In Another Lost Day (The Thirteen), Mario Pergolini surprised the audience with a proposal that was as nostalgic as it was fun: inviting kids from Generation Alpha—the digital natives—to experiment with analog technology for the first time. The segment, called “ODP Laboratories”, went viral on social networks and concentrated in a few minutes all the involuntary humor that the generation gap can generate.
Pergolini surrounded the boys with a collection of analog objects: a tube television, a cassette recorder, a typewriter and a record player. The driver’s initial question was as simple as it was revealing: “Do you understand more or less what you are seeing?” Benja, one of the children, recognized the TV and the typewriter. Vita, on the other hand, was surprised to identify “cassettes and a telephone.”
The first big obstacle was the cassette. “How does it get in?” Vita wondered aloud, trying to figure out the mechanism. Pergolini had to mediate with humor: “He who breaks, pays, eh?”he warned between laughs. After several attempts, the boys managed to open the recorder, insert the cassette and press play.
With the record player, Emilia, another of the participants, looked at it suspiciously and admitted: “These are not things that I know.” However, with the help of his colleagues, he managed to get it working and hear what the vinyl sounded like. Benja’s reaction when he heard the music coming out of the device was genuine amazement. Pergolini took the opportunity to draw the comparison: “Before it sounded like this. Instead of playing Spotify now, you used to go and have to grab a record, take it out, put it on, and lower the knob.”
But the most chaotic moment came with the typewriter. Benja pointed out, with all the logic of his generation: “What catches my attention about this computer is that it doesn’t have a mouse.”confusing the device with a modern notebook. Pergolini guided him until the boy managed to insert the paper, turn the roller and see the sheet appear. Benja’s conclusion was as precise as it was unintentionally poetic: “It’s like a computer that has keys that you have to push hard down.”
The driver finished with a reflection that summarized the entire experience: “You are used to there being a button and doing… No, in this era everything had to be done by oneself. There were no automatic things.”
The segment not only ended up becoming a technological history lesson, but also a a bridge between generationswith adults who recognized in the children’s reactions the inverted mirror of their own childhood: the same curiosity, but faced with a completely different world.
