While he’s not exactly yelling at children to get off his lawn quite yet, Jason Reitman says he has a hard time relating to teenagers and it’s all because of the internet.
The 37-year-old director says when he talks to children who are 15 to 20 years younger, they “might as well be 100 years younger than me because the life they grew up with doesn’t resemble my childhood at all”.
He says while “a cordless phone versus a wired phone” separated him and his parents, newer generations are growing up with “the internet as a fact of their life”. “And we’ll just be old people who don’t understand,” Reitman says.
That generational relationship with technology is the focus of Reitman’s new movie, Men, Women & Children. It focuses on a group of high school students and their parents dealing with the way the internet affects their lives.
The Oscar-nominated director says he doesn’t “get social media”, noting that his teen actors had to explain to him how SnapChat works.
He also says he’s uncomfortable with how easily teens share their lives online. “That fuzzy line between public and private when it comes to social media is the thing that bothers me personally.”
The son of director Ivan Reitman says he’s already worrying about how his nearly 8-year-old daughter will manoeuvre her way online when she gets a cellphone in a few years.
“It’s like giving the keys to the car, only they’re much younger. And unlike a car, which you can drive to any part of town, on the internet, a cellphone can really take you anywhere. So you have to hope that from the moment they can log on that you’ve done enough to raise them well so they’re not looking for the wrong thing in the wrong places.”
