• They don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors.
• They never had the fun of being thrown into the back of a station wagon with six others.
• "Whatever" isn't part of a question but an expression of sullen rebuke.
• They've grown up in a single superpower world.
• Salman Rushdie has always been watching over his shoulder.
Why does this list leave me feeling it could have been a lot better? It seems as though they just went over some newspapers from 18 years ago and extracted some events. The bigger cultural shifts are harder to see. Aren't there much more interesting differences between the world that preceeded today's freshmen and the world they grew up in?
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6 comments:
Grunge music is classic rock for them.
downtownlad - yep, their parents will break a hip trying to pogo to the oldies station.
This list is goofy. How many college freshman have ever heard of Salman Rushdie, or for that matter, Khomeini? My undergrads are unaware of much of what is going on in the world right now. For instance, I doubt very many of them know who John Roberts is.
Also on the list:
-Andy Warhol, Liberace, and Jackie Gleason have always been dead.
Why would an 18 year-old have ever heard of Liberace or Jackie Gleason? I'm 33 and I'm only vaguely aware of these people. Sheesh.
Well, I liked the "cut and paste" one--I was just explaining to a young associate the other day how we used to do documents. I think she had never realized that the "cut" and "paste" commands reflected what were once physical practices.
I am tempted to add that today's young people have never redlined documents by hand, with a ruler and a red pen, but that is a rather specialized law firm item, more relevant to junior associates than to college students.
The most obvious change is the rise of the internets, and the accompanying changes in where this generation gets its news, how this generation spends its time, and how this generation communicates (instant messenger).
It certainly seems that the advent of the internet marks the end point of Generation X and the beginning of the next generation. For college students starting in 2000, life is substantially different than college students in 1992 necause ofthe internet. Yet the differences from 1972 to 1992 are merely incremental.
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