interested in hearing the thoughts and experiences of you guys out there, how you feel the "normal" family institution has helped or hindered you, and how you've seen technology changing those traditions in your life.
+11
Posts
I don't know if the internet really has much to do with this issue. You still pick up a lot of your formative behavior from your family, and I don't think we've had a generation alive where the type of internet we have today has been available for long enough - i.e. when I was growing up there was a long period where the internet did not exist, as far as I was concerned.
Whereas my girlfriend's niece is going to grow up in that world. She'll have access to tablets and laptops and wi-fi from a young age, and will be able to look up whatever she needs to when she needs to. But her generation isn't well, old enough, for us to see how that works out - or what things change while they do grow up.
So you could say I'm unconvinced people are losing the idea of having elders. So long as we have strong fiscal ties to certain people from an early age, I don't know that much has changed or is likely to.
The Nuclear Family is dead, but it barely ever actually existed anyway, even in the historically insignificant length of time it rhetorically dominated.
I think that's a a good thing though, and if the internet can be used to normalize the normal more power to it.
However, I will say that technology has helped me to connect more with my friends and make new friends as well. They are much closer to feeling like a family than my family ever did.
Besides, the internet is very, very different. As opposed to unconditional love, it's hyperconditional love, focused in general on the value you can provide them and in specific cliques on whether or not you meet their standards for inclusion. Sometimes it's very helpful--I've seen people on forums offer job connections or straight up donations to people in need just because they're on the same forum--and sometimes 4chan destroys your life. The internet is a capricious hive-mind, and no pocket of it is entirely for you the way a blood relative should be.
Also, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be nearly as comfortable on the internet as I am if not for my parents buying me computers and laptops, encouraging me to learn how to type, and so on. The generation of kids growing up with the internet aren't doing so on the computers at their school library; they're doing it with cell phones and iPads in hand, purchased for them by their family.
The internet can be wonderful, and maybe it can fill the hole in an individual's life left by a family that doesn't want or care for them, but there is still a broad societal value to the family unit, one that will never really go away.
However, just wait until those online friends get married and have kids of their own. Relationships which seemed forged in steel will vanish as if they had never existed, and those which seemed tangential and random will be suddenly locked in place.
Your friends (especially your online ones) are not forever. Your family will always be your family. Good or bad. One cannot replace the other.
Honestly what you are talking about is how the internet has replaced public libraries, to the point you don't even remember that libraries existed. Back in the 'old days' when people wanted to learn to roof a house there was still a solid chance there grandad was a goose who fought on the wrong side in the civil war/spanish american war/viking invasion/mongolian conquest and so they just went to their local library/wiseman/village elder to get advice.
The internet is a near magical way to share information better. It is not a family.
Nobody is forever. Truly nobody.
In the past you wouldn't be exposed to a lot of ideas unless you went to college, but now all of that is available to anyone of any age.
Double edged sword though, as some young people are being indoctrinated into white supremacy, Islamic fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, etc. through the internet, but while a young girl in Iran can read about feminism.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I've had the same set of online friends since...somewhere between 2006-2008, I'd guess? And to be honest, they're really the only friends I have. I'm 31, so I don't know if I'm still "too young" to have grown up from having online friends.
I doubt that this as strongly a function of age as tbloxham portrays it to be.
It probably correlates more strongly with other factors, like ethnicity and sexual orientation.
I'm 36 and my relationships with my friends are much stronger than my relationships with my blood relatives. I love my family, but we're not close. I do not confide in them. They are certainly not the first (or second or third) people I would turn to for help when the chips are down.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This seems about as one sided as the op.
We naturally form bonds that can be thick as family ties.