My 13-year-old goddaughter still can’t understand how telephone busy signals used to work.
She can’t help it.
At 13, she’s a member of the Gen Alpha generation, kids born between 2010 and 2024, which is the first generation to NOT know what life was like before social media and artificial intelligence were everywhere.
I tried to explain that before call waiting was commonplace in the mid-1980s, a caller would get a busy signal if a phone line was being used.
When I was in high school, I told her, we only had one telephone line. My father, a Bell Telephone man, installed five heavy-duty phones in our house, but all of them were connected to a single landline.
When someone called us, the ringing brass bells created such a hullabaloo, it sounded like someone was breaking into the Fort Knox Bullion Depository.
But the bells didn’t ring often, because, between my mother and five sisters, somebody was always tying up the line.
When I needed a ride home after football practice, I placed a dime into the pay phone, turned the rotary dial with my finger and was then greeted by an annoyingly loud buzzer that suggested: Loser! Try again!
This silly story illustrates the stark contrast between the innocent childhood I experienced as a tail-end Baby Boomer and the all-digitized childhood she is experiencing as a Gen Alpha.
Modern childhood is fraught with digital landmines.
According to The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, children between 8 and 12 spend 4 to 6 hours a day using digital devices, such as smartphones, while teens spend up to 9 hours.
AACAP says unmonitored children are likely to be exposed and influenced by risk-taking behaviors, sexual content, substance use, negative stereotypes, misinformation and advertising aimed at motivating a child to buy or act.
Copyright 2024 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.