I was thinking the other day about how the typical young adult (20-25) now is nothing like the typical older adult (say 45-50).
Those born near the end of 20th century compared to the general Baby Boomer crowd seem to have a much better understanding of technology and also a larger openness to new ideas, standards, and principles. Has this always been true? Or was there a time where a child would typically grow up to be just like those who raised them?
It's definitely worth nothing that the exponential rise of technology has an impact, so I'm leaning towards it being a new social phenomenon. What do the experts say?
I find the question interesting if you reformulate that way :
"If you compare the technology level available to the public from 2015 and 1985 there is a huge difference. In the collective representation, it seems that no gap of such kind existed in the past like between 1800 and 1830 or between 1200 and 1230. Is it true? Has the technology available to the public more evolved in the last 30 years that it did during 30 years in other time of history? Had the people in other historical area the same impression?"
Thomas pickety in its book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" tried to evaluate the economic growth level of traditional society pre Renaissance and industrial revolution. It calculate a level at maximum of 0.1%. Of course the level is debattable as it is difficult to find reliable sources so old. (But he still searched the old archive such taxes records of old centralized european kingdoms such as France).
With such a low growth level, life do not change significaly from one generation ot another and so the life of the son is quite similar to the life of the father.
But with the growth level around 1-2% like today in most countries in max tech level, life actually change a lot. 1% seems low but on one generation, it is a enormous.
I will take that by technological gap you mean the differences between how one generation and the next relate themselves with their world through the use of the technology available to them. In this sense [of technology being the tools that we use to interact with our world] then no, there hasn't. Our technological development has become exponential in the past two centuries, meaning that there's more difference between 1980-2015 than between 1880-1915.