My Generation

Roger Daltry may have expressed a wish to die before getting old, but most of us would prefer not to. Of course, old is relative. When you're in school your teacher is, by definition of being your teacher, old. Thinking back I had a math teacher who was in her first job out of University. She was closer in age to the thirteen year olds of the class than to the Headmaster. To us she was old, the assumption is to her the Headmaster was old.

But perception of age changes. And perception of what a generation is must also be mutable, and shorter, or longer. There's generation which experienced watching the moon landings, so folks alive and old enough to understand what they were seeing, hearing, reading, between July '69 and December '72 - count me out, I was a month old at Apollo 17. Or for longer we could consider those who experienced the Cold War, generally counted as running from 1947-90 - I'm definitely in here.

But here's a thing to ponder. Just being born in, or alive in, a certain time period does not automatically make you part of some wider generation. The reason is using generation's in these terms is to use it as a shorthand for a commonly shared set of experiences and cultural events.

But not everyone shares in, or experiences, the same things in the same way.

Expecting someone to understand you because of there age and birth country being similar to yours is as normal as it is weird.

But there is a group, which we could call a generation, which is interesting to think about as it is the first to pass learning backwards, and not forwards. In broad terms, in western society, it began to form in the early eighties as home technology started to advance beyond 'take it out the box and turn it on'.

This generation began by learning to set the video recorder and the microwave. Sometimes the parents would learn, but there are plenty folks who were the family 'fix the thing' person where 'fix' meant make the machine fulfil its basic function.

This generation began working as email began to be integral to working life, and had to help transition away from older paper based methods of communication.

They have gone on to develop some of the most beloved, and hated, parts of life today: From streaming music to social media to tools which use increasing complex algorithms to imitate heuristic learning that allow for programs to produce pictures or language which can be approximations of what a human may produce.

And this generation is replicating, as generations are wont to do. Each iteration of technology requires a level of learning which becomes time consuming and not necessarily of immediate benefit to older folks, and by older I mean mid-twenties on. Thus, those immersed in burgeoning advances bring their knowledge to those older than them.

Never in history has information moved up and down generations in the same way, but I think this paradigm which will continue.

Would I have considered sharing these thoughts without @hive-106316 and @dreemport collaborating this month? Possibly not. But I'm glad I was made to think about the changing generations, and to see what other folks thoughts on the matter are.

text by stuartcturnbull, picture from Hajninjah via Pixabay