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For those of you who man 'the Hotline' - maybe it's just me, but have you noticed a disturbing trend (even more than usual)?

I'm continually shocked by how many newcomers prefer to ask advice from a forum of strangers, rather than read the downloadable manual, or do any research - or experimentation on their own.

Like they say:

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.

Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.

Try to prevent the same clueless dumbass from accidentally poking his eyes out with all the pointy things in the tacklebox, and he'll bitch and moan about 'not asking for a lecture on eye safety.' Arguing that he's already a professional fisherman, because he caught a fish once on a bass-fishing video game and only scratched his cornea a little bit doing that.

Is that Good Bass Response? or Good Bass Response? Can I just trap my bass in the corner?

Comments

audiokid Tue, 05/03/2011 - 22:09

Its only going to get worse. The new generation is being force fed from the time they are born. The Parents of this particular generation are blind to it as well. Its the me me generation. Its hard to imagine walking down the street or in a class room texting to someone beside you and thinking it is intelligent. Same goes for Facebook. duh...

We've pulled our kids out of the school system and they are excelling in every way.

On that note, RO is heading into the top 100,000 in the world now so our traffic is increasing some. With that, we are getting more members so its par for the course.

dvdhawk Tue, 05/03/2011 - 22:53

audiokid, post: 370278 wrote: RO is heading into the top 100,000 in the world now so our traffic is increasing some. With that, we are getting more members so its par for the course.

Growing pains then.

This surely isn't a problem that's only chronological "younguns", but -

Geezer alert:
When we were kids, you looked out the window when you went anywhere by car (because it was usually more interesting than looking at the interior of the car, or my brother). A lot of my son's friends can't go on a 20 minute car ride without putting in a DVD or sticking their nose in a gameboy/PSP. No wonder GPS devices sell so well, young drivers never looked out the window to see where Dad was driving them.

Read the manual, study a map before the trip and you probably won't need one on the trip.

kmetal Wed, 05/04/2011 - 01:16

Helpline is why you get paid the big bucks right? Some people are forced into technology, or they'll be forced out of a job, not everyone who uses it likes it. My dad is 62 and does more texting than i do, not because he updates his facebook status on every breath, but it's how people communicate in his industry (shipping). Frankly i'm surprised people even read anymore, it won't be long till these posts are little crap quality videos. I plead guilty to asking/suggesting stupid, or obvious, things on this site. Heck, half the new stuff i buy doesn't even come w/ a hardcopy manual, they force me to go online w/ my non-audio computer.
I hate how acceptable it is to ignore someone to answer a text mid sentence. My generation, i feel is truly the last of the people who know what a cassette is, remember what it's like before the internet, remember car-phones?
People haven't changed however, new devices have just made things a bit different. People are obsessed with themselves and other people. gossip will never die, whether your at a 17th century bar, or on a driod. I blame the person, not the technology.
Hopefully people will have so much immediate acces to each other they will get sick of it, and desire privacy. (very unlikely).
The band Death has a tune called 10,000 eyes, and while maybe not your style, if you read the lyrics,
it's an awsome prediction of the demise of privacy, and an excellent example of forsight if you ask me.
This post got me going, so as an end to it, It's not all bad. My friend stationed in afghanistan's only window to the world is his limited acces to facebook. Does he care molly ate a big mac and feels bad about it. NO. Does it help keep him sane. Dunno.
Ugh, auto-gain function on recording equipiment really gasses me. useful sparingly, but i bet i'll be paying extra for a gain pot soon enough, to creatively use gain.

Boswell Wed, 05/04/2011 - 04:12

It's saddening to see newbies posting on R.O. who simply have not done even a simple search of the archives. However, before responding to yet another newbie post asking the same set of questions, last time I myself tried the R.O. site search I was about to recommend and found that I did not get very sensible hits, or, at least, results that would be useful to a newcomer to the terminology.

