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.