Today at work, one of my co-workers, ready for her three-day weekend, started singing "bad boy bad boys, whatchu gonna do, whatchu gonna do, whatchu gonna do when they come for you bad boys bad boys..." I looked at her like she was an idiot, because for one she was in-uniform, very white, and attempting faux gang-signs that I, being fluent in sign language, interpreted as "attempt at W, attempt at W, that's definitely not a correct M but your're trying, P, K, I love you, I love you, goat, mom, shower, shower, I love you." I asked her where she heard that song, and she said she heard someone else singing it. I asked her if she knew of the tv show it came from. She responded "what tv show." I then resisted the urge to punch her in the face, because COPS was a defining part of my generation. EVERYONE watched it. The nerds, the jocks, the geeks, the sluts, the school shooters, the dropouts; everyone. Focus: When have you encountered a "generational gap" where the other person 'just doesn't get it'? How did you react? (For me, and I have this sometimes with my wife, even though we are only two years apart, if you "don't get it" the conversation ends and I immediately try to educate you about what you're missing. She now loves Caddyshack thanks to the generational gap.) Alt. Focus: What major life/social moments do you think define "generational gaps"? An obvious example, those born pre-9/11 vs. those born post-9/11 will experience a generational gap. Though I can't quite pinpoint the exact year, there is also a generational gap between remembering when MTV was all about music videos vs. when MTV was all about reality shows vs. when MTV was all about common entertainment shows.
The biggest one I can think of is the internet. I was born in the mid 1980s and I feel like I was born to early to be a Millenial and too late to be a Generation Xer, but I think my generation (born in the 80s) was the first one to remember a time before the internet, grow up with early personal computers, and then see the internet evolve from its infancy. I tried to explaining that to my cousin who is 17, and she just kinda stared at me like she couldnt comprehend a time before social media, which I thought was a bit sad. When I was a kid, and Im sure I speak for many board members, playing outside and enjoying nature was just what you did during the summer. Now its become something to do other than something involved with technology. This article sums up how I feel about it pretty succinctly.
Alt focus: If you are under the age of 30, the Cold War, Iron Curtain, and Berlin Wall are out of your realm of experience. Growing up on the 70s and 80s, these were defining characteristics of world events/politics. In that time period, the threat of Commie missiles landing in your back yard was a very real possibility. If you were born after 1986, this is all something from your textbooks, as quaint as "duck and cover" was back in the 1950s. Frighteningly enough, we came insanely close to nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion. http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/5-cold-war-close-calls
I think the thing that most clearly defined (for me) the difference in generations was working and attending school with people my daughter's age. Resume? They have no idea how to begin to build one. Recognizing their inability to articulate complete thoughts, or to problem solve was a shock to me. Their helplessness when faced with obstacles beyond finding a phone charger was...kinda scary. My boys have never known a world without war. They've never known a world when dad wasn't going to rotate into a combat zone. Husband and I recently rewatched "Friends". Explaining answering machines, pagers, and not being in constant contact was a fun moment for us.
I was born in '75, and unlike everyone around me who seem to be suffering from autobiographical amnesia I actually remember my childhood. Every time Reagan gave a televised address I thought we were going to be at war (and I didn't even know about this until a few years ago). We had computers in the house in '83 on, and discovered the WWW a little ahead of the curve in early '95. But yeah, that whole "no internet/texting/not in constant contact thing" lasted well into adulthood for me. COPS is still on though, so clearly some kiddies just aren't paying attention. Focus?: I've been texting a young a woman I met on Whisper who could be my daughter. I may have more of relevance to contribute later...
I was born in '85. I think one of the things for me is that we are among the last group of people whose first picture ever was taken with a camera using film. And now, we're at the point where it's not even a camera. Baby's first snapchat... Remembering what things were like before having Internet is a funny thing, but it's even funnier when you talk to a kid who doesn't remember when we didn't have WiFi. My first WiFi computer was in my hands in 2003 when I left for college.
I was a combination of poor, extremely sheltered, and out in the sticks - so my exposure to things like presidential speeches was zero. I remember my dad marveling at a compact disc he read about in the Dallas morning news but - except playing Oregon trail in school I'd never touched a computer. relevant
As an early millennial ('87) the two biggest that probably are a result of each other would be the internet, which has been mentioned, and the whole concept of styles and fads. I know, they still exist, but it's hard to describe to people just how many 90s things came like fire on a gust of wind and then faded into irrelevance. Think about it for a second, and this is in no way a comprehensive list. - pogs - beanie babies - roller blades - giga pets - baseball cards - yoyos - air jordans - tickle me elmos And so on. Some of those like roller blades and baseball cards had a following beforehand and just went back to normalcy, others like beanie babies and pogs just slipped into complete irrelevance seemingly overnight. These weren't just what the cool kids on the blocks were doing either. People dumped fortunes into beanie babies, and spent the equivalent of a home owner down payment on tickle me elmos. You heard so little about what happened to those people once these fads died. I think most were shamefully quiet, but I'm sure there's more than a few enthusiasts still hoarding their collection in the attic, just waiting for them to come back so they can get rich. It was also the last era that seemed so defined by music. I don't think it's my age (I graduated high school in 2005 after all). The two decades after just don't have the kind of scenes you saw in the 60s-90s. I think the poker boom was the last, and longest of the major fads, which was both great and terrible for the game. When I grew up you learned at least 20-30 games of poker. The later millennials only know hold 'em. A lot of them don't even know the other boom games, like 7 card stud or Razz.
