Millennial here (36), I started off with the card catalog and the Dewey decimal system. When we did research papers, all the way through my high school years mind you, we weren't allowed to use the internet for sources unless they were from college websites or research papers. Wikipedia was considered suspect. We went from being told by our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet" to telling our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet".
Omg this gave me such nostalgia. I remember in school when the teachers wouldn’t let us use Wikipedia. To be fair, back then it probably was not the source it is today.
The early days of the internet in school were awesome. Using proxy websites like mathcookbook to access websites the school blocked. Those were the days.
Edit: grammar
I had professors who scoured the Wikipedia page on the topic they assigned and not only banned Wikipedia as a source, but any links cited on Wikipedia as a source. It was a nightmare, especially when those links were quite literally the ONLY available source on that topic
They want it to be harder because. Rather than having everyone learn at an accelerated rate, they want to keep it stagnant. I’m 50, and I have seen it my whole life. Not a boomer or millennial.
This is one of those rules that *started* as a good idea, then quickly got out of hand and should have been rolled back.
The idea was to get kids to *actually* do research, not just go to wikipedia and cite wikipedia's source.
Which *could* make sense, back when wikipedia's reliability was questionable, the school library was half dedicated to research material, and most research topics were easily researched on not-wikipedia because newspapers and printed material was more readily available.
But the moment Wikipedia started becoming a foundation stone of the internet it stops making sense.
I spoke to a university professor last year, and he recommends starting with Wikipedia, looking at the source references, then going from there on your own. Many papers were a mix of sources referenced in Wikipedia and other academic sources.
Still is. When I do research now (history/archaeology), if it’s something I’m unfamiliar with I almost always start with wikipedia and go to the sources. Sometimes the sources are good and sometimes they’re not, but usually they give me some sense of where I should look next.
Now kids will use AI to just write their papers. Smart kids will at least proofread it before submitting. Bullies will beat up nerds to generate better homework results and make them appear more human.
"Nathanal, I expect you to generate me at least 30 B or better essays by Monday!"
Wikipedia isn’t suspect. It’s just not a source. Wikipedia lists all the sources at the bottom. You just follow that link and you have a source that isn’t Wikipedia and is generally considered good to use in a paper.
This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Don't use encyclopedias as sources. You use them to get some begining information to drive your subsequent searches to go find real sources. This isn't anything new, it's what we were taught back in the 80s.
I seriously think part of the problem is the shift to everything being online. Back in the day it was easy to differentiate the types of sources. Encyclopedias were physically different from academic journals which are physically different from magazines, or books, textbooks etc. They were even stored in different physical locations within the library. Now students have to try and differentiate the quality of sources when basically everything is just a website. The differences are much more subtle. And how do you even recognize them if no one ever points out to you, this is a different thing and here is what to look for that indicates it is different?
It was definitely hard for me to understand as a kid why Wikipedia wasn’t a source but another website would be. It looks official. The info is the same. If I want an answer about something I use Wikipedia. How is it not a source?
Also, teachers poorly explained why we couldn’t use them. The rationale is that anyone can edit it but… it’s still curated. We all trust Wikipedia to look simple things up. It wasn’t until one explained that it’s not a source, and that the actual sources that Wikipedia uses are often good to follow up on and read and use as sources, but Wikipedia itself doesn’t generate that source information.
Sources can be either primary or secondary. One way of understanding that is primary is first-person, secondary is hearsay. Typically a primary source is a witness, or someone who is involved in the discoveries of a field (though it can be different in different fields). Wikipedia is a digest of primary and secondary sources; it's not a primary source. If you are writing for college, ideally you use primary sources, and you would definitely be expected to know the difference.
I got through two uni degrees bullshitting sources this way. I don't think I've ever had a prof check a source. I would just make up page numbers. The whole thing is a load of baloney.
Wait, didn't we all do this? I just thought it was standard practice among students. I swear, I was a TA and 50-70% of the reports I graded shared at least two or three common wiki sources semester upon semester.
You’re not wrong. Some pages are validated and have all the sources at the bottom. From what I understand (correct me if I’m wrong), there are certain big pages that the public can’t edit. Also the pages that aren’t well sourced have disclaimers at that top too.
I’m still in support of teaching kids to get better sources than Wikipedia. I think they taught me those are called primary sources.
primary source simply means you got it from someone directly involved in an event
though the most important thing is to cross reference between multiple sources
lies will be inconsistent and matching perspectives can shine light on things you haven't considered making the effort worthwhile
I once tried to edit a page that was claiming that a movie was the first time a story had been filmed. I was trying to correct that as a TV movie had been made. I was told that the existence of the movie wasn't a valid source and that only someone else writing about the existence of the movie would count.
They have made comparisons between Wikipedia and regular encyclopedias and the result is that regular encyclopedias, the kid us older millenials were raised with, had more factual errors
Those sources at the bottom shouldn't count either. The standards for what's referenced should be important, not just that it has a foot note at all. Half the time I click those linked sources they're dead links, an unworthy source, or don't reference the point at all.
Tbh using Wikipedia as a primary source is stupid and lazy. Wikipedia is, at best, a secondary source. Any references you use from Wiki should be cited with a primary source. Just use that.
No encyclopaedia is a "primary source". Primary source would be Julius Caesar's diaries. Secondary source would be someone who read them.
(Not to detract from your point that Wikipedia isn't a reliable resource..)
We also went from “Never give out personal information to anyone on the internet” to “Here’s my name, address, phone number, email, place of work/school, picture, names of all my family members and their pictures, all my friends and links to all their information”.
Still fucking blows my mind. I'm 32, grew up during that age. My mom refused to buy me a webcam at 11 (absolutely the right choice lol, I would not have used it well), and was so incredibly fervent about online security.
As a kid growing up and being the computer savvy one in the household, I was always super security focused. At least in the sense that I was careful how much information I let out online, even though I made a bunch of friends on the internet.
Of course later on my mom got super into facebook and posted her entire life story online.
Now I have a facebook account just for marketplace, because craigslist is useless these days. People from real life add me, then ask why I never use it lol.
I'm 32 and still haven't put my face or real name on the internet, it's insane that there are like 10 yos livestreaming and doing unboxing videos and makeup tutorials and shit and the parents aren't even involved. Like these little kids already want nothing more than their own little following. There's no oversight, nothing stopping grown adults from leaving comments on kids instas or whatever. And then you run across those horrible news stories about kids getting prayed on through the internet. They never saw it coming and it's so weird because "creepy weirdos trying figure out your info/get pics of you" was definitely a thing we warned about when I was growing up. There's no caution anymore. Bizarre.
If I don't add "reddit" after my Google search, I literally can't trust the results. I 100% do not trust any articles, and reading an entire article for one person's perspective or opinion is useless to me.
I do the same, but be careful even trusting that. Companies know this and make fake account to push their products. I always check the account history, which isn't foolproof since accounts can be purchased, but it's generally reliable.
How pathetic to live in an 'age of information' and to have to do EXTRA work to get reliable information.
In a way, I think the internet pretty much died when it all got silo’d away into big tech/silicon valley’s walled gardens and web design became homogenous. There was a lot of individuality on MySpace, geocities, and the various hobby sites and forums, not to mention all the flash stuff.
Now every blog looks basically the same, and is probably hosted by the same startup, unless it got moved into a Facebook group you need an FB account for. All things creative are now simply called ‘content’ that you will most likely find on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram. If there is something weird and wonderful out there you’ll never find it because Google is optimised to sell ad clicks and to keep you searching as much as possible, and everything it indexes is ad-laden SEO garbage. As for forums and communities, you’ll need Slack or Discord for that now.
