Fun with Millenials

My buddy Slarkpope makes a great point over at Slate this week, regarding the rampage of uploading "back in the day" photos over on Facebook. It's becoming a little too scary/trendy to scan all your old-school photos and then tag people in them without asking...

Which got me thinking on a semi-related theme...(dun dun dunnnnnnn. You know how that usually turns out.) Is there really such a stark difference between older generations and Gen Y/"Millenials" vis-a-vis the InterWebs and technology as a whole?

I fall solidly in the Gen Y category, which seems to be generally anyone born from the late 70's to early 90's. Being a child borne of the 80s, the days before checking my email every five minutes or texting my BFF with the latest gossip are hazy at best.

And while I'm on this rant, how did I find my way ANYWHERE without GoogleMaps??? (Sadly though, I just lied. I totally used Mapquest and Yahoo Maps prior to my discovery of GoogleMaps. Too many "slight rights" and "turn left on unnamed street"'s was a dealbreaker.)

How did I cope???

I'll tell you how I coped. The same way I would have coped if I'd been born ten years later. My parents likely wouldn't have allowed me to have a cell phone until I started driving anyway. My access to email, social-networking sites and instant messager apps would have been similarly limited due to schoolwork and extracurricular pursuits. And I STILL would have rocked my portable CD player, because there is no way in hell I would have been able to afford an iPod.

And I actually do have one clear memory of a time before the advent of the personal hand-held device. I was very young, probably 8-ish. My family had a clunky old Apple IIE from 1983 (which now I have discovered was ancient technology by even that point in time). I was beginning to learn that computers were useful for something other than just playing Battlestar Galactica and Frogger.

I don't remember the exact context of the discussion—although it was probably spurred because my little brother and I were fighting over who gets to use the computer next (at that time, I was fighting for game time and he—at age 5—was fighting to program his own games in BASIC). My dad intervened somehow and I remember him telling me that someday this fight would be irrelevant. Because someday, SOMEDAY, engineers would develop a computer that will fit in the palm of our hands.

I remember oohing and ahhing and trying to imagine such a thing.

Wait...hold on...my Blackberry is vibrating...

Okay I'm back. That was my grandmother messaging me about the latest on "Days of Our Lives."

ANYWAY. I guess I'll draw a conclusion. Technology is so much a part of all of our lives now. Does it really matter whether you grew up with email or with a slide rule? Or that you had to trudge both ways uphill in the snow to school without a shirt? Even my grandmother is texting now. My parents and their friends are on Facebook. We're all human. Can't we all just get along???