Ok so what I suppose you would call an āelder zoomerā or whatever, born in the span of '98-'02, entering my mid-20s. Get all your geriatric chomsky emotes out of your systems, itās fine. My parents were born in '71 and '72 respectively, meaning they just entered their 50s. My dad has always been a computer guy, played dnd back in the 80s, introduced me and my brother to pirating media growing up, etc. Basically, heās a nerd. Heās always been a nerd. He also holds some weird contradictory views ranging from very based (like pirating and hating the US) to very chuddy but thatās unrelated for now.
My point is, my dad isnāt some tech-illiterate boomer who hates āthe iphones and nintendosā or whatever. Despite this, heās completely, and I mean completely oblivious to any and all internet culture. Hell, my mom runs circles around him in terms of being able to understand memes and me and my brother have even gotten her to start using ācopiumā correctly to my uncle (which is hilarious but also resulted in me having to explain to my extended family what it means during christmas dinner). Itās not like my dad didnāt get on the internet when it first came around, he was a super early adopter of both cellphones and the internet. I also know that he has spent a not-insignificant amount of time on various hobby forums and so on. He still doesnāt know what a āmemeā is though, he sends me and my brother āfunny picturesā which are all some rank-ass 2012 facebook-funny-page tier shit that always manages to be a bit problematic no matter how innocent the subject matter seems.
Heās also incredibly thin-skinned online. Heās tried playing online games because, well, he like playing games! He just canāt though; he gets so incredibly offended over any and all toxicity (yes toxicity is bad but heās a grown-ass white cishet male heās not exactly being targeted with violent slurs) that it would probably be incredibly humorous as an outsider.
His relationship to media online is also quite interesting. Heās fully aware of youtube, with the caveat that to him itās still just the site where you āgo to find a grainy video of some indian with a thick accent to fix an obscure tech problemā (paraphrased from him) or where you watch uploads of live concerts or clips from TV shows. Basically any video uploaded after 2010 doesnāt exist to him. Youtube is just for home-video amateurs, thereās no artistic merit in it, āwhy would you ever watch someone else play a game? are you stupidā-type-beat, etc. I think if I showed him something like a Jacob Geller essay he would just straight up not get it.
The same goes for video games. While he plays plenty of newer games, he thinks of all games as being either competitive match-based PvP games like counter strike or single player experiences where you play from the start to the end once and then the game is done. Iāve tried so many times to explain to him that the reason ESO is so weird coming from skyrim is that itās an MMO, and MMOs are fundamentally different. He has no concept of roguelikes or other games that deviate from this standard form of a ācinematicā single-player experience. Just recently he started playing 7 Days to Die and it has been blowing his mind seeing this āsuper innovative gameplay loopā, but instead of contextualizing it in terms of other survival-crafty games, he thinks itās cool because āitās just like Fallout with the scavengingā
Idk people I donāt really have a big point to make here at the end. I love my dad even if our relationship is a bit strained, and the stuff I bring up here are not meant to be specific to him. My mom is the same minus the video games in many ways (not understanding that online videos are more than just charlie bit my finger etc). Iām also aware that framing it as a generational thing is a bit unhelpful and all that, but what can you do.
Do you people have similar stories with tech-literate people who are somehow completely out of touch in terms of internet culture? Itās somehow fascinating to me, and I think maybe talking about it could help me communicate with my parents about it better.
Thatās rather ironic given that Rogue is an absolute dinosaur of a game. Your dad wasnāt even a teenager when it came out.
What youāre seeing here is that while some people keep up with whatever the shifts are in culture, others lock into whatever the cultural modes are at a certain timeframe of their life, typically mid thirties to early forties, and any changes after that just donāt compute. It being Internet culture-related is just the current variant on a long running phenomenon.