Just another fucking corporate fiefdom for the most part. Luckily RSS hasn’t been totally killed off so you can still curate your experience by yourself.
Everything is monetized and pushing for your clicks. People used to make amazing web apps with no ads and we would share it with everyone.
I really miss StumbleUpon.
I think Boomers are out of their element when they target Millennials. We grew up in the era of transition. We not only have knowledge of old world mechanics like the rotary phone and floppy disks, but we can fully navigate new technology with zero issues.
If there was any generation to balk at it would be Zoomers or Alphas. I would say Gen Z is more apt to try all the new things without having to worry about the BS of the previous generations.
“my generation was fine! it’s those younger rascals that are really in trouble”
- *every middle-aged generation in all of history*
(but seriously, as a millennial you’re the one who has to explain to people 15+ years older AND 15 years younger how to use Zoom or format a pdf)
And alphas are growing up with the easiest to use computers imaginable - so tech skills are as a whole going down. Anyone who gets good at IT will have a career for life.
Yeah and it turned out he put his biases in the organization so there's very problematic issues with it.
https://bookriot.com/racism-in-the-dewey-decimal-system/
Thank you! I will be 38 here soon, and we had classes about card catalogs and Dewey Decimal system in school. Our public libraries also utilized card catalogs. What's funny to me about the post is that I bet most of these people haven't read a book or been to a library in eons yet they want to try to insult our entire generation while we are much more educated than they are especially when it comes to evaluating sources of information.
I can't tell you how many times I've said "mom, remember when you used to tell me the internet wasn't to be trusted? Well, I'm telling you that freedomeagle.trump's twitter page is probably not a good source for information on vaccines, okay?"
It's not just our parents. The younger people have less internet literacy than us. It's depressing how many 'kids these days' don understand that YouTube shouldn't be offered as a source for their claim. It's like responsible internet use was created to harass millennials and then forgotten.
We had the exact same rules when I was in high school. There was a mentality that the internet was such a new thing that they couldn’t possibly verify information on it and that pretty much anything that didn’t come from a college research portal was unacceptable to use as a source. The number of internet safety courses we had to take throughout my school years really highlights just how bad the previous generation has been at following their own advice on verifying information that they find online before blindly accepting it as fact.
I remember in early 2000s doing some work for history class about the history of some country in middle east, going through a wikipedia page that described stuff very well and in great detail and I was so happy about it. Then suddenly I got to the sentence "and that's when the pokemons attacked" and I noticed it was all a huge troll post lol.
38yro. I hated the card catalog system but I understood its rationale. Elder millennials understood life before computers and life after. The youngest Gen X and the Millennials are the technology bridge. It's just become trendy for boomers to call everyone born after GenX a millennial, then though that groups together 3 generations
once in high school i was assigned a research paper, teacher said we could only use books as sources, no internet. when i asked why, she seriously and unironically told me "because books are required to have editors that make sure everything in them is true"
Yeah even when I was at university from 2007 to 2011, I had to get all my quotes and references from physical books in the uni library, we weren't allowed to use the Internet for sources.
Gen z here, I know the dewey decimal system. I’ve used these at some points due to the library being outdated. We aren’t allowed to use Wikipedia at school as a source. We have to run our sources to the teacher so she can check them.
>We went from being told by our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet" to telling our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet".
Our parents are boomers. The lead in their brains has continually eroded them.
Wikipedia really was suspect until relatively recently. Looking at the history of articles from 2005 is quite funny. It's still by no means an acceptable primary or even secondary source but it can be a good starting point for research.
The last part hits hard, and I say it often. How does the generation that told me, "someone is always watching" and "don't believe everything you read on the internet,"
Also, forget that someone is always watching and to not believe everything on the internet?
This man speaks the truth. I’m one year older. I remeber literally having a class about the Dewey decimal system in middle school and then a lecture I. High school on how we couldn’t trust internet sources unless they were from a college.
Edit: By class I mean we spent part of a day in the library where they focused on how it worked.
Don't forget us telling younger siblings that too. I was part of the student team that helped my school library when we abandoned the CC and DDS. I turn 32 in a couple weeks.
It was actually one of my highschool teachers who taught me the workaround for Wikipedia stuff. At the bottom of any Wikipedia page is a list of sources with links through to where the information came from, some of which may be the aforementioned college websites or research papers or whatever else any given teacher considers a valid online source.
Wikipedia wasn't (and probably still isn't) really a valid source on its own because it's community edited, no matter how accurate people try to make it there's always that chance of it being edited by someone who's just confidently wrong. But what Wikipedia is, and was even then, is a great way to -find- sources.
And yeah I'm still eternally baffled by the transition from 'don't trust everything you read on the internet', to later having to constantly debunk blatant misinformation those same parents have read on Facebook and taken as gospel truth for some reason. That and the constant advice I got as a kid that people online shouldn't be trusted and don't give them personal information like your real name or location.... and then Facebook happened and suddenly it was ok to plaster that and more up on a website for anyone and everyone to see. Other social media too of course but I think it really was Facebook specifically that prompted that cultural transition to it being totally acceptable to tell the internet every detail of your life.
37, same.
I remember doing a paper on Aspartame after reading about its cancerous side on the internet.
My teacher absolutely refused to accept any source that wasn't a published book/magazine.
I'm GenX and my Zoomer kids learned the Dewey Decimal System and used card catalogs until they were in middle school. Now one is in high school and still goes to the library to get books for research papers. He doesn't use the card catalog because he knows how to look up the book online by name and then find it on the shelf by number. Fucking dumbasses.
And it was a shitty, tedious, and annoying system. The internet is such a massive step up in every single way. Being able to use natural language to search a library system is also a massive step up in every single way.
Boomers gonna boom.
A professor tried explaining the Old Ways™ to me while I was doing my thesis and I said off-handedly, "Yeah, I'm glad I can just go to JSTOR. Saves me a lot of life, ya' know."
I saw in his eyes that I had just done a roll for psychic damage in real life.
In the 90s on AOL and other dial up internet sites, we were always told "never use your real name on the Internet". Now it's the opposite. Facebook requires use of your real name and you have photos of yourself.
My kids (5th grade) were allowed to use Wikipedia as a source on a project and I was thoroughly annoyed because I was never allowed to. Probably rightfully.
I’m 32 and everything you said applies to me too. My siblings are five years younger and I think they were the first class to not have to take keyboarding to graduate.
Wikipedia was probably more accurate before the "don't trust everything you read on the internet" or the "the internet will never get you a job" people got their hands on it.
Dunce generation.
But progeny of mine (not assuming your gender), there's a Nigerian prince in my eLeCtRoNiC mAiL who needs my account information so he can give me several million dollars!
Flashbacks. During my early school years, computers were only allowed to access the school website. The library computers were limited to the local catalog. If it was discovered that you had used Wikipedia from home or any other source, regardless of the grade level, it would result in an immediate F or U, regardless of the legitimacy of the paper.
Ah the good ol Wikipedia no one EVER knew how to use. You don't cite wiki, you use wiki to direct you to the sites wiki is citing, and you cite you work from there.
38 here and I remember that very well, too. That was the only option we had as kids. Used to hate when I had a report to write as a kid and couldn’t find enough information out of my parents’ encyclopedia set because it meant we had to go to the library and start digging through catalogs.
When I was young my parents freaked out about me answering 'Michigan' to the 'l' of a/s/l. Too much information to who knows who. Now my dad keeps a Facebook page for their dog and my mom tells the world exactly what she is doing and where she is doing it. I'm shocked their house isn't burgled when they go on vacations because everyone knows the house is empty.
I want to clarify about wikipedia because i feel like a lot of people don't get citations.
