One item on my son’s camp list stopped me in my tracks this week

My son’s camp list contained an item that made me nostalgic for the era of dictionaries, street directories and cameras with film. How do we explain these items to our offspring?

One item on my son’s camp list this week stopped me in my tracks.

It was a watch.

The teacher who did the list must have been ready for queries about this quaint old device because he mentioned it not once, but four times in a dossier of about 30 items.

“A watch can be handy,” the list said.

And then: “Did I mention a watch?”

“Yes, a watch.”

And further down: “A watch. No, really. Not your phone – a watch. Wrist-attached time-keeping device.”

To keep the joke going he even referred to it as a “chronometer”. Even I had to google what that was.

Of course, we had to go and buy one because no one in my house owns a watch anymore. My son is now on camp sporting the best ladies’ watch from Kmart that six dollars could buy. There were none to be found in the men’s section.

What a sign of the times.

I hope he bought a digital watch because hardly anyone under 30 can tell the time on an analogue watch anymore.

Watches were once a must-have but have been replaced my mobile phones.

It reminds me of when my daughter went on surf camp and was told to bring a disposable camera.

As someone’s who’s only ever taken a photo on a smart phone, she was stumped by the Fujifilm QuickSnap Superia 800 Marine 27 Exposure Camera I bought her.

“How does it work? What do you need the film for? How do you know what you are taking photos of? How do you know if your photos look good? Why can you only take 27 photos? 27! What do you do after that?” she asked me.

“Well,” I told her. “You take one shot at a time and hope for the best. You only know what you’ve got a photo of when you get it back from being developed.”

She looked at me with the kind of pity teenagers reserve for their tech-challenged parents.

“And how does it take selfies?” Sigh.

Susie O'Brien likes the idea of old technology but admits she doesn’t wear a watch anymore either. Picture Rebecca Michael.

Disposable cameras were invented when I was about her age. Back then they had names like “Fling 35”, “Funsaver” and “Imp”.

Kids her age don’t use watches to tell the time. And they don’t use real cameras, even disposable ones. Instead, they use apps on their phones to make their photos look as if they were taken with disposable cameras or box brownies.

The apps make their digital photos look old-school and grainy, with light streaks and an orange date stamp in the bottom corner from the year 1998.

On one app you have to take photos through a tiny pretend viewfinder and can only see the results of your photos at 9am the next morning.

Young people love these products because they’re “authentic”.

Kids get to rely on old-school tech while on school camps.

Thus far, Gen Z’s contribution to world culture includes using “verse” as a verb, texting with their thumbs and their love of “authentic” products that make new things look old and thus inauthentically authentic.

Watching my daughter marvel at the Jurrasic-era technology that was cutting edge when I was her age in 1985 made me a little wistful.

I am old enough to remember back when brand names had spaces between their words and when nouns were nouns and verbs were verbs. Now we “diarise” and “incentivize” things.

Kids like mine will never have to rewind video tapes before they watch them, and they don’t know what it’s like to look things up manually in phone books, library card catalogues, dictionaries and maps.

Camps allow kids to get back to nature without modern technology.

Kids today will never get to book flights 7, 14 or 21 days ahead and go backpacking with a bag full of Lonely Planet books. They’ll never rip out chapters of countries they’ve visited as they go to make their pack lighter as we did.

And they will never understand the frustration of running out of film on their camera a week before the end of their holiday. Or waiting two weeks to get their photos back only to find all the photos are black and everyone’s heads are cut off.

Well, us Gen Xers can’t talk. We gave the world the Trump Presidency, Prozac, climate change and Married At First Sight love rats. But at least we know what wristwatches are and how to tell the time on one – even if we don’t use them anymore either.

Originally published as One item on my son’s camp list stopped me in my tracks this week