Friday December 02, 2005
The Techiest Generation
I was having a conversation with a trendspotter this week, and we were talking about how the younger generation—Gen Y or Millennials or whatever—are comfortable with technology and demand that it be convenient and easy to use. Then she and I, both Gen Xers, had to laugh. Perhaps they’re like that because most of the technology they’ve grown up with, you know, works.
After the conversation, I looked around my office and realized, with some surprise, that most of my technology actually does work. My three-year-old Windows XP desktop, my smartphone, my DVR, my CD burner. They’re all pretty reliable. While just five years ago I treated any functioning installation of Windows 98 like a delicate house of cards that might crash at any moment, today I install and uninstall programs with abandon and without disaster. I can’t remember the last time I had one of those dreaded “conflicts,” a formerly standard Windows feature that meant it didn’t work and no one knew why.
This dawned on me as it only could on a Gen Xer, because—I realized—we’ve been fighting bad technology our whole lives. I imagined what it would have been like to have grown up in this new world—the world of reliability. I would be comfortable with technology—and demand easy solutions—too.
Think about the crummy technology today’s 18-year-olds have never dealt with. They’ve never had to program a VCR or search for the program they recorded once they get home—perhaps, as was often the case, to find that it is not there. They’ve never had to cue up a blank tape with their finger or spend hours making a mix only to find that the last song doesn’t quite fit. They’ve never had to respool a cassette with a pen after it’s been eaten by their tape deck or spend minutes going back and forth, back and forth, looking for their favorite song. They have never used a Lynx browser or experienced a dropped dial-up connection or tried to get anything done on a BBS or attempted to remotely retrieve messages from an analog answering machine or carried a stack of 5ΒΌ-inch floppies to the campus computer lab just to have them refused, one by one, by the giant metal drives of a TRS-80. It is possible, though hard to believe, that they have never, ever experienced the Blue Screen of Death. (Can XP even produce such a screen? Someone must know.) These kids, can they even begin to understand what humiliation, and data loss, we used to suffer at the hands of CTRL+ALT+DEL?
I hate them. I really do.