Is it out of the question for moderators to tag individual threads (or even posts within threads) as good newbie info, and then to have the page-top default search box scan only the tagged threads (or posts)? Full searches could be done as usual via the "advanced search" form.

JohnTodd Wed, 05/04/2011 - 05:12

I agree with the search problem. I get crazy hits or can't find what I'm looking for a lot of the time.

Is there any way to incorporate Google's search tech into this site? Google's search is highly refined, even showing results for slight mispellings - engineers may be talented, but that doesn' meen thay kan spel. :D

BobRogers Wed, 05/04/2011 - 05:48

audiokid, post: 370278 wrote: ...The Parents of this particular generation are blind to it as well...

Blind to it? Heck, they're part of it. I just spent the better part of April recruiting math majors. Mom and/or Dad and kid. I can't tell you all the times that the kids say nothing and the parents ask all the questions. Kids just sit back and let it happen. Helicopter parents taking care of everything. I have a friend in admissions who said that a Mom asked for an extra key to son's dorm room so that she could come in on weekends and do his laundry. And you guys think it's a big deal that they expect us to read the manual for them.

I do have to give some props to my daughter who never even let her mom and me read her college application essays. Though she does allow me to sign the checks.

audiokid Wed, 05/04/2011 - 08:26

BobRogers, post: 370301 wrote: Blind to it? Heck, they're part of it. I just spent the better part of April recruiting math majors. Mom and/or Dad and kid. I can't tell you all the times that the kids say nothing and the parents ask all the questions. Kids just sit back and let it happen. Helicopter parents taking care of everything. I have a friend in admissions who said that a Mom asked for an extra key to son's dorm room so that she could come in on weekends and do his laundry. And you guys think it's a big deal that they expect us to read the manual for them.

I do have to give some props to my daughter who never even let her mom and me read her college application essays. Though she does allow me to sign the checks.

Hey Bob, spot on. That it exactly what I meant, that they are blind to how they are enabling this all. "Helicopter parents" , man that is a good one!
I think it may have well began one gen even further back by us driving them everywhere.

Davedog Wed, 05/04/2011 - 09:27

audiokid, post: 370313 wrote: Are there bike racks at schools anymore?

Fortunately, here in the Great Northwest, bike racks are the norm rather than the exception. Kids do get out into the OUTDOORS even though its not without a Blackberry or some sort of cellular device.....Which in this case isnt such a bad thing if they happen to get lost or forget where they hid the car keys......That still doesnt stop them from wanting it ALL right now without them having to research anything.

Self-sufficiency was imperitive when I was growing up. My Father had no idea how to love someone but he sure knew how to teach things like taking care of yourself to the point of not NEEDING anyone else to do so. The gneration that won the war was, for the most part, horribly deficient at expressing themselves but damn good at gettin 'er done!

kmetal Thu, 05/05/2011 - 04:04

I used to skate on the bike rack, that is still there, at the grammar school near my house. They exist. So does public funding/transportation for people who will never make the grades/ or taxable money. Impose a tax break for people who don't use public funding/transportation. In massachusetts, that would be more than enough for kids involvled in 'the arts', after school programs. Mass. funding is pathetic, i care only cuz i have to make a living here. It caters to the 'masses' of sludge. Which is why the same bike rack exists, so do the potholes from ten years ago.
I have a 1 yr old nephew, bound to know who little wayne is, before led zepplin. At least he still has two parents...

SunDaze Thu, 05/05/2011 - 06:34

Thanx guys .

For me it feels interactive and of the moment when I ask a question here.
And other times I just trawl through and read stuff for insperation.

I reckon you guys have answered pretty much anything that comes up in here
already at some stage in da past .

I used to own a blue racebike until I got wiped out on my way to school.

dvdhawk Thu, 05/05/2011 - 08:39

I started this topic, to call out dumb-asses in general (of all ages) - but we seem to have struck a nerve and it's turned into more of generational thing.

I agree 100% with the notion - if the kid is a snotty little brat - it's not the kid's fault. You can thank the parents for that.

