Pixeldust
After reading this article this all came to me. I suddenly feel very old. For some reason I was under the illusion that 33 is young. LOL, I’m extinct. Peeking into the worldview of individuals all born after 1989, there is a sense of being left behind in a haze of pixeldust. Oh well, whatever. I can deal with the dust. Acceptance to complacency will not be my path. I will participate. I want to participate as much is possible in the web generation.
Up till now I have participated.You could even say as a part of the bubble and working as a post-bubble consultant I’m an active agent in designing the spaces that shape webgen behaviors and communities. But my participation in the digital domain (I help shape and design) is limited by webgen standards. I was there when there was no such thing as ubiquitous cable and satellite connections. Growing up in a lower middle class family I remember getting our first color TV. I had a B/W (with no coax input) in my room until I was 15. A Saturday trip to the arcade was my computer culture and social networking site.
“These kids today, with their lack of privacy and self-censorship, and their MTV without the music.”
The reason I’m so explicitly defining the parameters of this age gap are simple, differentiating capacity for output. When we are younger our output capacity is greater for two reasons. One, because they have the time. They don’t have the beast of burden on their backs. Us pre-Reaganites have to sing for our supper and this cuts down on time we can spend archiving photos and uploading them on Flickr. Two, because webgen has an overwhelming desire to be seen and heard by their peers. We all did but webgen is in a unique position where higher capacity for output is equal to infinite possibilities for finding audiences.
But there is something completely different in understanding a community and participating in it.
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