FAMILY MATTERS by Jude Dobson

Every year for 13 years two officials at Beloit College in the USA, a private school of 1400 students, survey the student body.
The point of "the mindset list" they compile from this is to remind teaching staff what exactly is the mindset of the 18-year-olds they teach. The possibly unintended side effect of the exercise is that the lecturers (as I did when I read the results) feel old because what is recent history to them is not even within the teenagers' sphere of experience.
Decrepit feelings aside, the article was interesting reading and was a timely reminder that time marches on relentlessly and every so often a wee stocktake is helpful in ensuring the generation gap doesn't become more of a chasm.
Those surveyed were born in 1992, a year the Queen termed an annus horribilis. That was the year Windsor Castle caught fire, the Prince and Princess of Wales announced their separation after all those glum photos together, as did Prince Andrew and The Duchess of York.
If you say "Fergie" to an 18-year-old, they won't be thinking of Sarah Fergusson but, rather, the pop star version. Princess Diana is almost as obscure, since she died the year they started school.
Eighteen-year-olds know Clint Eastwood as a Hollywood director, not an actor who muttered "make my day" and spent a lot of time behind a gun. Likewise, say Ron Howard and first, I think of Ritchie in Happy Days, rather than the director of The Da Vinci Code. My parents' generation remember him as little Opie in The Andy Griffiths Show.
Computers in 1992 were pretty basic. I remember buying my first one that year - a 386. I just looked it up on Google Images and, yes, that's the one - all large and boxy. It seemed pretty amazing at the time. I still have one computer here with a floppy disk slot. Better keep it for posterity maybe.
The 1992 babies, though, know only a digital world, and a rapidly changing one at that. For them, email is old hat and just too slow. Snail mail is very quaint and possibly a lost art to them. They must have been taught cursive writing at primary school but nobody seems to use it, so a hand-written letter from this generation could be a little hard to read.
They all have cellphones and they've morphed from hand-pieces you use as a phone to something far more multifunctionary in nature.
Landlines are probably becoming a thing of the past for many who operate with just a mobile. If you do have one, phones that are anchored to one spot are almost defunct according to the mindset survey. Those phones with the curly cords attached are something they see at their grandparents' places. Well, we still have one, and we're not grandparents. In a power cut you'll wish you had one, too.
Watches are also becoming relics of history for the babies of 1992. Why have one when the phone or laptop tells you the time? Except in a power cut.
There's no doubt the rate of change in technology is fast and accelerating. Finding knowledge is easy for this crop of youngsters. A quick Google on anything will bring you a veritable sea of information to sift through.
But it's the sifting this generation will need to master. The small, credible, handful of news sources available to me at 18 has become hundreds of reading or viewing choices from copious different avenues, not all of which can be called genuine or accurate!
Then there's the rise and rise of Facebook. But that wee can of worms is next week's column.