I Like That Old Time Usenet

Continuing the trend of talking about new movies I haven't and probably won't see, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are in the new movie The Internship, in which they try to get jobs at Google or something.

The reviews haven't been good (currently 33% on Rotten Tomatoes.) Complaints are that it's clichéd, too long, and just a big ad for Google.  But one criticism is interesting because it relates back to a problem our whole society is having with the place technology has in the population.  Apparently a lot of the humour in the movie is built around the generation gap (since Vaughn and Wilson are much older than the other Google recruits)

But that doesn't really add up.  If their characters - like he actors themselves - are in their forties, then they would have grown up with computers and video games, and the Internet would have blown up in their early twenties.  So although they likely wouldn't be as immersed in connectivity as their twenty-something colleagues, they wouldn't be comically out-of-touch either.
I know that sounds like a minor quibble when it comes to dumbed-down comedies.  But for myself, having seen the Internet hit the mainstream as I entered my twenties, I've been told by the media that I'm on different sides of the generation gap at different times in my life. At first I was told that the Internet was on my side but it scared the Baby Boomers, but now I'm being told that I'm being alienated by the technology that millennials are at home with.

We're going to have to acknowledge that technology doesn't fit into our usual generation gap template.  Usually there's a clear distinction between generations and their tastes.  Even if the divisive element ends up lasting more than a generation (e.g. Rock n Roll) it changes enough as time goes on that there's still a separation between generations (These darn kids and their folk/glam/punk/metal/grunge/emo).

The internet isn't really like that, since there's a big difference within generations as to how much technology they adopt.  You can't assume a person's tech use based on their age (isn't that right, Mom?)  It all comes down to the speed at which the world is changing.  It used to be that the culture-changing technologies came along, made a big change, and that was it.  For instance, TV appeared, there was a distinct difference between life before TV and after TV.  There weren't more changes when colour TV came along, or stereo broadcast or something.  On the other hand, since the Internet became public, we've been continuously adapting to one change after another.  There is no all-or-nothing before and after culture gap.  We're all on one big spectrum of technological adaptation, but there isn't much broad comedy to be made about MySpace vs. Facebook.