Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

> Today’s young adults grew up in a time when their childhoods were documented with smartphone cameras instead of dedicated digital or film cameras.

I get that this is a ridiculous nit-pick to kick off a comment, but how do they define "young adult?" Because I'm not sure that that statement is actually true just yet.

I have two Gen Z daughters, the youngest having been born in 2001. Smart phones didn't really start to land on the scene until 2008. It then took a few years until everyone had one and the cameras were good enough that people were getting rid of their digital cameras and switching to smart phones.

Granted, my daughters are several years older now than an 18 year-old, which I would consider to be the "youngest" possible "young adult."

Even then, an 18 year-old today was born in 2006. I suppose that part of their childhood was likely captured on smart phones rather than digital cameras. But being old enough that I remember the 00s like it was just yesterday, and having two "young adult" children whose childhoods' were almost entirely documented using digital cameras, even having packs of old printed photos that were printed at the same places you would get film developed ... I just can't help but question the statement that today's young adults had their childhoods documented on smartphones. Today's children and young teenagers, sure. But the modern smartphone, with camera, actually hasn't been with us for a full generation quite just yet... as much as it feels like it.

"Young Adult" is a weird term -- think of the book/movie genre called "young adult" or "YA" -- it isn't actually literally for people in their twenties but for children. It's like calling people like me in their 50s "middle aged" -- most of us aren't going to make it to 100.

I had considered the YA genre in fiction, which is marketed at teenagers. But I did a quick search for the general term "young adult" and Wikipedia seems to suggest that it is the period immediately following adolescence, which is generally considered to begin at 18.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_adult

.. this one silly statement really triggered my autism this morning lol.

Both terms are euphemistic for the groups they refer to.

You call it young adult fiction because most teenagers would rather be perceived as young adults than children.

You call people middle aged in their 50s because no one wants to be reminded that they're statistically 2/3 of the way to the grave.

Exactly. Kodak stopped selling film cameras in 2004.

Peak film sales was in 2001!

Film sales in 2006 was the same as in 1994 ...

After 2006, the decline was drastic¹.

But the long tail of childhood memories stored on film and cheap digicams stretches far into the smartphone era. Remember, not everyone had a smartphone or even a good way to transfer the images out of there. Also, smartphone cameras were really bad in the beginning.

1: https://petapixel.com/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm-thrived-a-...

> I get that this is a ridiculous nit-pick to kick off a comment, but how do they define "young adult?" Because I'm not sure that that statement is actually true just yet.

Additionally, before the explosion of digital camera sales in the early 00s, many childhood memories simply went unrecorded.

Growing up my family had a couple film cameras that rarely got used. They might come out for holidays and a handful of events but they spent a lot of time in the closet.

Even when they were used a roll of film only got two dozen photos that weren't cheap to develop. We'd get maybe one or two photos per roll that had decent focus and lighting.

There's a Cambrian explosion of photos I have from my first digital camera onwards. There's so many events and several people I'd love to have pictures of today that don't exist because no camera was handy at the time. Today I can capture pretty much anything I want to remember.

The first generation iPhone will enter "adulthood" on Janury 9th, 2025.

Yeah, I wondered that, too. That line might be referring to the handful of people whose parents were tech enthusiasts who went to midnight launches of the first iPhones and were born at roughly the same time. A very small group.

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