The media loves writing about Millennials. We’re the narcissistic “Me, Me, Me Generation.” Or maybe we’re the pantywaist “Generation Nice.” We’re starting to buy homes. Or maybe we’re not and all the banks are going to explode. We were born between 1980 and 2000. Or maybe it’s 1981 and 1997. We’re going to destroy America! Or maybe also save it!
Two things should be clear. First, if you’re a columnist on a deadline, you can’t go wrong pontificating about America’s most populous generation. Second and way more interesting, Millennials are starting to get kind of old. If the Millennial cut-off line is drawn around 2000 — to account for political realities, let’s make it September 11, 2001 — the oldest post-Millenials are already thirteen years old.
They’re about to be high school freshmen. They’re going to vote in the 2020 presidential election. Some of them may well end up fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq.
But what nifty new name are we going to call them? And what will they be like?
Learning to text as they learn to talk.
The question of naming I’ll leave the professional demographers and those with a lot of extra time on their hands. Regardless, it should not be decided by an open internet poll. No one deserves a “goatse generation.”
It’s very interesting, however, to consider how their worldview and life experiences might diverge from even us young-blooded Millennials. The oldest post-9/11, post-Millennial will have been just six years of age when the first generation iPhone was released in 2007. It’s inconceivable any post-Millennial from a middle-class family will not have grown up spending nearly all of their conscious years connected to the mobile internet. Coming of age under such conditions, it would be an exercise in futility to draw a line between cyberspace and the “real world.” They will have been two dimensions of the same life experience, each flowing into the other. A conversation begun mid-sentence might shift seamlessly into Kik or Snapchat or whatever app the kids are using these days.
I’ve observed and occasionally poked fun at the fact that, for most older folks, “checking the email” is a task that requires concerted effort — almost as if they have to physically saunter outside and bend over a mailbox. To me and nearly all people my age, email makes sense; a logical extension of person-to-person conversation and a superior way to get things done.
But try as I might, I have my own trouble adapting to newer platforms — YikYak or Snapchat — where the method of communication is a mix of transitory text and images meant to communicate a point here and now, but meaningless for any archival value. These platforms are like having a conversation, woven with images and video, where there’s no expectation that memory of the interaction will outlast the day, much less week or month. For someone like me, having grown up with the steady progression from Xanga and LiveJournal to MySpace to Facebook — platforms intended to create a digital presence instead of swiftly fading footprints — this is a difficult transition. Even Twitter, a platform that bridges these two worlds (easy to find what’s trending; harder to dig through past tweets), doesn’t seem wholly comfortable. If I write something, I want to be able to find it again!
As mobile bandwidth continues its virtually limitless growth in capacity, the tech will get even weirder. Video livestream will be second nature, augmented by all sorts of manipulation tools and video-in-video that will put the current Snapchat “stories” to shame. Interestingly, this may also accelerate the trend away from written communication as people grow more accustomed to “speaking” visually. I grew up writing in blocks of text because I had to. The internet wasn’t fast enough to do anything else. This isn’t the case today.
It’s time to start thinking about these kids; the tech they’ll use and the way they’ll see the world. Millennials may be getting ready to inherit the country, but there’s another, even stranger generation coming up after us.
I don’t know that they’ll be any stranger. They might even be more coherent and cohesive than we are as a generation, due to not being split down the middle between this imaginary “pre-technology” time that marks many of the older Millennials’ childhoods and the bleeding edge of the mobile information age. I find a lot of our generation have been caught up in premature nostalgia for years, because technological change has accelerated so much over the course of our lifetimes that we perceive our childhoods as much further away than they actually are.
Once upon a time, entertainment and information technology might undergo one or two major changes during a person’s childhood. At that rate, a few holdouts might still be using the two-generations-old tech when their kids are coming of age. I actually knew a fair amount about the music, pop culture, and technology of my parents and grandparents, for example. But for younger Millennials and post-Millennials, several “generations” of tech have gone by since they began elementary school. I have younger siblings who find CD players antiquated and the first generation of the iPod a fossilized joke. It’s too many tech-generations behind their times and they’re too firmly engrained in an integrated, constantly-updating tech culture for them to relate.
All that to say, it’s likely that the next generation will exhibit less resistance to change than Millennials and their parents, simply due to rapid change already being an accepted part of their daily lives. Now, whether we as a generation will impose the same value judgments and doomsday predictions on their relationship to tech as our parents and grandparents impose on ours is really up to us. Every time I get online it seems there’s a new article or “study” or “social experiment” (quotations because they rarely adhere to the requirements to be called either) talking about the effects of technology on young people.
Nearly all of these focus disproportionately on what prior generations perceive as negatives, without taking into account the perspective of the people actually using the technology, how they use it, how they view it, and what they value. I sincerely hope when we do begin to really discuss the next generation, we’ll forsake the “fire is scary” mentality of Boomers and Gen-Xers toward their integration of technology into daily life, and take a more balanced look at the trade-offs of a pre-tech versus post-tech early development, without automatically assigning a negative value to anything different from our own childhood experiences.