The Internet Generation, Prologue

This is a topic I have wanted to put down in words for some time now. There is a growing gap between generations at the moment; the difference between my generation and my parents is monstrous. I don’t say this out of any left-over teenage angst I have stored up inside me, or some sense of inflated ego, but out of how fast the world has changed between when my parents grew up and when I grew up. I started thinking at one point about the main differences between the then and the now. (Just to clarify here, I’m 24. I would be considered part of Generation Y (anyone born roughly between the 70s and the 90s inclusive), and my parents would have been considered part of the Baby Boom generation.) The most obvious difference that I can see is where we are in terms of technology. When the Internet became mainstream the world changed in a huge way. It gave us instant communication, instant look-up of any factual information and instant access to anything you could ever conceive really. The Internet changes everybody’s life that uses it. This is true for people of all ages. Just think about your life before the Internet, and after it (if you are old enough to remember a before that is…). Think about your friend’s and family’s lives before they started using email, search engines, facebook, youtube and any other of the millions of web based applications out there. The Internet opens up a whole new world for anyone willing to learn how to use it, or to put it another way, once you’ve gone down the Intertubes, forever will they dominate your destiny.

So with that established let’s move on to the topic at hand. I define the Internet generation as the first generation of people to grow up with the Internet present during their teenage developmental years. You know, the time of your life where you really become who you are; where you form your ideas and outlook on life, experiment, find your limits, etc. So I’m really talking about people born around the 80s/late 70s, and had access to the Internet by the late 90s. There is a reason why I’m making such a precise requirement here, and it goes like this. People who grew up and had become adults by the time they had access to the Internet have already had a lot of their opinions shaped and defined by the other mainstream forms of media. For example, television, newspaper, radio and word of mouth. Before the Internet was mainstream access to information was a lot more tightly controlled and monitored, and I guess conspiracy theorists could argue that those in power had a substantially easier time of shaping societal opinions. This is key because it partly defines the type of person you would become. If you spend your entire life up until say the age of 30 believing things are a certain way (or being shown they are a certain way) and not being used to the idea of challenging those or other widely held beliefs, you are less likely to do just that in the future. That’s why so many older people are “set in their ways”. It’s not a fault on their behalf, it’s simply because they are not used to challenging the way they think about things (this can be seen to great effect throughout history. Most recently in the war on terror, and previous to that in the war on drugs and going even further back, in Nazi Germany).

Enter the Internet and suddenly information and communication is no longer so tightly monitored. You get to see hundreds of thousands of different ideas and ways of thinking about things at any time. Those of us that had access to that during our developmental time got more used to the idea that there are literally thousands of ways of thinking about or approaching a particular topic, and it shaped the way we developed our beliefs (or lack there-of, more on this later). Now the Internet Generation could be widened to include people born past the 80s (ie into the 90s, possibly even the naughties), but the reason I don’t is two-fold. Firstly, those generations may have other contributing technologies that might have a heavier impact on their developmental years that I am not yet aware of (cell phones are a good contender :) ), and secondly those born later did not have the before time in their lives. I am old enough to remember a time before the Internet. I remember getting the Internet and I remember the impact it had on my day to day life. I also remember the Internet before it became bombarded by advertisements and lolspeak. I’m not sure if this is really that relevant, but it seems like it might be.

Anyway, I want to wrap this up because it has gotten quite long and I don’t want to start rambling. What I wanted to do in this post is merely establish the fact that I believe there exists a subset of people that I refer to as the Internet generation. The premise is important because it will be the subject of a few more of my posts that delve into specifics of this group. Ultimately I am trying to bridge the generational gap that I feel has developed because of such dramatic differences in the sheer volume of information that was available during developmental years, and to give an insight into a massive group of people that will be taking control of the world one day. Next up: discussing morality.

Such is life

Salutations to all, and welcome to my first blog, ever. Up until this point in my life I have steadfastly resisted the urge to become a blogger, but have succumbed due partly to the gentle encouragement of my beautiful wife, and partly from the boredom I face during stretches of work lasting 30 minutes or more. To kick things off, it seems fitting to dedicate my first blog to nothing more or less than blogging itself.

Blogging is an interesting phenomenon, derived I think from our need to feel like our lives have meaning. That someone, somewhere, is witnessing what we are doing and thinking, and perhaps even learning a little from us. The problem with this, I used to think, is that aside from a few actually interesting people in the world, most of us are boring with the same ideas that everyone else in the world has had at some point in their lives before. I think part of the reason I resisted reading blogs, writing blogs or even acknowledging that blogs are an ok thing is centered somewhere around this fact. In fact I even remember a conversation I had with a friend when I first heard about blogging in its web 2.0 version. It went something along the lines of me not accepting that blog is an actual word, and then laughing at the idea of people being so vain as to think that anyone is interested in what they have to say. I have held onto this belief for years. It's kind of ironic, because I had no problems with forums, articles (which are suspciously similar to blogs anyway...), youtube, status updates, or any of the other web 2.0 crazes (except maybe twitter but I guess thats closer to blogging than anything else on the list), even though they all center around the same theme. I think it has something to do with how blogs are structured. They aren't question/answer type venues like forums, where the conversation evolves only by different users inputting their ideas and opinions to bring the topic to fruition. They also aren't factual like articles where topics at least need to have some basis in logical reality and have a clear defined purpose from the start that readers can know "when I have finished reading this article, I will know more about subject x". No, blogs stand alone (well...next to twitter anyway) as pure unedited, unwashed glimpses into what the everyday person is thinking about any random topic that they came up with for that week/day/hour/whatever. And what the hell is the point in that?

Fast forward to today and here I am posting about how useless blogs are in a fucking blog. Oh how the times change. But that's just the point I'm trying to make. The times do change and unless we are open to changing our views, opinions and ideas as we progress through our lives, we will be left behind. I had a realization that blogs are one of the great treasures of the Internet. The Internet itself was developed as a tool, a tool to communicate and share information across distances. What it has become is something else, almost a living thing. But I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that the Internet has grown from field experts swapping information to everyone in the entire world being able to swap information. There are some very smart people in this world; every single person I consider myself friends with I would say are fairly smart individuals. They all have pockets of knowledge about this or that, facts that come out every now and then, and opinions on everything that they have ever come across during their time on this world. And that, my friends, is the key. Opinions are everything. They shape everything. From the way governments are run, to the way individuals treat each other, everything comes from our opinions about the various things we see in life. So I would argue this, one of the best things you can do in your life is seek out as many different opinions on as many different subjects as you can. And don't just read them, try and understand them. Push yourself to consider opinions that challenge your own. This is how we have evolved, this is how we have shaped the world around us. By considering opinions that challenge the social norm.

To bring this full circle, I realized that blog's are the tool to share our opinions on the subject matter of life encounters. So read a blog, subscribe to a few, and see if you learn a thing or two. We are only here for a short time people, absorb as much information as you can to better leave your mark here when you're done. I know I'm late to the table on this one. I'm sure you were all aware of this before you started reading. After all, this is a blog, and you are reading it right? But I wanted to share my example of growing and learning with you, and how it is generally a good idea to consider things that go against what you already think.

- Dan