TV vs Computer vs Cellphone Generations

April 2, 2025

Today, I stumbled upon Steve Jobs' talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen. He talked about how they were raised in the TV Generation, but that the computer generation was incoming. Hours later, a friend told me that "he watches too much TV," and it got me thinking that I don't really watch TV; I'm just on my computer all day. I was (and still am) a computer-internet-boy. I wasn't raised with a TV, and I'm not someone who uses a cellphone to work.

I'm a computer generation kid. I studied computer science, and of course I know how to operate a computer terminal, but I also remember that my classmates in primary school were able to use MS-DOS to play games on the school computers.

As the computer generation, we started having other options from the mainstream content. While our parents just watched whatever was on the big TV networks, we experienced the early days of fragmented media like watching some random historian guy on YouTube instead of a documentary on History Channel. We had endless choice with all these channels, forums, and personal blogs.

Netflix and other streaming platforms are pushing us back to that old TV mindset. They're deciding what we should know about through their recommendations and curated content. It feels like we have tons of options, but it's just the same old gatekeepers in a different form. They track what we watch and push us toward certain content.

For me, my phone is just a portable computer. I can listen to music, browse Twitter, answer emails, or use WhatsApp on either device and it feels about the same. But there are plenty of things I can do just on my computer doing serious work or consume longer content.

The phone generation consumes content through TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube shorts. These platforms were built for phones, which creates a divide in how different generations use and understand technology. To be fair, mobile interfaces have made technology more intuitive, requiring less technical knowledge to operate. Modern interfaces are designed to hide complexity rather than reveal it.

The creative landscape has changed dramatically. We discovered websites by clicking around and customized everything on platforms like Fotolog in Mexico or MySpace in the US. Today's digital creation happens within structured environments. There's still creativity, but it's channeled through platform-specific formats and features.

This shift benefits technology companies economically. Apple, Google, and others have designed closed ecosystems where users depend on official channels for repairs, apps, and services. They've made technology more streamlined and user-friendly, but at the cost of transparency and user control. The computer generation often resists these limitations, while many in the mobile generation accept them as the natural state of technology.

This difference isn't universal—there are plenty of tech-savvy young people and plenty of computer-generation folks who struggle with technology. In many parts of the world, mobile phones represent the first and only computing device people have access to, creating different relationships with technology than in Western markets where computers came first.

This is where the Horseshoe theory comes in. I'm not referring to political science here, but using the horseshoe shape as a visual reference to make my point. Both the TV and cellphone generations share a similar relationship with their primary technology—they interact with content and interfaces designed by others, with limited ability or incentive to understand what's happening behind the scenes.

Instead of understanding how things work, both the oldest and youngest generations consume what's put in front of them. The computer generation sits at the curve of the horseshoe—closest to understanding both the content and the systems that deliver it.