Within a Room
Leslie Maxwell / Columnist

In one of my classes last semester, the professor shared an interesting message that had been floating around the faculty email lists. It is titled “The typical 18 year old college freshman” and it contains a list that was created to “give the faculty a sense of the mindset of that year’s incoming freshmen.” 

This list contains events, people, and obsolete technology that many people 18 years old and younger don’t remember. There were a couple of things on the list that I only had a foggy idea about, but it is hard to imagine that students just a couple of years younger than me can’t remember a world without VCRs, remote controls, and bottle caps that don’t twist off. I was only born in ‘78, but I can clearly remember Ronald and Nancy Reagan, the repression, and even Oliver North. 

Those of us born at the tail-end of Generation X have definitely grown up in a different world from the one that our parents and even our big brothers and sisters remember. I have run this list by several of my friends who fall into this age category, and their responses have varied. For some of them, a few of these things ring a bell, while others draw a complete blank (especially words like Atari and Pong). Here are some of the items from that list:

— The people who are starting college this fall across the nation were born in 1980.

— They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era and did not know that he had ever been shot. 

— Black Monday is as significant to them as the Great Depression.

— There has been only one Pope. They can only really remember one president.

— They were prepubescent when the Persian Gulf War was waged.

— They were 11 when the Soviet Union broke apart and do not remember the Cold War.

— They are too young to remember the space shuttle blowing up.

— Bottle caps have always been screw off and plastic. 

— Star Wars looks very fake to them and the special effects are pathetic. 

— They have likely never played the original Pac Man and have never heard of Pong.

— Atari predates them, as do vinyl albums.

— There have always been red M&M’s, and blue ones are not new. There used to be beige ones?

— They may have heard of an 8 track, but probably have never actually seen or heard one. 

— The Compact Disc was introduced when they were one year old.

— There have always been VCRs, but they have no idea what a BETA machine is.

— They have no idea when or why Jordache jeans were cool.

— They never took a swim and thought about Jaws. 

— They have never heard: “Where’s the beef?”, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel” or “de plane, de plane!”

— McDonald’s never came in Styrofoam containers.

— They do not care who shot J.R. and have no idea who J.R. is. 

The items on this list made me think about how much our world changes just from one generation to the next. Technology and pop culture seem to change faster than we do. 

Although typical 18 year old may not have played Atari, they aren’t the only age group who occasionally suffers from a lack of information. A few months ago, I read a story in a magazine in which the main character said “Wait till you listen to the other side,” while listening to music with her friend. This doesn’t seem strange unless you know that the object in question was not a tape or a record, but a compact disc.