Backstreet boys were the first boy-band that ever caught my eyes. Come on, I wouldn’t believe it if you said that you didn’t have the biggest crush on Nick Carter. With the dark blue eyes and the dark brown, almost blonde, hair giving him the perfect next-door-boy charm, we all swooned at his honey like voice. I remember almost fainting from excitement when I got hands on my first CD of them. That’s right, a CD, a concept lost on kids of this generation. Now, all they got to do is download the song they go ga-ga over and listen to it on repeat. They don’t even know the hassel of rewinding the film of the cassette, that got caught in the tape recorder.
WIRE TO WIRELESS
Oh, the tedious work one had to do to dial a number on the landline just to give your sick friend the latest gossip they missed. But, which house even has landline these days, when they got a smartphone all to themselves. Long forgotten are notepads, kept beside the landline, with a pen, to jot down important contacts and notes. Nowadays, a single press is all you need to contact whatever person you want. Technology, it’s upside and downside. But that’s an argument for another day.
CLOTHING
Rolled up jeans, neon everything, leggings and scrunchies. A typical ’90s outfit was like a My Little Pony ate a Cabbage Patch doll and threw up naiveté and spandex. Today, not a lot stands out in terms of weird or extreme fashion trends for today’s kids, a torn up jeans, leather jacket under the boiling sun, and teenage girls having to wear virtually nothing. I just hope the fashions of teenage girls of 90’s, including loose-fitting flannels and sweatshirts, come back around. Instead, what the ’90s kids knew as nerd dressing is coming back as the new hipster style. This generation is a fan of copying, but with a twist. Oh, there’s always a twist, for the better or for the worse, that varies.
WHAT WAS THAT FISH GAME, AGAIN?
Games coming in big boxes with loads of floppies, before buying your first cd-rom drive and fiddling with mscdex to get Star Wars Rebel Assault working, not to mention the endless faffing with boot disks with customised autoexec.bat, config.sys and emm386 configurations to make sure your games ran.
For me, getting scared and jumping playing alone in the dark or quake may mean I am now desensitized so that Alien:Isolation isn’t that big a deal to me. But nowadays the real threat isn’t trapped in the video games but in the internet filled world. We have all heard about the “game”, Blue Whale, right?
What kids thought would be another game they found online, turned out to be quite the catastrophe. As innocent as this name may sound, it had people, kids, commit suicide. To reach the last level you were required to fulfil a list of grotesque tasks. Eager, bored out of their mind kids/teenagers/adults, downloaded this “game” and met with their fate.
GALLERY BEATING ALBUMS?
Back then, kids never had easy access to cameras and recorders. Selfies were a concept lost on us. Bad quality pictures filled our albums, where we could be seen with two front teeth broken, with the goofiest clothing, to pigtails and mohawk for guys. Back then making memories were more important than capturing memories.
Selfies have become an integral part in our day to day lives. People have to capture each and every moment, because the quote “live the moment” isn’t something they can grasp on. You were lucky if you still have some albums from your childhood.
E-BOOK/HARDBOUND
The smell of a new book or old book old book gives you a different level of satisfaction. The way the book feels in your hand when you touch touch it, for the first time, soothes your mind. But kindle is taking over the hardbound books. Ebook is taking over and books are loosing their value. It saves trees, sure, but does it save honeybees?
I remember, when I was 10, my mother, switching off the fan, woke me up unlike the blaring song, which I set as an alarm, making me partially deaf, waking me up these days. Sweating profusely, now that’s a way to lose some weight instead of just sitting at home, fidgeting with gadgets. The world has progressed a lot over the past decade from Afro to Mohawk. The biggest problem of todays’ generation kids, are that they blindly follow whatever clique, just to fit in but it isn’t always about fitting in. Back in the days we were preached about patience, hard work and understanding but where will you learn this in today’s world when everything you want is given to you in just a heartbeat?
No doubt that today’s kids are far smarter and advanced than the 90’s kids, but is it their doom or blessing?
