Digital Birdhouse
Some people are stuck in the analog age in the midst of a digital world.
My dad was one of those people.
In fact, I’ll bet a lot of people’s dads were like that. Unless it had a carburetor or it could kill you by using it wrong, there was a good chance it was too high-tech for my dad.
Now, by no means am I part of the rising generation. I clearly remember when the Nintendo wouldn’t work unless the TV was set to Channel 3. Sidenote, no matter what brand of system it was, Sega, Sony, or otherwise, my dad called it a Nintendo. All of them.
But don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t inept. There are mysteries my dad took to the grave that I’ll never unravel. Like how he knew the secret to sharpening a chainsaw so perfectly that the chain would stay sharp for weeks. Or how he always knew the exact gas-to-oil ratio for the weed whacker without measuring. The man was a wizard with tools.
Now I will also mention that he was also the one who taught me how to set the VCR to record Toonami before I got home from school. But when we finally brought a computer into the house during my teenage years, that’s when he decided that the world had advanced too far for his taste. That was where he drew the line and his journey with technology ended.
To him, Photoshop might as well have been witchcraft. HTML? That was some kind of alien language. Over the years, I’d try here and there to introduce him to something new, tentatively, gently. It took years of convincing to get him to get a cellphone and give up the landline phone that didn’t even have long distance and that had barely supported dial-up back in the day. The turning point? Showing him YouTube.
He couldn’t believe he could watch full-length Led Zeppelin or Rush concerts from the ’70s, whenever he wanted. That blew his mind. Eventually, I showed him how to stream shows like Duck Dynasty and MASH on demand, and I think that’s when he truly started to come around.
He had missed out on so many modern conveniences for so long, not because he wasn’t capable, but because he was set in his ways. And when he did start to dip his toe into the digital world, it was always on his own terms.
I say all this as a millennial who still refuses to use TikTok. So, I get it. But I learned something from watching him:
Resisting progress just for the sake of resisting it can cause you to miss out on a world you don’t even know is there.
Maybe that world is better. Maybe it’s not. But it’s there. And sometimes, all it takes is a little curiosity, and maybe a full-length classic rock concert on YouTube, to step into it.
