Oregon Trail Generation(en.wikipedia.org) |
Oregon Trail Generation(en.wikipedia.org) |
I had this discussion with colleagues we never felt like millennials (I’m from 1982). I like this piece. A Xenial is what I am.
I also saw the move from rotary to cordless to caller ID. I heard "Shh. I'm talking long-distance" and also played Commander Keen and used Trumpet Winsock to connect at the ultra-fast 14.4k to local BBS's and eventually Teleport, our local ISP.
We also grew up on Nintendo, I'd say that The Wizard starring Fred Savage is possibly an anthemic film since it showed off the most sophisticated game available (SM3) [2]
As a minor point of this group a major non-digital event event of this time was the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens [1], which was the most disastrous volcanic eruption in US history. (Offers some perspective on the wildfire smoke, perhaps.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mount_St._Hel... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._3#Developmen...
I guess I am a xenial, and I remember this cross-over period as one of epic excitement and wonder as this "internet thing" took off and became something amazing. I was lucky enough to be online when a 14.4 modem was fast and seeing the internet grow and develop since then at the same time as I grew and developed into an adult was quite the thing to experience. Fuck "knowing the analog days" - being there as the internet took off and changed was brilliant for me. Eager anticipation of genuinely big technical leaps that duly arrived and changed our lives significantly - broadband, MP3 players, smart phones, WiFi, pervasive 3g etc
This was world-changing stuff happening in our hands.
Kids today get what? To experience that time when Instagram/TikTok/<next app> went viral? How underwhelming.
But now we’ve got cynicism everywhere about both analog and digital. Old analog technology is stupid and obsolete but new tech is clearly ripping our society to shreds in a variety of ways.
So I guess I miss being happy with what we had AND being excited about the future.
I also wouldn't cede the biggest communication change in the past X years to our adolescence either. I think that immersive VR experiences in the metaverse will be a bigger change than no internet -> smartphones.
In 1995, when I was a freshman in high school, they trotted my English class down to the library for a lesson on how to use "the information superhighway." For the next hour or so, the librarian dispensed wisdom to us about how to open Netscape, type URLs into the address bar, and that kind of thing.
Put another way, they had a woman who did not know how to use the Internet try to teach a few dozen teenagers who did know how to use the Internet how to do something they did understand by reading them a book that she did not.
I didn't learn anything about the Internet that day but I feel like I gained an appreciation for Kafka, even if I didn't know it at the time.
In my opinion, the characteristic aspect was the widely accepted (and promoted) idea that everyone should learn how to use a computer as a programmable device in the broad sense (whether it was kids with LOGO, professionals with professional software, or general public with general tools and UIs). That education was an important project on a state level. Then the goalposts were silently moved, and it was declared that user already knew enough, and the “intuitive design” or some other thing would deal with the rest. (That doesn't ring true: for some reason, people still need to spend 10 years at school instead of “intuitively” learning all those other things. Moreover, it was the crowd of already prepared people that allowed these practices to be viable.)
A couple of iterations, an today, in the “bright future”, there are crowds of computer illiterate people using computing devices as if they are another kind of TVs or phones. Which is, of course, good for the ones who sell those TV-like devices or software services, but is not good for the rest of the people. Despite all of the promotion, someone who, say, places “just” an internet-connected camera into a home or an office to “simply” check the video stream in a “convenient” smartphone application does not make it “more secure”. On the contrary, all kinds of trouble are to be expected, because a little bit of theory tells us that this system is only secured by someone's promises, and a little bit of practical data tells us that the hardware, software, and security practices in such a system are going to be awful most of the time.
What?! An effectively continuous variation in values and experiences can't be clustered into homogeneous 15-year cohorts with an arbitrary phase? /s
I'm ostensibly in this Oregon Trail generation, though as a non-American I've never seen an Apple II in the flesh, and the first time I heard about this game was as the name of a generation. I'm some years older than my wife, and one difference between us is that I have much clearer memories of the 90's as a time of apparent progress and optimism, and just how big a change the September 11 attacks were. She remembers them of course, but not as a point of abrupt change. She did not become politically aware until some time after, when the war of terror was in full swing.
There's a bit in Coupland's Generation X where one of the main characters talks about remembering the Vietnam war being constantly in the news until one day it just disappeared, but his little not remembering it at all, to him it was just history. It feels kind of like that, in the inverse, in a way.
At elementary school I was one of a handful of kids that used the (two) computers (Apple II and Commodore 64) to play Oregon Trail (not the fancy one, there have been versions of Oregon Trail since the 1970s) and MULE, and in junior high I was an administrator of our newly installed mac lab.
