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THREAD: When I was 8, if my family saw a movie, ate dinner & got ice cream, no one on earth could get a message to us for hours. If the POTUS wanted my dad to be Secretary of State he'd have to send someone to wait at our front door. No cell phones, no answering machine, nothing. https://twitter.com/Indychick31/status/1288287725020483585
Some people had cell phones and many had answering machines, but we had neither and we weren't weird at all. We didn't have a computer of any kind in the house -- that was exclusively a rich kid thing. The school computer lab was my first computer experience.
By the time I was in high school, I had a cell phone, an AOL instant messenger screename (davidordave, hit me up sometime), and I could code a website from scratch. Sure, it would look like the Space Jam website, but that was the style at the time.
At this juncture, the public debate was this: Would anyone ever make money online? A few dreamers thought that one day in the far distant future, some retail stores MIGHT be able to have a whopping 15%-25% of their sales come solely from online sales. That was our "flying car".
By the time I was in my early twenties, I had a smart phone, my third or fourth social media page, blah blah blah. You know the rest.
That was all in less than 15 years. I know we all know this and we all went through it. It is the most rapid cultural change in human history. One specific, narrow generation went through that arch during their formative years, and that's a different way to experience it I think.
I hope this isn't an "I think I'm special for no reason" thing. Could be. To my parents, cable television and affordable air travel were the huge differences from their childhoods. I grew an Adam's apple and woke up on an entirely different planet.
Getting all your cultural understanding from magazines while not hearing about major world events until the next morning AND making friends with total strangers on the internet while knowing everything instantly within the same childhood is pretty strange and won't happen again.
I'm rambling. But those of us who like the Pixies and internet memes in equal measure give a lil' head nod to each other. Nothing crazy, but it feels like a nuance between Gen X and Millennials that needs a label and "Oregon Trail Generation" is one I enjoy.