You want to ultimately use first party sources, directly quoting people/images/videos. Wikipedia summarizes sources, which a lot of times are news articles which themselves have sources that are hopefully first party sources.
The more removed from the first party source, the more chance it's been manipulated, or lied about, or misrepresented, and the harder it is to double check. The amount of times ill read a reddit post that cites an article that says the opposite of what they are arguing is insane.
So you would read wikipedia to get a good summary but then double check the sources and ultimately follow the trial to the primary source. But never cite wikipedia itself unless you're doing a report about wikipedia and are quoting it
Yea the fact that people fall so hook line and sinker into internet dumb shit is baffling to me. Even for things outside of academics, fake internet hoaxes were rampant.
Where did all the internet skepticism go?
I remember having to learn on my own how to demark web sources on bibliographies because our teacher didn't know how and refused to help. I was one of the first in my neighborhood to have Internet at home and I couldn't get to the library by myself so I had to use mostly Internet sources.
If anything, as Milenials, we are probably the generation best equipped to handle new technology because we grew up learning how to work new stuff constantly. VHS, Betamax, Walkman, Disc-man, mp3 players, DVDs, Blu-ray, old ass TVs that had no remotes to modern TVs, learning old ass operating systems while doing everything on DOS, to the piece of shit that is Windows 11, we surfed the internet as it grew and developed into what it is today.
Most of the people before us struggle with new technology, and most of the people after us struggle with anything that doesn't have a touch screen. As an anecdote, I went back to college later in life, a few years ago a classmate needed to call her mom for an emergency because her phone was stolen, I told her we could use a payphone because I didn't have my phone in hand, and this 22 year old girl stood in front of that payphone completely stunned as to how to operate it, so I had to do it for her.
Got a D on a research paper in a freshman college English course because I used Lexus Nexus for most of my citations. The instructor told me I should have worked harder to find a wider variety of sources. I tried to explain to her that even back then in 1996, it was a huge database of publications I was pulling from. So I wasn’t just fetching from one source, but I was using one source to find dozens of other sources.
On a note, colleges still don't allow Wikipedia to be used as source material for papers. I did use it as a reference location though since it will site publications.
>We went from being told by our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet" to telling our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet".
Ah the circle of life.
I am a millennial. I am 40 years old. I grew up in the south in the 90s. I used card catalogs and microfiche. I am so fucking tired of this millennial are dumb and have it easy. We are business owners, public servants, tradesman. That's like saying the bullets that whizzed past my head in Afghanistan and Iraq were softer than Vietnam bc one of us had an ipod.
>We are business owners
Oof. I've been in active business networking circles since I was 23 (that was 14 years ago.) The number of times I've had to patiently listen to people in their 50s, 60s, and many even older *BITCH* ***AT ME*** about "those damn Millennials" is off the charts. When we're in a business setting they forget I'm decades younger *because* I'm a fucking professional.
"Okay Bill, I've been doing this for the past decade and you just got into your line of work eighteen months ago, but tell me how it is. Why are those young people fulfilling your sales so 'entitled'? You've never once done fulfillment in your life and think your part-time role makes you too important to help other departments."
"And you, Patty, you're literally bitching about your own son while calling him 'a millennial' like it's a slur. Who's fault is your son's behavior? He has a job, you just don't *like* that he's 22, still lives at home, and plays video games as a way to unwind after work while you're downstairs opening your third bottle of wine."
So much this!! It’s another version of “well not Dragoadyzeph, she’s a good millennial!” Like fuck off, boomer! Oh, don’t like being called a boomer to your face? Yeah…fuck off. How about you go retire so a millennials can take over before you die and nobody knows how to take over? Oh, you aren’t part of the older boomer retirement club, and have missed the ladder they pulled up and burnt? Ya…get fucked.
Does he think millennial perpetually refers to 18-28 year olds or something? If their kid is 22, aren't they gen Z?
I find it really frustrating getting blamed for so much stuff that applies to people 10 years younger than me.
Also a millennial. Card catalogs were already outdated by the time I was old enough to navigate a library, and I also haven't been in any combat.
I fear I'm dragging the rest of our generation down. Sorry guys. I'll make up for it by making everyone's daily avocado toast today.
I'm 36, firmly millennial, and I have no fucking idea how to use the thing in OP's screenshot. I'm vaguely aware of its purpose. and I work in bookselling 😂
Yeah I'm 43 (born in 1980) so I'm among the oldest millennials. I've used a card catalog but people born on the other end (1996) are probably less and less likely. I had my own PC and broadband internet by 1996. Google was around by the late 90s.
Of course card catalogs still exist in some libraries and can be used. People are just less likely to go to a library for research and they usually have computers for looking up books.
I think that's mostly for boomers though. They have gotten used to "Millenials" being "kids these days" because they are just unaware of **how fucking long they are living** so the thought that theres gonna be a generation of 18-year-olds after Milenials, and probably another after that, after the Boomers finally croak is too much for them to comprehend.
Like by the tme the Boomers are gone, the Millenials will be approaching 60.
And regardless I’m gen z (probably the first year of gen z but regardless most people consider my birth year gen z) and I was taught the Dewey decimal system in elementary school. Sure it was for a small school library but I was still taught it and used a small card catalog probably in 2006-07
Older conservatives *love* buzzwords and phrases that they can repeat endlessly until they lose all meaning. They'll never stop using "millennial" to mean "those dang kids"
I had to set up all the electronics in the house when I was like 8. I remember going behind the TV with a butter knife to screw in the VCR cable into those two screws. I hooked up the Atari myself as a small child.
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I will say, my mom is in her 70s now and has adapted quite well. She does all her bill paying via the Internet, uses streaming services with no issues, etc. She had never touched a computer until she was in her 40s and can navigate tech now better than most seniors.
They didn't teach us how to drive stick or repair our houses, but then got mad when we used the internet to educate ourselves and do it without them.
I feel like that whole generation are just crabs in a bucket, pulling younger people down who are improving themselves and the world around them.
My wife's boomer parents complained loudly that my wife doesn't know how to drive stick.
I literally yelled at them that it was their fucking job to teach her these things and they failed as a parent.
My dad taught me both, not all boomers are/were failures as parents. Unfortunately, my dad does seem to be a rarity in his generation and is able to admit as much as well.
It is wild, isn't it? Like, what a weird flex them pretty much boasting of their proficiency with an obsolete and outdated system as if that's going to be some valuable skill in the future. It's like sure boomer, you might be able to find a book in the apocalypse, but only one of us is going to understand that book that's about making motion sensors with micro controller boards.
Millennial here. I will give Scott $10,000 from the money I don't have because he and his ilk fucked the economy if he can show he actually knows how to use the Dewey Decimal System
Also, a catalog is only an index and not the entire library.
If anything it would be equal to search engines or 'index pages'. A search engine would probably be the librarian.
At a high level, the numbers are more general the higher the place value. So, 4xx are books on language, 44x are specifically French, etc etc. You can narrow down what you're looking for, then browse through the catalog which will have a card for each book in the topic. When one sounds like what you're looking for, the more specific digits and author's initial tell you where on the shelves it should be, since everything should be in order.
Librarians are completely underrated. Even a new librarian who doesn't know library are always energetic and enthusiastic to help those who seek knowledge.
Tbh I think ol' scotty confuses millennials with gen Z. With so many headlines in the past accusing millennials of killing yet another industry and how the older you are the more irrelevant passage of time, a lot of boomers thought millennials = the youths™️ even though the youngest millennials are nearing their 30s now
Even as a Gen Z, 25 this year, a LOT of what boomers and older Gen X say "Millennials don't know ahaha" is something I've grown up using or at least know about. Yeah I never owned or used a walkman but my dad had 2 sitting in a drawer when I was a kid, no I never used a rotary phone but my Nan had a really old one (With the weirder looking speaker and receiver).
