I'm going to get a little nostalgic and continue with my previous post about technology.
I work at a university and spend most of my days interacting with the same 30 or so students. We use student help as our brute man power when we need to get a job done, and usually one person, c'est moi, won't suffice. I've been working there for about six months and have struck up some fun and interesting conversations, with the students around me. I'm close in age to a lot of the them or just slightly older, so we have a good laugh at the common ground we share. It would have never occurred to me without these recent conversations, that by being a few years older than these students, we have a large generation gap between us.
I never gave it much thought, but my sister is 4.5 years older than me. Round it up to 5 years when you're talking about separation of years in school. That seemed like a wide enough gap for me to grasp why Saved By The Bell was her generation's hit t.v. show, and why mine was Boy Meets World. No Doubt was her jam in elementary school, while the battle of the boy bands, Green Day and Nelly was mine. Each came just far enough apart from one other, that we connected with different shows, different musical groups, and different toys. Ok, maybe not toys. EVERYONE wanted Sock'em Bobbers, because they WERE more fun than a pillow fight!
I'll give you a scenario to put yourself into my shoes with my fellow students. If you were anyone near the age of being able to surf the internet around the early 2000's then you must have come across this video; The End of the World.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCpjgl2baLs
Yeah, I bet anyone in their mid 20's remember's that one. It was MEGA popular when I was a youngling. I still quote it today, like most of my generation. "I'm le tired!", "And the kangaroos were like WTF, MATE?", "Hokay, so here's the earth, IT'S ROUND". You get the jist. I've mentioned to several students this video and soon realized they weren't picking up what I was putting down. You've got to be kidding me!! You don't know this video??? What is wrong with you???
And that's when it hit me. Those kids had no idea there was a world of the internet before Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook. HOLY JESUS!! What are we teaching our children?? I should call child protective services on all your parent's asses!
Here's a quick list of things that I remember from my childhood before the internet exploded:
Albinoblacksheep:
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/
Ebaumsworld:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/
Runescape:
http://www.runescape.com/ (I am still friends with the nerds who gamed on this site...)
Myspace:
https://myspace.com/
Xanga:
http://xanga.com/
Napster:
http://www.rhapsody.com/napster (back in the day when it was free!)
And that's just a short preview of the websites my generation use to be apart of. These were the pioneering websites. As a kid you progressed from a Xanga account, to MySpace, and eventually in high school there was Facebook (back when you had to be invited to have a FB account through email). AlbinoBlackSheep and Ebaumsworld was my generation's CollegeHumor or FunnyOrDie.
This was the era of overhead projectors in class, and PowerPoint presentations were only used for your once a year, mandatory speech. I remember using floppy disks until 7th grade. Say What?!? USB's weren't even that accessible or popular to use until the latter part of high school. Up to that point, we "burned" all of our files onto blank cds. OH, the BURNED CD!! How could I forget about that. Burning a mix cd was cooler than Nelly's white band aid on his cheek. If you received or made a mix cd you were a Cool Cat. I'm positive I have about 50 burned cds just from those few formidable years. Thank god we've crossed that bridge and don't intend to go back.
I have become fascinated with this idea that although I am only 2 to maybe 4 years older than most of the student workers, I remember and have seen more growth of the internet and technology, than they ever did as a kid. I had an AIM account, and remember when AOL was a big deal, and how I felt left out that I didn't have one. How you had to dial up to get on to the internet. You had to either be on the phone or the internet, the simultaneous usage came years later. AskJeeves, Dogpile, and Netscape were the search engines I used until Google took over the planet. I remember being in high school when a student told me about the new internet website that had launched called Twitter. I thought the idea behind Twitter was ridiculous and weird. Oh that opinion hasn't changed, by the way. Or when "Santa" bought me the first generation of the Ipod mini in middle school. That was a BIG DEAL to have one, and it only came in one color, silver. The skittles rainbow hadn't taken over your devices yet.
I realized now that if you were born post 1993, you don't have a clue as to what the world was before the internet and technology boom. You didn't live in a time where it was much more difficult to get cell service because only 1 in 5 people had a cell phone, or didn't have to worry about dial-up-internet before high speed internet became the norm. I bet some of you didn't know that PalmPilot was the first tablet invented back in 1997, Huh?? Huh??
I did some research to see how unrealistic it is for me to expect anyone born after 1993 to understand where I'm coming from. I found this website that cites the Top 10 Oldest & Most Popular Viral Videos pre-Youtube. It's a Juno sound-a-like, commentating and giving her own "expert opinion", but she explains the terrible and yet absolute glory of the early days of the internet. There was complete freedom and room for any odd or peculiar thing to surface on the web, because it was a new concept to even the inventors of the world wide web.
http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/team-nchick/nostalgia-chick/36664-top-ten-viral-videos-from-the-ancient-internet-aka-before-youtube
I have to admit some of those videos were even slightly before my time! I knew most of them, but some I had never heard of. So maybe I'm being unrealistic and hypocritical to these kids? Do you remember me ranting just a few days ago about how I will never be able to know everything about pop culture on the internet??
I'm a creative person and I contradict myself all the time. Get Over It.
What I find hard to believe is that kids only a few years younger than me (Generation Z) never experienced floppy disks, a childhood that was rooted in AIM messaging to meet up with your friends (cell phones were only for corporate adults then), or remember your mom typing on a type-writer until it was absolutely necessary to switch to a desktop computer. Why ruin a good thing? Type-writers were "da bomb" (how's that for a late 90's phrase) back in the day, and made my mom's office sound like she was in the movie Working Girl or 9 to 5. Generation Z never saw the growth and change as other generations had before them. They never had to experience the rapid fire that my generation (Generation Y) and those slightly older than us had to experience. We've been through the most metamorphosis as a generation and we're only between the ages of 23 to 35. We can adapt pretty quickly because we experienced and remember a life before laptops and smart phones, but can also remember the eruption and surge in the technology era. We lived through it all, especially in a time of our lives where we could keep up with the rapid fire.
As a young adult, you're more capable of balancing the distinct and game-changing revolutions. It only became a norm to have a computer in your house by the early 2000's. Up until college my classes still had to toe-the-line of not being overly reliant on computer based curriculum, in case you weren't lucky enough to have a computer at home. Now it's expected that you have one. Everyone has a laptop or "device" that can essentially take the place of a computer. We barely had time to get use to the idea of a computer in our homes, before it became mainstream for you to have a laptop that can fit into an envelope. It's all happening so fast!
It's understandable some of the students I work with have no idea what I'm talking about, because it was a blip in time. But for me, that small window of time was a hell of a time to grow up in. I remember it fondly because of the best of both worlds were bridged together for a brief moment. The nostalgic kick-the-can kind of childhood that met and later morphed into the modern childhood we're more accustomed to today. The internet obviously took the biggest development steps and has changed the most with credit given to Apple and Google. But I will always have a soft spot for the classic internet days, because of the universal freedom with most start up websites and the hilarity that ensued with them. It was a free for all, and a time to see how far you could push the limitations that we had set for ourselves in the webbing world. It's not slowing down, (Thanks Captain Obvious) as I've already ranted about previously, but I sure wish more than a small pool of the population knew about these quality years on the web. It certainly made my childhood rich with obnoxious animated videos.
I'll just leave you with this quote:
"It'll be so fast, Mother Nature will be like, SLLOOOOWWWW DOOOOOWWNNN!!"
Refer to one of my all time favorite videos if you don't understand... You Generation Z-ers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs
