A day in the life of Retro-gustus

It is September 1^st 1991, and Retrogustus, an amalgam of “retro” and “Augustus,” has just woken up. He gets ready for the new day and goes to school. He tries to get as much information from his friends as he can, and then goes home to do his homework at his writing desk. He goes to sleep eventually, but not before he phones his friends to find out what's happening over the weekend. He hasn't once checked face-book, or text-ed anybody, or listened to an I-pod, or done web-homework; He doesn't even know what they are.

Luckily for his futuristic dopplegänger Augustus, these services are all too real. He knows exactly what his friends have been doing because they have synced their lives to face-book and twitter. He has already set up his weekend via text. He is even doing his web-homework just hours before it is due. He can scarcely imagine how Retrogustus ever survived back in 1991 without social media.

However, the question Augustus should be asking isn't how Retrogustus survived without every excruciating detail of his friends lives; the real puzzle is why he can't do the same himself. It goes without saying that the teenagers of twenty years ago were a far cry from the social-media centric kids of today. They knew out how to work around limited connectivity and weren't dependent on the Internet. This wasn't exactly a boon to their communication skills. Indeed, our now 30-something generation-x Retrogustus is still bamboozled by the simplest of face-book protocols, while his 16-ish millennium-kid contemporary is dancing around the Internet like a cyber-gymnast. Augustus uses words to speak when he can, but even his parents and superiors are now just a finger's tap away. The condition that presents itself is that digital technology is no longer just an arbitrary way for Augustus to talk; it is now and forever a bona-fide part of his vocabulary in the same way that writing is a part of his language. The humble :) holds more meaning to him than the phrase, “I am happy.”

Across the board, our relationships are now deeper, but also less personal. We don't have as much of a tie to our interactions as we did before the Internet. The consensus is that if it's on the Internet, it must not be real. I think this is favorable in the sense that our lives are easier to handle, but it's also more dangerous. If this trend continues, we may reach a point where there is no need for body-language or even vocal grunts. Even so, our current Internet savvy population, is much better off than they would have been twenty years ago. They have new, more effective tools for communication, and are therefore in a better position. Augustus probably had a better childhood than Retrogustus ever could, and that's just the way things are.