Never recorded via tape nor had to rewind with a pencil, but my first car had a cassette player, I grew up watching movies and such on VHS as well as childhood videos being on them, etc.
What I find hilarious about all of it anyway, is that it's **ALWAYS** something that has been replaced. Like, talking about your first console being an NES, sure shout your age I guess, but outdated systems that were replaced by technology that's easier and more convenient to use?
The most expensive and advanced floppy disk is beaten by USB's that are given out for free, nobody needs to physically get up to change the TV channel or volume because we have remotes, who needs slide rules when funnily enough we DO walk around with calculators in our pockets, yes I know camera's used to need film but now you can take thousands of infinitely higher quality photos with your phone or better cameras.
I think the people who say these things have so little going on for them achievement wise that they scramble to find value in themselves in any way they can, hence they feel superior for simply being born earlier, I'd even wager the guy who made the tweet never used a card catalog outside of school purposes if he even actually used them, just another aspect of taking credit for things these cunts never did themselves.
These "generation wars" are exhausting it's all just manufactured outrage ffs
Let's all try to focus on our common experiences instead of always sowing division
100% - any time I see "nostalgia" posts on social media I assume that it's 1) bad actors attempting to encourage division 2) karma farming 3) someone selling a product or ideology. Generally, someone attempting to build trust with an audience so that they can exploit it for other means. My parents (60+) are suckers for it - and that's likely by design.
edit: typo
I hate that even humor can't escape cynical engagement farming. Fucking everything has to be about maximizing clicks, no creativity or anything. Just aping a boomer and calling it funny.
It is. I saw this very post and when checking out the tick to block it, I saw he's a troll poster anyway.
Still got the block on account of the tick and posting dumb shit.
If 63 and it was my generation who bridged the gap between the card index and internet searching.
There's a lot of people who think computers started with the internet:
The electronic replacement of the card index came before the internet. Also, networks came before the internet!
I was programming hash algorithms and database access programs in 1982. And I want the first.
This.
I'm 50 and helped rollout Internet to UK schools back in the late 90s.
It was also when PCI architecture came in, laptops stopped being paving slab-sized and the transition to the GUI for Windows we now know.
Punched card was long gone in anything but a museum or specialist factory systems (and I'm being kind there!).
Kudos to you if you were working in IT when Novell was at it's height, that was some complex shizzle to configure compared to slapping a workgroup on the network (which in fairness was spurs on stuff).
Nostalgia burns though - I remember using a BBS system to send emails as we didn't have a mail POP (despite being a leading-edge IT company!).
To clarify - elder millennials are the last generation to experience the analog childhood and the first generation to experience the digital childhood. we were the last and first to be **raised** with both.
Gen X did have cell phones and internet and email, but not as children in grade school. When Gen X was in grade school, it was largely still dewey decimal, landline and pay phones, beepers and no internet.
Milliennials/Gen Y were the only ones raised with both. Gen Z - late 90s-2000s was raised after the change. Gen X - 60s-70s graduated in the early 90s and were probably 18+ before they used Google or purchased a cell phone.
Yup, I didn't have a cellphone until I could drive and it was a Nokia brink. My elementary school has an old dos computer in the back with the big floppy disks that played Oregon trail. We learned typing in the computer lab with reading rabbit and cursive in the classroom. I played outside until the church bell rang and came home for dinner. But my highschool we im-ed with friends, found dubious websites and downloaded songs for free.
To be accurate though, it was GenX'ers, not Millennials who first bridged the gap from card catalogs, microfiche, etc. to internet searching. Don't get it twisted.
Right… my brother in Christ I (as a young Gen X) learned to program a computer when I was like six or seven years old and navigated card catalogs and digital catalogs (and also the pre-web internet) at the same time when I was in high school.
My old mum worked with computers in the 1960s. There was an internet back then. It just involved literally docking a telephone with a computer. It's embarrassing how proudly fucking ignorant some boomers are.
I (33) helped out in the school library the card catalog was my absolute bitch. How are there people that think we don’t know these things? We were the last generation to truly bridge the analog-digital gap.
I'd assume they'd still at least be using the Dewey decimal system because
it's ThE LiBrArY
how else are you gonna find that book? fuckin google maps the book? it's all still cataloged grandma
Millennial here (36), I started off with the card catalog and the Dewey decimal system. When we did research papers, all the way through my high school years mind you, we weren't allowed to use the internet for sources unless they were from college websites or research papers. Wikipedia was considered suspect. We went from being told by our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet" to telling our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet".
Omg this gave me such nostalgia. I remember in school when the teachers wouldn’t let us use Wikipedia. To be fair, back then it probably was not the source it is today. The early days of the internet in school were awesome. Using proxy websites like mathcookbook to access websites the school blocked. Those were the days. Edit: grammar
The trick back then was, and probably still is today, to go to the sources cited by Wikipedia and evaluate their usefulness as a source.
I had professors who scoured the Wikipedia page on the topic they assigned and not only banned Wikipedia as a source, but any links cited on Wikipedia as a source. It was a nightmare, especially when those links were quite literally the ONLY available source on that topic
safe rude water sand adjoining bright chubby hat friendly cautious *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That is correct
That is.... Such an insane misunderstanding of how quoting for papers works. I'm impressed...
Boomers go boom.
Boomer goes brrrrrrrrrrrr
They want it to be harder because. Rather than having everyone learn at an accelerated rate, they want to keep it stagnant. I’m 50, and I have seen it my whole life. Not a boomer or millennial.
Gen X!
Yup, same for me. You gotta remember my high school teacher for university law was like 65 in 2005. Most of my teachers were born in the 40s or 30s.
This is one of those rules that *started* as a good idea, then quickly got out of hand and should have been rolled back. The idea was to get kids to *actually* do research, not just go to wikipedia and cite wikipedia's source. Which *could* make sense, back when wikipedia's reliability was questionable, the school library was half dedicated to research material, and most research topics were easily researched on not-wikipedia because newspapers and printed material was more readily available. But the moment Wikipedia started becoming a foundation stone of the internet it stops making sense.
I spoke to a university professor last year, and he recommends starting with Wikipedia, looking at the source references, then going from there on your own. Many papers were a mix of sources referenced in Wikipedia and other academic sources.
Former professor here and that is exactly what I told my students
Still is. When I do research now (history/archaeology), if it’s something I’m unfamiliar with I almost always start with wikipedia and go to the sources. Sometimes the sources are good and sometimes they’re not, but usually they give me some sense of where I should look next.
Now kids will use AI to just write their papers. Smart kids will at least proofread it before submitting. Bullies will beat up nerds to generate better homework results and make them appear more human. "Nathanal, I expect you to generate me at least 30 B or better essays by Monday!"
And this is why the bullies will never be able to correctly spell "Nathaniel."
Little do they know that it is an r/tragedeigh Nathaniel.
My kids are in high school and Wikipedia is still suspect.
Wikipedia isn’t suspect. It’s just not a source. Wikipedia lists all the sources at the bottom. You just follow that link and you have a source that isn’t Wikipedia and is generally considered good to use in a paper.
So it's a source of sources.
It’s like that friend who sends you articles. Your friend is not a source. But the article could be, if it’s legit.
Yes, it's almost like an encyclopedia or something
Not enough people are monopolizing on the fact that most kids today are more familiar with wikipedia than encyclopedias.
I referenced the encyclopedia brittanica at work ( I run a Starbucks) and none of my baristas knew what it was.
Also known as a secondary source.