And I think whether we realize it or not, most of us have witnessed history. Time will be divided again, in this case BC is Before Computers and AI is After Al Gore Invented the Internet. or maybe AI = Artificial Intelligent, which more accurately describes the masses who don't feel like they need to learn anything anymore - because a wealth of information, and misinformation, is just a couple mouse clicks away. You just have to look smart - right?

soapfloats Thu, 05/05/2011 - 21:04

You guys have hit it spot on. As an under-30, I saw the very beginnings of the coddled, me-me-me, life in a bubble phenomenon. It's mainstream and omni-present now though, so even the more susceptible "elderly" can fall victim to the mindset.

Remember when little boys were supposed to eat dirt?
And take things apart because they wanted to know how it worked?
Heck, even I played w/ lead soldiers (and put them in my mouth!) and broke thermometers to play w/ the mercury.
It started w/ the everyone gets a trophy idea. Then the notion that everyone is "special" spread. Yes, you are special - but no more so than any other person - your wants are one in several billion, sorry.
When instant contact/culture was brought about through tech, this only exacerbated the problem.

Bubble life, indeed - and again, I'm sort-of part of that generation.

Interstingly enough, two fantastic local bands I've worked with have connections to all of this - the band "Bubble Life", and an album from another band entitled, "i want! i want!" (notice the uncapitalized 'I')
Hopefully they're on the side of the phenomenon that finds it ironic/disturbing.
I think they are - they're close to my age, and they're "good kids".

hueseph Thu, 05/05/2011 - 21:28

Thanks for posting this thread. Instant gratification is a problem. It's nice that I can buy software online and download it with the packaged version in the mail. Cool. It's unfortunate though, that even people my age(IE:myself) forget sometimes, what it's like to save up and wait for something that's worth it. Even worse that you don't even have to pay for it anymore. You can steal with impunity. Do you really think the RIAA are going to knock on every door that there's a pirate? They don't have the man power.

When I was a teen I was a mothers nightmare. I knew what it meant to break and enter, to run from cops to stuff my pockets at the corner store and walk out the door. The thing is, I got caught.......once. That was enough for me. I realized that there was a person that was being affected by my actions. On the internet, you don't get that. You don't even need to comprehend the amount of work that it takes to put together a movie, a song, a highly complicated audio editing tool.

When computers first came out, my late step father bought us a Commodore Vic 20. This thing had 3 available kilobytes of ram and if you wanted more memory than that, you needed a tape drive. Essentially a cassette recorder with a 9 pin interface. I learned to program a simple animation on that thing and even got most of the way through programming a space invaders type game. That was when it didn't crash. It took a lot of time to get those simple things going. Every symbol had to be exactly correct or the program simply wouldn't run. And, if you didn't have the tape drive, you were hooped. If it crashed you had to start all over again.

Point of that story is, that those programs were incredibly simple but took hours to get working. Imagine what it takes to get a DAW running. Granted, there are programs for writing programs now and, many can be made within a GUI these days. Still. it's somebody's hard work and I learned to appreciate that too. Nothing is simple. Nothing is free. If you got it for free, it cost someone else something. Their time. Their hard work. Their potential earnings. Their student loan payment.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

DrGonz Fri, 05/06/2011 - 07:22

The Me Age! Just remember that we are all part of this mess. Change only comes when we make the choices for ourselves. Revolt against what you detest and don't conform unless you need the money... lol. I do not have a facebook account and never will... I canceled my text messaging a while back... I have a cell phone but use it about 5mins or less a week. Now you could just say I am a loner or a loser...? But I ain't one of the losers looking at his Blackberry or Iphone and all that crap! I try to avoid chains and all this corporate hell that surrounds our daily lives. It is impossible to avoid so many things these days, since the technology is everywhere. I have a degree in computers, but lately I don't want to be a part of all this stuff. Interesting post here that evolved into this topic.