朗读版：想到有一天周杰伦也会过重阳节，有些焦虑 | CGTN周末随笔
在音乐APP上重温《听妈妈的话》，有些留言“扎心”了。
我是00后，我也喜欢这首歌，有人说；满满都是回忆，还有人说。
幻想着这首歌还在新歌榜，其实早已成为年龄的标签。
搜索了一下，出自2006年的专辑，14年了，白驹过隙。感谢歌手的名气和音乐应用的兼收并蓄。
那还是二十一世纪的第一个十年。磁带和CD加速失宠的时代，MP3即是音频格式，也是主流收听设备。“爱国者是导弹，不是MP3”（《爱情呼叫转移》），笑。
进入第二个十年，手机听歌冷不防地扩大。据说在拥挤的地铁上，小偷会根据耳机线判断出你的手机放在了哪个兜里，伺机下手。第三个十年开始的时候，某公司说卖手机不再附赠耳机了，自己买去。哼。
“给你一张过去的CD，听听那时我们的爱情”，伤感脸。一代人觉得熟悉的事物悄无声息地不见了，听歌方式只是注脚之一。
语言学家说，一些手势可能会慢慢退出表达的历史舞台。比如打电话——单手比一个“六”，拇指和小指分别对着耳朵和嘴。看着办公桌上并不常用的固线电话，未来的年轻人比划“call me”的时候，是不是把手掌直接贴在脸上就行了？
还有钞票的手势，可能也会慢慢消失。三个指头捏在一起，搓搓。数字人民币已经开始试点了，早晚有一天，人们会对“数钱数到手抽筋”这种说法一脸懵圈。
科技在一点一点革新我们的生活环境，抹去一代人习以为常的事物。老去的标志之一，就是发现自己感觉熟稔的突然面目全非。什么是移动支付？什么是手机扫码检查健康码？没有手机扫码的话该怎么坐火车？比起在移动应用上听老歌时发现一句扎心评论，这些不便可能让老人真的无所适从，仿佛世界已经不再与自己合作。
“想快快长大，才能保护她。”
小时候，觉得妈妈说的话包含了这个世界的全部常识；第一次哼唱《听妈妈的话》的年纪，已开始对其中一些感到不以为然。人近中年再听这首歌，突然意识到，妈妈们的常识是一个正在消失的世界，是我们长大的代价。
维护这个世界的尊严，是我们的责任。
Sidelines | United We Stand, Divided The Old Fall Harder
Sidelines is a column by CGTN Social Media Desk
The comment section of music apps is a place to bond. But it can also divide along age lines. Below the songs playlisted by this columnist, the comments include quite a few exclamations like: OMG! Can't believe it! Being a Generation Z, I so dig this tune, too!
A cool reminder of how time flies in a way that thrusts the back-burner issue of aging right under your nose.
To feel good about ourselves, we older folk sometimes tell gags about the generational gap to mock young people's ignorance of the "conventional state of affairs." But no sooner than the laughter calms down, we realize that the joke might just as well be on us and our denial of the impact of our new lifestyles. As one such joke goes, upon seeing a real-life floppy disk, a Generation Z shouts out: "Did Microsoft make a garage kit for its saving button symbol?"
The generation gap is a footnote to how fast and drastically the world changes. In the not-so-good old days, science and society progressed so slowly that a century worth of people seldom felt any generational difference. The 21st century has a completely distinct landscape. The idea of a music app was still beyond most people's imagination during the first ten years of this century. MP3 Player continued gobbling up market shares once owned by Walkman and CD Player. Less than a decade, smartphones quashed the market for all.
With the rapid technological revolution, what older generations are familiar with could be quietly and steadily obliterated.
Some hand gestures, for example, are on their way to extinction, linguistics say. Suppose you are signaling to your friend across a noisy street that you are going to phone her: automatically you arrange your fingers in the shape of a landline receiver. Imagine what people will do after the landline is tossed into the science history museum. Another more likely candidate to be condemned into oblivion is rubbing three fingers to suggest money. Landline's number may not be up anytime soon, but digital currency has already rendered banknotes clumsy.
For the elderly struggling to cope with this digital reconstruction of life, the switch to paperless money is no laughing matter. It causes real problems.
Following various reports in China that older shoppers were perplexed by the rejection of cash at the checkpoints due partly to an overly zealously embrace of digital currency, the government rushed to correct, stressing that it's illegal to turn down legitimate banknotes in payments.
A great deal more could be at risk for the slower adopters of digital life amid a global pandemic. Governments, as well as individuals, are relying heavily on new information technology to ward off the new coronavirus. From trace and track applications to online shopping and Zoom to stay in touch with family and work, the required skills that younger generations take for granted can be befuddling to the elderly who are also the most vulnerable facing COVID-19.
A recent survey in the UK found that a majority of people over 60 feared being left out from the government's trace and track project because of lacking the technological know-how to update their phones to install the newly issued mobile application that alerts people to close contact with an infected person.
Similar complaints are heard in China despite the country's largely successful anti-COVID-19 measures. The trace and track done on the Chinese messaging app WeChat might be difficult for some pensioners not in touch with its functions.
Family members can always be counted on to help older relatives with COVID-19 apps. For households in which such help is not immediately available, local governments or communities need to give out information and answer questions with leaflets or hotlines (social distancing also needs to be factored in). Alternative measures from telephone surveys to TV or radio bulletins and door-to-door visits by volunteers can make up for the uneven distribution of smartphone ownership.
A "gap" denotes disconnection. Yet, if a song trending decades ago is still capable of touching the heartstrings of teenagers today, there is a connecting force that defies time. Amid a sweeping pandemic that has divided the world in so many ways, we hope this force of kindness can help heal at least one of them.