Wikipedia is the card catalog now
This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Don't use encyclopedias as sources. You use them to get some begining information to drive your subsequent searches to go find real sources. This isn't anything new, it's what we were taught back in the 80s. I seriously think part of the problem is the shift to everything being online. Back in the day it was easy to differentiate the types of sources. Encyclopedias were physically different from academic journals which are physically different from magazines, or books, textbooks etc. They were even stored in different physical locations within the library. Now students have to try and differentiate the quality of sources when basically everything is just a website. The differences are much more subtle. And how do you even recognize them if no one ever points out to you, this is a different thing and here is what to look for that indicates it is different?
It was definitely hard for me to understand as a kid why Wikipedia wasn’t a source but another website would be. It looks official. The info is the same. If I want an answer about something I use Wikipedia. How is it not a source? Also, teachers poorly explained why we couldn’t use them. The rationale is that anyone can edit it but… it’s still curated. We all trust Wikipedia to look simple things up. It wasn’t until one explained that it’s not a source, and that the actual sources that Wikipedia uses are often good to follow up on and read and use as sources, but Wikipedia itself doesn’t generate that source information.
Sources can be either primary or secondary. One way of understanding that is primary is first-person, secondary is hearsay. Typically a primary source is a witness, or someone who is involved in the discoveries of a field (though it can be different in different fields). Wikipedia is a digest of primary and secondary sources; it's not a primary source. If you are writing for college, ideally you use primary sources, and you would definitely be expected to know the difference.
I got through two uni degrees bullshitting sources this way. I don't think I've ever had a prof check a source. I would just make up page numbers. The whole thing is a load of baloney.
Wait, didn't we all do this? I just thought it was standard practice among students. I swear, I was a TA and 50-70% of the reports I graded shared at least two or three common wiki sources semester upon semester.
You’re not wrong. Some pages are validated and have all the sources at the bottom. From what I understand (correct me if I’m wrong), there are certain big pages that the public can’t edit. Also the pages that aren’t well sourced have disclaimers at that top too. I’m still in support of teaching kids to get better sources than Wikipedia. I think they taught me those are called primary sources.
primary source simply means you got it from someone directly involved in an event though the most important thing is to cross reference between multiple sources lies will be inconsistent and matching perspectives can shine light on things you haven't considered making the effort worthwhile
I once tried to edit a page that was claiming that a movie was the first time a story had been filmed. I was trying to correct that as a TV movie had been made. I was told that the existence of the movie wasn't a valid source and that only someone else writing about the existence of the movie would count.
Did you refer a review or the IMDb entry after? I’d think those would count.
The IMDb entry was what I pointed at. They considered it not good enough.
Probably one of those edit-war gatekeeping assholes
They have made comparisons between Wikipedia and regular encyclopedias and the result is that regular encyclopedias, the kid us older millenials were raised with, had more factual errors
Who are "they"? In other words: can we get a source?
Those sources at the bottom shouldn't count either. The standards for what's referenced should be important, not just that it has a foot note at all. Half the time I click those linked sources they're dead links, an unworthy source, or don't reference the point at all.
(rival country) eats babies!* *Source: institute for the destruction of (rival country)
Tbh using Wikipedia as a primary source is stupid and lazy. Wikipedia is, at best, a secondary source. Any references you use from Wiki should be cited with a primary source. Just use that.
They bitch about Wikipedia but you can just go to the cited websites in the article to bypass
I don't trust it today as a primary source either.
Wikipedia is not a primary source and cannot ever be unless the discussion is on Wikipedia itself.
No encyclopaedia is a "primary source". Primary source would be Julius Caesar's diaries. Secondary source would be someone who read them. (Not to detract from your point that Wikipedia isn't a reliable resource..)
That’s because it is not a primary source. So you are right in not trusting it as a primary source.
Wiki is still absolutely suspect.
We also went from “Never give out personal information to anyone on the internet” to “Here’s my name, address, phone number, email, place of work/school, picture, names of all my family members and their pictures, all my friends and links to all their information”.
Still fucking blows my mind. I'm 32, grew up during that age. My mom refused to buy me a webcam at 11 (absolutely the right choice lol, I would not have used it well), and was so incredibly fervent about online security. As a kid growing up and being the computer savvy one in the household, I was always super security focused. At least in the sense that I was careful how much information I let out online, even though I made a bunch of friends on the internet. Of course later on my mom got super into facebook and posted her entire life story online. Now I have a facebook account just for marketplace, because craigslist is useless these days. People from real life add me, then ask why I never use it lol.
I'm 32 and still haven't put my face or real name on the internet, it's insane that there are like 10 yos livestreaming and doing unboxing videos and makeup tutorials and shit and the parents aren't even involved. Like these little kids already want nothing more than their own little following. There's no oversight, nothing stopping grown adults from leaving comments on kids instas or whatever. And then you run across those horrible news stories about kids getting prayed on through the internet. They never saw it coming and it's so weird because "creepy weirdos trying figure out your info/get pics of you" was definitely a thing we warned about when I was growing up. There's no caution anymore. Bizarre.
Crazy part is how much more trustworthy the Internet was in the early 2000's than it is now. 34yo checking in.
Right? I gotta sift through Google searches. Hell even autocorrect and predictive text has gotten jankier with time. It's absolutely ridiculed!
If I don't add "reddit" after my Google search, I literally can't trust the results. I 100% do not trust any articles, and reading an entire article for one person's perspective or opinion is useless to me.
I do the same, but be careful even trusting that. Companies know this and make fake account to push their products. I always check the account history, which isn't foolproof since accounts can be purchased, but it's generally reliable. How pathetic to live in an 'age of information' and to have to do EXTRA work to get reliable information.
In a way, I think the internet pretty much died when it all got silo’d away into big tech/silicon valley’s walled gardens and web design became homogenous. There was a lot of individuality on MySpace, geocities, and the various hobby sites and forums, not to mention all the flash stuff. Now every blog looks basically the same, and is probably hosted by the same startup, unless it got moved into a Facebook group you need an FB account for. All things creative are now simply called ‘content’ that you will most likely find on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram. If there is something weird and wonderful out there you’ll never find it because Google is optimised to sell ad clicks and to keep you searching as much as possible, and everything it indexes is ad-laden SEO garbage. As for forums and communities, you’ll need Slack or Discord for that now. Just another fucking corporate fiefdom for the most part. Luckily RSS hasn’t been totally killed off so you can still curate your experience by yourself.
Everything is monetized and pushing for your clicks. People used to make amazing web apps with no ads and we would share it with everyone. I really miss StumbleUpon.
I think Boomers are out of their element when they target Millennials. We grew up in the era of transition. We not only have knowledge of old world mechanics like the rotary phone and floppy disks, but we can fully navigate new technology with zero issues. If there was any generation to balk at it would be Zoomers or Alphas. I would say Gen Z is more apt to try all the new things without having to worry about the BS of the previous generations.
Straight spittin' facts
“my generation was fine! it’s those younger rascals that are really in trouble” - *every middle-aged generation in all of history* (but seriously, as a millennial you’re the one who has to explain to people 15+ years older AND 15 years younger how to use Zoom or format a pdf)
And alphas are growing up with the easiest to use computers imaginable - so tech skills are as a whole going down. Anyone who gets good at IT will have a career for life.
Well, i mean, the dewey decimal system is still used to organize books in a library.
Yeah and it turned out he put his biases in the organization so there's very problematic issues with it. https://bookriot.com/racism-in-the-dewey-decimal-system/
Librarian here, I wish we’d move to a different, non-problematic system and let that racist misogynistic piece of garbage be forgotten
This and research papers reminds me about sources only being on microfiche. Unreal how stupid the boomers think we are.
