Some of us can remember the days of Polaroids, of sitting around the table looking at 3x5 or 4x6 photos--real photos that you could bend, touch, cut out and paste on to other things. Today we watch slide shows on the computer, or on-line. When my kids want to look at pictures of when they were babies, they don't ask me to get out the photo album, they ask me to turn on the computer!
The reality of their world dawned on me the other day when I was reading with them. The story was about a boy who found a magic key that took him back in time, to the land of dinosaurs. Lucky for the boy, he happened to have snatched his camera just before voyage on the backward journey. Much of the story highlighted the various kinds of dinosaurs that the boy encountered. When the powers of the magic key ran out, and the boy returned to his own time and home, he began to relate to his parents all that he had seen. They, of course, did not believe him, but praised him for his vivid imagination. Here we come to the punchline of the story. The boy, in an effort to convince his parents that he had indeed seen dinosaurs, pulled out his trump card--the camera, which he had used to take photographs of encounter. His plan, however, was fatally flawed, for there was one vital piece missing to the camera--there was no film!
I laughed; my children did not. Then the asked me why I laughed. I said, 'Because the camera had no film!' Still no laughing. Then came the revelation. Caedmon, speaking for the rest, looked to me and quizzically asked, 'What is film'.
Jokes never work when you have to explain the punchline. And punchlines are based on shared common knowledge. In this case, the knowledge was not so common. It was then that I realized that my kids have only known the digital world.
I am getting old!
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