When I was putting together the concept for this blog, it seemed only natural to connect Generation X and geekiness, and not merely because I’m a geek and an Xer. The two concepts just felt right together, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at the time. But now I’ve got it -- I figured it out by looking at the kids coming up behind us, the Millennials.
I spent the day Tuesday with my friend Sheila, today, for instance -- she’s 12, and she spent her day shackled to her cell phone and her iPod, which she wields with easy panache. (This is the kid who, when she was maybe six or seven, discovered features on my cell phone that I had been hitherto unaware of.) The array of music on both devices is amazing: she’s got audio clips from Grease and the Olsen twins singing from god knows where, the Carpenters and Billy Joel and the Shangri-Las, and music so new that I couldn’t even identify it, having pretty much given up listening to the radio when I sold my car. She makes no distinctions between oldies and today’s hits -- she doesn’t have to: everything is available to her on an equal footing whether it was produced 50 years or 5 minutes ago. You just download it from iTunes, duh.
She’s typical of Millennials, and particularly Millennial girls, as a fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times reveals:
Julia and her peers have vastly more access to a broader and more global spectrum of pop culture than any generation beforethem. Her favorite movies, music and TV shows are less a reflection of her age or status than they are of the infinite array of content available now. She's a fan of "Saturday Night Live" alumnus Dana Carvey — whose career peaked in her infancy — and an avid devotee of the Finnish rock band H.I.M. She switches between the science-fiction stories on FanFiction.net and an old Anne Rice novel, the cartoon "The Fairly OddParents" on Nickelodeon and a video clip of comic Dat Phan posted on his MySpace.com page. She rents a DVD every week (most recent fave was the 2004 film "Bring It On Again") but only occasionally sees a movie in the theater; her home is her entertainment center....
Often called Generation Y, the Millennials or Echo Boomers, these kids are known by economists, sociologists and marketing experts as optimistic team players and rule-followers, born into "child-centered" families and raised as part of the most celebrated, protected and overscheduled generation in memory. Technology has been so much a part of their lives that, to them, life before e-mail and the Internet was "the Stone Age."
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As with a lot of girls of her generation, Julia doesn't really adhere to gender stereotypes. She hangs out with a large group of boys who, she said, quote constantly from "Wayne's World" and "Wayne's World 2." Thanks to them, she said, she has learned to appreciate the band Sum 41 and Johnny Knoxville's antics on the MTV show "Jackass." She's a black belt in karate and a big fan of sci-fi movies.
Julia -- and my friend Sheila -- would have been called geeks 20 years ago. Except “geek” doesn’t mean anything anymore if it applies to everyone. To be a geek -- a devotee of cool tech toys and outré pop culture and stuff you had to actively seek out (like weird SF TV shows from England) or produce yourself the hard way (like typed-on-a-typewriter-and-mimeographed fanzines) -- when I was a teenager was to mark yourself as a weirdo if you were a boy, and worse if you were a girl. Xer geeks became a definitive subculture -- and the one that defined our entire generation -- because we were the most strinking illustration of how we were not like our elders. Just as a small minority of hippie kids carved out a Boomer identity for all their non-hippie peers by very dramatically being not-gray-flannel-Silents, a small minority of geeks defined all of Generation Xer by being the most obvious example of not-make-love-not-war-Boomers.
But just as many of the ideals of the hippie movement have gone mainstream -- a loosening of sexual mores having the greatest impact on our society, perhaps -- so has much of what made geeks geeks, like an affinity for computers that created the Web, which is changing the world as much as free love did. There have always been and will always be, in every generation, people who are like hippies and people who are like geeks, but there will probably never again be so many hippies or so many geeks all around the same age all unwittingly working in tandem and accidentally pushing our culture in a new direction. Geekiness is, then, the ultimate expression of Xerness, and as a cultural force, it lives and dies with Generation X.
What specific accumulation of personality quirks will come to define Millennials? It’s probably too early to say yet. But it’s a sure bet that Julia and her girlfriends probably won’t stand around one night doing what I and my geek-girl-pal Gail (of A Million Things That Bug Me) did recently: She showed off her cool new high-tech propane grill, which looked like you could travel to the moon in it, while we discussed the triptronic transmission and XM satellite radio in my way-neat high-tech Zipcar rental Mazda 3. And if Julia and her friends happened to overhear that conversation, they probably would have rolled their eyes and muttered something about the old farts who get so worked up about, like, just stuff and gone right back to texting each other the latest junior-high gossip.
(Technorati tags: Generation X, Millennials)
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