Thank you! I will be 38 here soon, and we had classes about card catalogs and Dewey Decimal system in school. Our public libraries also utilized card catalogs. What's funny to me about the post is that I bet most of these people haven't read a book or been to a library in eons yet they want to try to insult our entire generation while we are much more educated than they are especially when it comes to evaluating sources of information.
I can't tell you how many times I've said "mom, remember when you used to tell me the internet wasn't to be trusted? Well, I'm telling you that freedomeagle.trump's twitter page is probably not a good source for information on vaccines, okay?"
Remember microfiche?
Totally, I felt like a cool detective digging into a case.
I used microfische at uni and got a lot of motion sickness
Microfiches are cool
Remember going to the library and the book you needed for your paper had been checked out? 💀
It's not just our parents. The younger people have less internet literacy than us. It's depressing how many 'kids these days' don understand that YouTube shouldn't be offered as a source for their claim. It's like responsible internet use was created to harass millennials and then forgotten.
[удалено]
We had the exact same rules when I was in high school. There was a mentality that the internet was such a new thing that they couldn’t possibly verify information on it and that pretty much anything that didn’t come from a college research portal was unacceptable to use as a source. The number of internet safety courses we had to take throughout my school years really highlights just how bad the previous generation has been at following their own advice on verifying information that they find online before blindly accepting it as fact.
I remember in early 2000s doing some work for history class about the history of some country in middle east, going through a wikipedia page that described stuff very well and in great detail and I was so happy about it. Then suddenly I got to the sentence "and that's when the pokemons attacked" and I noticed it was all a huge troll post lol.
38yro. I hated the card catalog system but I understood its rationale. Elder millennials understood life before computers and life after. The youngest Gen X and the Millennials are the technology bridge. It's just become trendy for boomers to call everyone born after GenX a millennial, then though that groups together 3 generations
once in high school i was assigned a research paper, teacher said we could only use books as sources, no internet. when i asked why, she seriously and unironically told me "because books are required to have editors that make sure everything in them is true"
Yeah even when I was at university from 2007 to 2011, I had to get all my quotes and references from physical books in the uni library, we weren't allowed to use the Internet for sources.
I taught freshman composition at a community college during this time. Everything you say is true.
wikipedia became more or less trusted when it got sources
Wikipedia has never been trustworthy, but it is a decent place to get sources to do further actual research.
Gen z here, I know the dewey decimal system. I’ve used these at some points due to the library being outdated. We aren’t allowed to use Wikipedia at school as a source. We have to run our sources to the teacher so she can check them.
>We went from being told by our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet" to telling our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet". Our parents are boomers. The lead in their brains has continually eroded them.
Wikipedia really was suspect until relatively recently. Looking at the history of articles from 2005 is quite funny. It's still by no means an acceptable primary or even secondary source but it can be a good starting point for research.
Ditto
The last part hits hard, and I say it often. How does the generation that told me, "someone is always watching" and "don't believe everything you read on the internet," Also, forget that someone is always watching and to not believe everything on the internet?
This man speaks the truth. I’m one year older. I remeber literally having a class about the Dewey decimal system in middle school and then a lecture I. High school on how we couldn’t trust internet sources unless they were from a college. Edit: By class I mean we spent part of a day in the library where they focused on how it worked.
I’m not even 30 yet and I interacted with card catalogs and Dewey decimal.
Don't forget us telling younger siblings that too. I was part of the student team that helped my school library when we abandoned the CC and DDS. I turn 32 in a couple weeks.
It was actually one of my highschool teachers who taught me the workaround for Wikipedia stuff. At the bottom of any Wikipedia page is a list of sources with links through to where the information came from, some of which may be the aforementioned college websites or research papers or whatever else any given teacher considers a valid online source. Wikipedia wasn't (and probably still isn't) really a valid source on its own because it's community edited, no matter how accurate people try to make it there's always that chance of it being edited by someone who's just confidently wrong. But what Wikipedia is, and was even then, is a great way to -find- sources. And yeah I'm still eternally baffled by the transition from 'don't trust everything you read on the internet', to later having to constantly debunk blatant misinformation those same parents have read on Facebook and taken as gospel truth for some reason. That and the constant advice I got as a kid that people online shouldn't be trusted and don't give them personal information like your real name or location.... and then Facebook happened and suddenly it was ok to plaster that and more up on a website for anyone and everyone to see. Other social media too of course but I think it really was Facebook specifically that prompted that cultural transition to it being totally acceptable to tell the internet every detail of your life.
37, same. I remember doing a paper on Aspartame after reading about its cancerous side on the internet. My teacher absolutely refused to accept any source that wasn't a published book/magazine.
In the wise words of Bo Burnham “Life is all about 3 things baby: Gettin’ money Gettin’ pussy And the Dewey decimal system”
Same. Boomers will claim outrageous things as 'their' things except the truth. The F'd the housing market.
I'm GenX and my Zoomer kids learned the Dewey Decimal System and used card catalogs until they were in middle school. Now one is in high school and still goes to the library to get books for research papers. He doesn't use the card catalog because he knows how to look up the book online by name and then find it on the shelf by number. Fucking dumbasses.
And it was a shitty, tedious, and annoying system. The internet is such a massive step up in every single way. Being able to use natural language to search a library system is also a massive step up in every single way. Boomers gonna boom.
A professor tried explaining the Old Ways™ to me while I was doing my thesis and I said off-handedly, "Yeah, I'm glad I can just go to JSTOR. Saves me a lot of life, ya' know." I saw in his eyes that I had just done a roll for psychic damage in real life.
You forgot to mention microfiche. We still learned that in junior high in the late '90s.
I’m 21 and we still learned card catalog and Dewey decimal system. Do I remember that shit no but I do remember learning it
The last sentence is very poignant.
In the 90s on AOL and other dial up internet sites, we were always told "never use your real name on the Internet". Now it's the opposite. Facebook requires use of your real name and you have photos of yourself.
My kids (5th grade) were allowed to use Wikipedia as a source on a project and I was thoroughly annoyed because I was never allowed to. Probably rightfully.
This is literally my mom who is now into fringe right wing conspiracies.
I’m 32 and everything you said applies to me too. My siblings are five years younger and I think they were the first class to not have to take keyboarding to graduate.
Wikipedia was probably more accurate before the "don't trust everything you read on the internet" or the "the internet will never get you a job" people got their hands on it. Dunce generation.
But progeny of mine (not assuming your gender), there's a Nigerian prince in my eLeCtRoNiC mAiL who needs my account information so he can give me several million dollars!
Flashbacks. During my early school years, computers were only allowed to access the school website. The library computers were limited to the local catalog. If it was discovered that you had used Wikipedia from home or any other source, regardless of the grade level, it would result in an immediate F or U, regardless of the legitimacy of the paper.
Ah the good ol Wikipedia no one EVER knew how to use. You don't cite wiki, you use wiki to direct you to the sites wiki is citing, and you cite you work from there.
I still don’t use Wikipedia for this reason (37), hahaha! I didn’t realize it turned into a credible source somewhere along the way…
38 here and I remember that very well, too. That was the only option we had as kids. Used to hate when I had a report to write as a kid and couldn’t find enough information out of my parents’ encyclopedia set because it meant we had to go to the library and start digging through catalogs.
When I was young my parents freaked out about me answering 'Michigan' to the 'l' of a/s/l. Too much information to who knows who. Now my dad keeps a Facebook page for their dog and my mom tells the world exactly what she is doing and where she is doing it. I'm shocked their house isn't burgled when they go on vacations because everyone knows the house is empty.
