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:
