Today's youth ignorant about old-school pop culture, according to ABCNEWS

Today's youth doesn't know anything about old pop culture! I was amazed at the answers given here. Check out the article here.

I especially liked the part about gaming...

Mysteries of Pong

When it comes to old-school gaming, a few are similarly in the dark. Some are not even in the right ballpark.
"Atari?" Meredith said. "I have no idea what Atari is."
"A-what?" Erin asked.
X-box and Game Cube have replaced simple Pong. But not knowing this? Come on — that's just wrong.
"I don't know what Pong is," Amber confessed, her face reddening.
"Ping-Pong," Meredith said.
"I think Pong is the first video game ever," guessed Toby, on the right track.
"You have two paddles and the ball goes across," Daniel said.
"It was like 'ding-dong,'" Toby said, mimicing the sound of the game.
"Beek! Beek!" said Daniel, positioning his arms like paddles.
"Boing! Boing!" Rick said.

:rolleyes: Another example of only caring where we are and not how we got here. I see this all the freakin' time...

Not to sound critical, but why is it important that today's youth have no knowledge of the meaningless cultural detritis of the past? How could they know about Pong? I was born in '76 and the game had vanished by the time I was a kid. What possible means would today's twelve year old have to play it?

Not that I think today's kids are filling their brains up with Shakespeare and classical philosophy, but if no space in their heads is taken up by knowing who the Professor and Mary-Ann were, or what songs the Bay City Rollers sang, I feel no loss for them.

It's a shame that they have no idea what brought us to where we are. It really is.

I dunno, I was talking with some punk kid, and he was telling me how
his classmates refer to Street Fighter as "that game thats like Tekken", and he never played Double Dragon on the NES, and these people just sort of skip over what isn't in their generation. ask people who the greatest sports player(pick a sport) of all time is. they'll likely pick the one that dominated their era. Ask them what the current events were of the year before they were born.

things like that.


I would suspect that people know about pong though. " o_O " .

You're right about youth not needing to know about old pop culture stuff in general, but I think that if it pertains to something that they are engaged in today, then they should know at least know it exists. Today's gamers don't necessarily have to play Pong, but they should at least have heard of it. IMO, It's akin to high school basketball players not knowing who Bill Russel or Larry Bird are.

If you're just mentioning things about old pop culture to them in general, then there's not much point to it though.

Besides, they have no excuse for not knowing about Gilligan's Island. That's what Nic at Nite is for! :p

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Originally posted by StriderKyo
Not to sound critical, but why is it important that today's youth have no knowledge of the meaningless cultural detritis of the past? How could they know about Pong? I was born in '76 and the game had vanished by the time I was a kid. What possible means would today's twelve year old have to play it?

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I agree!

When I was a kid, I didn't really give a shit about the 2600 or the 5200 or anything like that. I was happy with my NES and I really had no idea about videogames in the past. It wasn't until I started to care more about the world around me (prolly around 13 or 14) that I started to get to know more about that sort of thing. But... until then, I couldn't tell you anything about any system or videogame company that was big before NES.

I actually played pong that my parents had gotten before I was born. That's the only reason I really know what pong is. Also had a 2600. Far as I'm concerned, gaming might as well have started with the NES. Those kids didn't miss anything.

I don't think we needed a report from ABCNEWS.com to figure this out.

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Originally posted by diffusionx


I agree!

When I was a kid, I didn't really give a shit about the 2600 or the 5200 or anything like that. I was happy with my NES and I really had no idea about videogames in the past. It wasn't until I started to care more about the world around me (prolly around 13 or 14) that I started to get to know more about that sort of thing. But... until then, I couldn't tell you anything about any system or videogame company that was big before NES.

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I had a 2600 as a little kid, and had fun with Joust, Asteroids, Defender and their ilk. But nobody was playing Pong; it was too basic, even back then.

And how the heck did that line make it into your sig? And who's the dude in the background? Very cool.

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And how the heck did that line make it into your sig? And who's the dude in the background? Very cool.

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That is CATS of course, from ALL YOUR BASE.

I took the picture of him saying "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" (grabbed it with an emulator and HyperSnap) and I swapped out that line with yours in Photoshop. I dunno what inspired me to do it but I just figured it would be funny.