A great way to gauge technological progress is to look at the tawdry uses people have invented for things that would have seemed like miracles thirty years ago. Like, the Internet is a legit miracle, and basically no one cares. If they use the Internet at all, it’s to yell at each other, look at clever pets they’ll never own, masturbate, and buy too many graphic novels for their Kindle Fire. The same goes for smartphones — what people might have greeted with hushed reverance in the 60s is, in its proper historical context, used in no small measure as a way for humans to more rapidly and widely disseminate pictures of their genitals among other humans.
Everyone does it, though young people (or rebel youths with their rock and roll, as the newspapermen like to call them) get a disproportinate share of the blame for sexting. Meanwhile, old people have been sexting like gangbusters, and the world has yet to see the “Baby Boomers Are Sexting and It’s Not Okay” trend piece we all know the New York Times is capable of.
A McAfee study conducted by the The Futures Company recently tried to get a better idea of sexting activity among the olds, i.e. the Baby Boomers (sorry, but you guys are old now). A poll of 1,258 adults between the ages of 50 and 70 revealed that 24 percent of Boomers have sent “intimate or personal photos, texts or emails” at some point in their mobile device-enabled sexual reawkening. In other words, concludes the Atlantic Wire’s Zach Schonfeld, this study should torpedo the idea that millennials and their younger counterparts are responsible for all the sexting.
[Atlantic Wire], [HuffPo]
Image via Lisa F. Young / Shutterstock.