The only reason I had a social life at all outside of school and modemming was because my parents wouldn't let me use the modem before 7pm on weekends. Then I got my own phone line and my social life was pretty much exclusively with other modemmers! When I wasn't on the line, I ran my own BBS. I had a university account and an e-mail address in my early teens.
I held out a bit on the cellphone because I would have had to pay for it (but I had various handheld PCs with modems that I used with payphones and landlines wherever I could jack into them). So yeah, computers have been a part of most aspects of my daily life since I was a young child, which was lucky because I can't imagine life as an introverted, autistic child without them.
I had a landline as a child but then around 12.....things started to get digital.
I remember hunting bears and rabbits in my 'computer processing' class in high school in Oregon trail. Which was a class that attempted to teach kids about the new technology that was coming out but wasn't great, because the teacher was a lady in her 60's and me and my friends were light years ahead of her.
The internet was all text for a while, then HTML came out and things started to get CRAZY!'
One friend made the newspaper because he was in high school making tons of money WRITING WEBSITES for people.
I had a beep beep boop modem and you had to pay for the internet by the MINUTE.
My buddys dad had a CAR PHONE because they were super rich.
I went from landline, to flip phone, to blackberry, to smart phone. Text and talk were limited to X number or X number of minutes.
My first computer was a 386 and I would hack the autoexec.bat files to get games to work.
It's pretty crazy being EXACTLY on the cusp of such a massive revolution and cultural shift.
Getting that first dot matrix printer was pretty magical. Especially since we could design our own dinosaurs by mixing heads, bodies, legs, and tails of a wide variety of dinosaurs, name them something ridiculous, and print them out. So many dinosaur printouts.
[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Designasaurus_1988
We had to upgrade the 386 to a 486 and install a math coprocessor to play DOOM.
Then later, it was all about SkiFree and Jezzball.
My favorite book was Windows 95 Secrets.
My small town school had a pretty solid computer class where we learned typing, then hypercard, and then digital video editing. The teacher convinced me somehow to make a movie about wheeling around a computer cart around the grounds to a soundtrack full of 'The Drifters' type music
Way later in life I found the guy who ran the one big server that brought internet to most of the community. He said the continuous bandwidth upgrade needs were driven almost entirely by porn traffic.
I was like this....is a game changer.
And the big differentiator for me is simply the lack of commonality that we have with the generations after us. Xennials really had the same basic childhood that someone had going all the way back to the 1920s. Anyone that grew up with electricity and at least the Model T that is.
The easiest way to differentiate between newer generations and all that came before if they ever remember a time before the internet at all. Because that and smartphones were the two big game changers for society that I witnessed.
The internet changed the economy enormously, and the smartphone revealed how stupid and manipulated people could really be.
Does anyone else born in the mid/late 80s share that feeling?
I can't imagine the game with a mouse.
https://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Unisys_Icon_Syst...
Sorry, that’s already taken: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation
Were young enough to not be too affected by the financial crisis like GenX and old enough to ride the wave afterwards, which many millennials were still a bit too young for.
Last generation to have affordable college.
I think being such a small generation opened a lot of opportunities and options to be more ahead than GenX and Millenial.
Rather than look down on your librarian for introducing a novel concept to students, I think she should be applauded for trying.
Everyone started somewhere.
"AOL Adolescence" Yeah, AOL IM dominated late elementary/middle school.
"Developed relationships before social media". Myspace was the big thing in high school, with facebook taking over senior year because you needed a .edu address to get an account. Before that social mediate didn't really exist in its modern incarnation, every friendship prior to that was pre-social media, and the original social media relationships were largely predicated on real world relationships. Was rather nice back when that was the case.
"They usually weren't on Tinder or Grindr" Uh, Tinder's only been around since 2012, and took a while to gain prominence. Most millennials are outside of the window for Tinder to be their first dating experience. Most of my cohort had graduated college in 2010/2011, I know some people who got freaking married before Tinder even existed.
I could go on, but it seems like just another incarnation of "millennial means young and tech-addicted, so we're moving the goal posts so it means what we want it to mean and we'll make up a new word for what's leftover"
So I think there is some real line right around 85/86 where, for those younger than that, technology/social media as we know it today, didn’t exist in High School.
Other examples would include Google.
Also, for my age, Wikipedia was really emerging during college and exploding/maturing at the end (2007). If you were born, say, after 88, you would have started college in the wikipedia era (and those born after would have had it available in high school)
That said, I think you could unequivocally say that those born after ‘90 are much different than those born before ‘85, but between those years it’s a little bit muddy.
It’s a bit crazy being able to contrast the before and after. I can’t think of much that’s happened since that really compares… even smartphones were incremental by comparison.