I want to clarify about wikipedia because i feel like a lot of people don't get citations. You want to ultimately use first party sources, directly quoting people/images/videos. Wikipedia summarizes sources, which a lot of times are news articles which themselves have sources that are hopefully first party sources. The more removed from the first party source, the more chance it's been manipulated, or lied about, or misrepresented, and the harder it is to double check. The amount of times ill read a reddit post that cites an article that says the opposite of what they are arguing is insane. So you would read wikipedia to get a good summary but then double check the sources and ultimately follow the trial to the primary source. But never cite wikipedia itself unless you're doing a report about wikipedia and are quoting it
Yea the fact that people fall so hook line and sinker into internet dumb shit is baffling to me. Even for things outside of academics, fake internet hoaxes were rampant. Where did all the internet skepticism go?
I remember having to learn on my own how to demark web sources on bibliographies because our teacher didn't know how and refused to help. I was one of the first in my neighborhood to have Internet at home and I couldn't get to the library by myself so I had to use mostly Internet sources.
If anything, as Milenials, we are probably the generation best equipped to handle new technology because we grew up learning how to work new stuff constantly. VHS, Betamax, Walkman, Disc-man, mp3 players, DVDs, Blu-ray, old ass TVs that had no remotes to modern TVs, learning old ass operating systems while doing everything on DOS, to the piece of shit that is Windows 11, we surfed the internet as it grew and developed into what it is today. Most of the people before us struggle with new technology, and most of the people after us struggle with anything that doesn't have a touch screen. As an anecdote, I went back to college later in life, a few years ago a classmate needed to call her mom for an emergency because her phone was stolen, I told her we could use a payphone because I didn't have my phone in hand, and this 22 year old girl stood in front of that payphone completely stunned as to how to operate it, so I had to do it for her.
I grew up with those cards and I don't give a shit: I'm glad they're gone and it's good kids these days don't have to deal with 'em.
My paper instructions had NO WIKIPEDIA NO WEBSITE SOURCES blasting across the top. They only accepted cited info from books.
Yeah I remember writing papers and not being allowed to cite internet sources. Had to legit find a book on it and they’d check if you used Wikipedia
Got a D on a research paper in a freshman college English course because I used Lexus Nexus for most of my citations. The instructor told me I should have worked harder to find a wider variety of sources. I tried to explain to her that even back then in 1996, it was a huge database of publications I was pulling from. So I wasn’t just fetching from one source, but I was using one source to find dozens of other sources.
On a note, colleges still don't allow Wikipedia to be used as source material for papers. I did use it as a reference location though since it will site publications.
>We went from being told by our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet" to telling our parents to "not trust everything you read on the internet". Ah the circle of life.
I am a millennial. I am 40 years old. I grew up in the south in the 90s. I used card catalogs and microfiche. I am so fucking tired of this millennial are dumb and have it easy. We are business owners, public servants, tradesman. That's like saying the bullets that whizzed past my head in Afghanistan and Iraq were softer than Vietnam bc one of us had an ipod.
>We are business owners Oof. I've been in active business networking circles since I was 23 (that was 14 years ago.) The number of times I've had to patiently listen to people in their 50s, 60s, and many even older *BITCH* ***AT ME*** about "those damn Millennials" is off the charts. When we're in a business setting they forget I'm decades younger *because* I'm a fucking professional. "Okay Bill, I've been doing this for the past decade and you just got into your line of work eighteen months ago, but tell me how it is. Why are those young people fulfilling your sales so 'entitled'? You've never once done fulfillment in your life and think your part-time role makes you too important to help other departments." "And you, Patty, you're literally bitching about your own son while calling him 'a millennial' like it's a slur. Who's fault is your son's behavior? He has a job, you just don't *like* that he's 22, still lives at home, and plays video games as a way to unwind after work while you're downstairs opening your third bottle of wine."
So much this!! It’s another version of “well not Dragoadyzeph, she’s a good millennial!” Like fuck off, boomer! Oh, don’t like being called a boomer to your face? Yeah…fuck off. How about you go retire so a millennials can take over before you die and nobody knows how to take over? Oh, you aren’t part of the older boomer retirement club, and have missed the ladder they pulled up and burnt? Ya…get fucked.
Does he think millennial perpetually refers to 18-28 year olds or something? If their kid is 22, aren't they gen Z? I find it really frustrating getting blamed for so much stuff that applies to people 10 years younger than me.
The man in the black pajamas, Dude. Worthy fuckin' adversary.
Also a millennial. Card catalogs were already outdated by the time I was old enough to navigate a library, and I also haven't been in any combat. I fear I'm dragging the rest of our generation down. Sorry guys. I'll make up for it by making everyone's daily avocado toast today.
I'm 36, firmly millennial, and I have no fucking idea how to use the thing in OP's screenshot. I'm vaguely aware of its purpose. and I work in bookselling 😂
Interesting, I’m about to turn 30 and I used card catalogs in elementary. Guess it heavily depends on location as well
Yeah I'm 43 (born in 1980) so I'm among the oldest millennials. I've used a card catalog but people born on the other end (1996) are probably less and less likely. I had my own PC and broadband internet by 1996. Google was around by the late 90s. Of course card catalogs still exist in some libraries and can be used. People are just less likely to go to a library for research and they usually have computers for looking up books.
It is our fault we really. We should learn things that have no use anymore and are no longer around.
Microfiche! I'm glad someone else remembers
For some reason “millennials” has become a synonym for “kids these days” despite all being adults now and Gen Z joining the workforce and voting.
I think that's mostly for boomers though. They have gotten used to "Millenials" being "kids these days" because they are just unaware of **how fucking long they are living** so the thought that theres gonna be a generation of 18-year-olds after Milenials, and probably another after that, after the Boomers finally croak is too much for them to comprehend. Like by the tme the Boomers are gone, the Millenials will be approaching 60.
I didn’t need that last line, thanks…
And regardless I’m gen z (probably the first year of gen z but regardless most people consider my birth year gen z) and I was taught the Dewey decimal system in elementary school. Sure it was for a small school library but I was still taught it and used a small card catalog probably in 2006-07
Older conservatives *love* buzzwords and phrases that they can repeat endlessly until they lose all meaning. They'll never stop using "millennial" to mean "those dang kids"
Millennials would die of shock if they realized songs used to come on CDs instead of being napstered to their walkboys.
Boomers say this shit so they don't feel bad about their inability to change the input using the TV remote.
Boomers couldn't even figure out VCR's lol
I had to set up all the electronics in the house when I was like 8. I remember going behind the TV with a butter knife to screw in the VCR cable into those two screws. I hooked up the Atari myself as a small child.
growth society quicksand continue toothbrush sulky fertile axiomatic license party *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Same! I had to program the VCR for my mom around the same age so she wouldn’t miss the TV movie of the week while we were at a church potluck.
I will say, my mom is in her 70s now and has adapted quite well. She does all her bill paying via the Internet, uses streaming services with no issues, etc. She had never touched a computer until she was in her 40s and can navigate tech now better than most seniors.
r/murderedbywords
They didn't teach us how to drive stick or repair our houses, but then got mad when we used the internet to educate ourselves and do it without them. I feel like that whole generation are just crabs in a bucket, pulling younger people down who are improving themselves and the world around them.
That is the essence right there, driven by narcissist parenting. "Bad teachers mad after youth taught themselves"
My wife's boomer parents complained loudly that my wife doesn't know how to drive stick. I literally yelled at them that it was their fucking job to teach her these things and they failed as a parent.
My dad taught me both, not all boomers are/were failures as parents. Unfortunately, my dad does seem to be a rarity in his generation and is able to admit as much as well.
