Really, Really Major But Very Short Generation Gaps

Ray Kurzweil propounded his “hyper-accelerating change” theory (Singularity) in which the world is speeding through technology and information at such a rate currently that if you took the year 2000 as one year unit of change, by the end of the century, humanity will have experienced 20,000 year units of change. The notion of a generation being a 20 year cohort may be fine for Baby Boomers (or older) and maybe even X-ers, but for everyone else, the rate of change creates cultural gaps whereby an American young adult aged 27 (like my son) has little or nothing in common with a 21-year-old. Different experiences, different slang and acronyms and different earth-shattering moments of life. Looks like having an entire generation span a meager three years isn’t that far off! They aren’t “Millennials” or the younger, “Generation Z,” to me… they are the “what’s next?” generations. They don’t seem to be able to live in the here and now anymore.

Lest you think you are culturally in touch with the younger generations, the August 23^rd Washington Post wishes to disabuse you of this arrogance: “These are among the 75 references on this year’s Beloit College Mindset List, a compilation intended to remind teachers that college freshmen born mostly in 1993 see the world in a much different way: They fancied pogs and Tickle Me Elmo toys [pictured above] as children, watched televisions that never had dials and their lives have always been like a box of chocolates… Remember when the initials LBJ referred to President Lyndon B. Johnson? Today, according to the list, they make teenagers think of NBA star LeBron James. And speaking of NBA legends, these kids didn’t want to be like Mike — they fawned over Shaq and Kobe...

“Then there’s OJ Simpson. These students were still in diapers when the former NFL star began searching for the killers of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman…Still not feeling old? Consider this: Andre the Giant, River Phoenix and Frank Zappa all died before these students were born. They don’t know what a Commodore 64 was, and they don’t understand why Boston barflies would ever shout, ‘Norm!’” Amazon is not a river anymore… unless you live in Brazil, and texting and tweeting have nothing to do with textbooks or birds. “‘If you look at the jump from email to texting, or from email to Facebook, it’s been faster than the jump from typing to computers,’ [English professor Tom] McBride said. ‘These generational gaps are getting smaller.’” The Post.

The Vietnam War, the Korean War and World Wars I and II rank right up there with the American Civil War, our own Revolutionary War… not to mention the war between Rome and Carthage… as moments of the distant past relegated to history books and nasty questions on high school pop quizzes. Perish the thought that you might actually have known someone who lost their life in such a conflict… okay, maybe not pre-WWI. These college freshmen have no consciousness of the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Soviet failures in Afghanistan. They don’t remember the long and bitter Cold War or that China really had no manufacturing economy or high rises or traffic jams until relatively recently.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am still holding on in this tsunami of change… and I hate to admit that I am addicted to “what’s next” as well.