#90sproblems
Cady Voge serves as the Program Director and is responsible for designing and implementing all three major annual trainings for OWYP’s university student volunteers, supporting the volunteers throughout the program year, and managing the partnerships with OWYP secondary schools. Read more about Cady.
Remember when going out and buying “The cell phone” was a family affair? Then for a few years every time you were going on an outing with Dad, he’d take the cell phone out of the drawer a few hours before and make sure it was charged. He’d put it in his coat pocket on the way out the door (it obviously wouldn’t fit comfortably in anyone’s pocket) – “So we can call Mom to pick us up after the basketball game,” he’d say. And what a relief it was that you wouldn’t have to wait in the cold on the decided-upon street corner at the decided-upon time and hope the stars aligned with no miscommunication about this carefully crafted plan. Remember that?
This was one of the memories that came to my mind when browsing through the tweets with the currently trending hash tag “90sproblems”, so many of which poke fun at how archaic things like Walkmans and pay phones seem today. Well, if you’re around my age (20-something) and grew up in the US with a household income that could afford one cell phone in the 1990s (which WikiAnswers says cost around $325.00), you might relate.
So, not a huge proportion of the world shares my exact association with their first taste of mobile communication, but many people alive today can relate to memories of the first cell phone they used, opening their first email account, and perhaps the experience of reconnecting with someone from their past through a social media platform. It’s easy to forget what it was like before the Internet and cell phones in a time when new innovations in communication technology occur so frequently that each time they do, we’re less and less impressed.
It seems that the novelty of being able to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world has worn off, and yet we have reached nowhere near our potential to dramatically change the world with the technology available to us today. The technology exists, for example, for students in a classroom in the Atlas Mountains to learn about rainforests firsthand from students who live in The Amazon by video conferencing between two basic personal computers on opposite sides of our planet. These are experiential learning experiences we could have only dreamed of 20 years ago.
We share a planet, we impact each other’s economies, we go to war with each other, and as our world becomes more interconnected than ever before, it is essential for youth to gain experience communicating and collaborating across cultures. One World Youth Project promotes this in classrooms worldwide by training university students to visit local classrooms to facilitate a new lesson each week, which always ends by using technology to produce that week’s “exchange component”. These exchanges range from photographs of student posters, videos showing and explaining their community to their partner classroom, and live Skype video chats. Now that the tools are at our fingertips, I say we get used to having conversations and working with each other instead of against each other.