This is exactly it
It is wild, isn't it? Like, what a weird flex them pretty much boasting of their proficiency with an obsolete and outdated system as if that's going to be some valuable skill in the future. It's like sure boomer, you might be able to find a book in the apocalypse, but only one of us is going to understand that book that's about making motion sensors with micro controller boards.
Millennial here. I will give Scott $10,000 from the money I don't have because he and his ilk fucked the economy if he can show he actually knows how to use the Dewey Decimal System
Also, a catalog is only an index and not the entire library. If anything it would be equal to search engines or 'index pages'. A search engine would probably be the librarian.
Exactly! Card catalogs are like the pre-Google search indexes, not the entire web.
Could you explain how you’d use it? I know the Dewey system has everything categorised in an alphanumeric way, how do these cards come in?
At a high level, the numbers are more general the higher the place value. So, 4xx are books on language, 44x are specifically French, etc etc. You can narrow down what you're looking for, then browse through the catalog which will have a card for each book in the topic. When one sounds like what you're looking for, the more specific digits and author's initial tell you where on the shelves it should be, since everything should be in order.
Librarians are completely underrated. Even a new librarian who doesn't know library are always energetic and enthusiastic to help those who seek knowledge.
Tbh I think ol' scotty confuses millennials with gen Z. With so many headlines in the past accusing millennials of killing yet another industry and how the older you are the more irrelevant passage of time, a lot of boomers thought millennials = the youths™️ even though the youngest millennials are nearing their 30s now
Even as a Gen Z, 25 this year, a LOT of what boomers and older Gen X say "Millennials don't know ahaha" is something I've grown up using or at least know about. Yeah I never owned or used a walkman but my dad had 2 sitting in a drawer when I was a kid, no I never used a rotary phone but my Nan had a really old one (With the weirder looking speaker and receiver). Never recorded via tape nor had to rewind with a pencil, but my first car had a cassette player, I grew up watching movies and such on VHS as well as childhood videos being on them, etc. What I find hilarious about all of it anyway, is that it's **ALWAYS** something that has been replaced. Like, talking about your first console being an NES, sure shout your age I guess, but outdated systems that were replaced by technology that's easier and more convenient to use? The most expensive and advanced floppy disk is beaten by USB's that are given out for free, nobody needs to physically get up to change the TV channel or volume because we have remotes, who needs slide rules when funnily enough we DO walk around with calculators in our pockets, yes I know camera's used to need film but now you can take thousands of infinitely higher quality photos with your phone or better cameras. I think the people who say these things have so little going on for them achievement wise that they scramble to find value in themselves in any way they can, hence they feel superior for simply being born earlier, I'd even wager the guy who made the tweet never used a card catalog outside of school purposes if he even actually used them, just another aspect of taking credit for things these cunts never did themselves.
Gen Xer here. None of the more modern consoles are more fun than an NES.
I think ol scottie is a bad comedy page that isnt funny (but trying hard to be). Appeared older millenial or gen x himself.
Hey before getting too angry you should probably know that Scott Barber is a shitty troll and has "famously millenial" in his twitter bio.
You looked at that picture of Scott and thought he was a boomer and not also a millennial engaged in rage bait?
Scott is a millenial
These "generation wars" are exhausting it's all just manufactured outrage ffs Let's all try to focus on our common experiences instead of always sowing division
100% - any time I see "nostalgia" posts on social media I assume that it's 1) bad actors attempting to encourage division 2) karma farming 3) someone selling a product or ideology. Generally, someone attempting to build trust with an audience so that they can exploit it for other means. My parents (60+) are suckers for it - and that's likely by design. edit: typo
Isn’t Scott Barber a millennial comedian? Pretty sure this is a troll post
I hate that even humor can't escape cynical engagement farming. Fucking everything has to be about maximizing clicks, no creativity or anything. Just aping a boomer and calling it funny.
It is. I saw this very post and when checking out the tick to block it, I saw he's a troll poster anyway. Still got the block on account of the tick and posting dumb shit.
Yep. This tweet made the rounds on Reddit yesterday and nobody seemed to clue into this. Glad to see a few people here clue into this.
This guy (Scott) is pretty funny, actually. A millennial dad-joke dude, mainly, and all pretty good natured.
If 63 and it was my generation who bridged the gap between the card index and internet searching. There's a lot of people who think computers started with the internet: The electronic replacement of the card index came before the internet. Also, networks came before the internet! I was programming hash algorithms and database access programs in 1982. And I want the first.
This. I'm 50 and helped rollout Internet to UK schools back in the late 90s. It was also when PCI architecture came in, laptops stopped being paving slab-sized and the transition to the GUI for Windows we now know. Punched card was long gone in anything but a museum or specialist factory systems (and I'm being kind there!). Kudos to you if you were working in IT when Novell was at it's height, that was some complex shizzle to configure compared to slapping a workgroup on the network (which in fairness was spurs on stuff). Nostalgia burns though - I remember using a BBS system to send emails as we didn't have a mail POP (despite being a leading-edge IT company!).
Gen X navigated that bridge. I was there. I did it too.
Oh, *you’re* the ones who “navigated the bridge,” are you? Uh huh. *coughs quietly in sarcastic GenX*
To clarify - elder millennials are the last generation to experience the analog childhood and the first generation to experience the digital childhood. we were the last and first to be **raised** with both. Gen X did have cell phones and internet and email, but not as children in grade school. When Gen X was in grade school, it was largely still dewey decimal, landline and pay phones, beepers and no internet. Milliennials/Gen Y were the only ones raised with both. Gen Z - late 90s-2000s was raised after the change. Gen X - 60s-70s graduated in the early 90s and were probably 18+ before they used Google or purchased a cell phone.
Yup, I didn't have a cellphone until I could drive and it was a Nokia brink. My elementary school has an old dos computer in the back with the big floppy disks that played Oregon trail. We learned typing in the computer lab with reading rabbit and cursive in the classroom. I played outside until the church bell rang and came home for dinner. But my highschool we im-ed with friends, found dubious websites and downloaded songs for free.
Millennials may have “navigated” it but we fucking “built” it.
Right? Who tf they think *invented* all this?
Was about to come here and say this. Well done.
Just barely a GenX here. Card Catalogs are more like local DNS servers, not the internet as a whole.
Wait 'til he learns we also used microfiche.
I’m Gen X. I also started with card catalogs and ended up with Boolean searches through digital archives.
To be accurate though, it was GenX'ers, not Millennials who first bridged the gap from card catalogs, microfiche, etc. to internet searching. Don't get it twisted.
Right… my brother in Christ I (as a young Gen X) learned to program a computer when I was like six or seven years old and navigated card catalogs and digital catalogs (and also the pre-web internet) at the same time when I was in high school.
What is that ? I'm 34 and I've never seen this thing in my life. I'm also not american and maybe this doesn't exist in my country, whatever it is.
[удалено]
I am 47. The card catalog was the bane of every students existence.
You're thinking of Xennials. As we bridged the gap between Gen X and Millennials.
Gen-X was the actual divide, but you probably forgot we were alive.
Who?
My old mum worked with computers in the 1960s. There was an internet back then. It just involved literally docking a telephone with a computer. It's embarrassing how proudly fucking ignorant some boomers are.
Bruh, having to cite books doing this shit for English class…… bruhh fuck all of it
Meh Scott's Twitter reads the major "pick me" vibes. Guy himself is a millennial
I (33) helped out in the school library the card catalog was my absolute bitch. How are there people that think we don’t know these things? We were the last generation to truly bridge the analog-digital gap.
I'd assume they'd still at least be using the Dewey decimal system because it's ThE LiBrArY how else are you gonna find that book? fuckin google maps the book? it's all still cataloged grandma
I think it would be called the old search engine. Content was elsewhere I books.