When I was growing up, "regular poker" was five card draw; I was also familiar with five and seven card stud. Then around 1999-2000 I checked out poker on Yahoo Games, and was like: What the fuck are they playing? Why does everyone have only two cards, and there's three, four, five cards face up that seem to be nobody's? I soon learned, and it soon became my best game. But yeah, I'll bet a lot of millenials are familiar with five card draw only through video poker.
I was born in 1972. I remember the following: Walter Cronkite was THE anchorman The Iran Revolution and hostage crisis Grenada (look it up) Iran-Contra Reagan winning in 1980 (at 8 I didn't realize what a sea change this would be in America, but now I see it) The Police were the hot new band John Bonham dying Van Halen releasing Diver Down AIDS was the scariest thing in the world - and this dramatically changed how sex was viewed by my generation, which was a vast change from the prior generation and the one following The Berlin Wall coming down The breakup of the USSR - for those of you too young, this was HUGE. We had grown up with movies like 'The Day After' about impending nuclear holocaust - and it seemed a distinct possibility Japanese cars being shitty Mike Dukakis in a tank (again, look it up) Pong and Atari, Intellivision and Collecovision Not coming home all day, with no supervision whatsoever Calling someone 'gay' or 'retarded' was completely normal No Black History Month, nor the phrase 'African American' Radio Stations were the center of the music universe The start of MTV Tienamen Square The divide appears to be around 1992/3/4. Culturally, politically, and technologically, the world changed very significantly in those few years and an entirely new pop culture/political culture/technological culture emerged that if you didn't live through the above seems weird and historical, as opposed to reality.
Get off my lawn. I was born in 1968. Our first computer was an Apple IIe that we got in '84 or so. A company that wanted my dad to use their connectivity gave him the computer and a modem. I spent HOURS with a guy I knew - we weren't friends, really, just he was the only other person I knew with a modem - trying to get baud rate, parity, etc. to match up. Once we got it, we succeeded in typing "hello." and that was pretty much it. But, it was awesome.
Language. It is fluid, but fluid in that it can regress too. I do not know what the fuck Fleek means, and when I see a bunch of text speak scribbles I am overcome pathologically with rage. I feel old when people haven't seen the seminal movies of my youth. I was born in '81, but people born between '85 and '90 still have no idea what Smokey and The Bandit is, or even Blazing Saddles. Caddyshack is right out. I might as well be speaking Chinese. Me: "If you buy a hat like that you get a free bowl of soup." Them: "What? No one is ordering soup. That hat is fine." The Red Threat, Nuclear annihilation was barely in our periphery as kids. The Berlin Wall coming down was a big freakin' deal though. Like VI said, as a kid you do not understand the significance. I remember reciting the pledge of allegiance and the pledge of christianity with pictures of Reagan and Jesus in the room (private school). Highschool testing did not exist. I remember PE, art, recess. I remember the principal of a very large christian private school in 1994 express to the assembly how he would shutter the school if he was compelled to hire a gay teacher. I recall our teacher stopping class around 1 p.m. to hear the OJ verdict. Tapes were a big deal. New Kids on The Block weren't bald, 40, and having sex with Jenny McCarthy, who was, like, 12; they were the biggest band in the world. Menudo still had Ricky Martin in it. Whitey had no idea "menudo" was tripe soup. The only Spanish speaking people lived in Miami; the idea of a second language being a necessity was unheard of. AIDS was a gay disease. Tom Brokaw was our Walter Cronkite. Connie Chung was a thing. Maury Povitch was a respected journalist. Terrorism was something that happened over there. Online dating was a sign of extreme weakness, pathetic, and probably perversion. Prodigy was to AOL what AOL now is to common decency. Simple news web pages took 5 minutes to load. Before Myspace was Geocities. Imagine the worst Myspace page littered with gifs and video that wouldn't load with a high speed connection; now imagine doing that on a 14.4k modem. Fuck it, I'm still pissed about Fleek. Fuck you.
I signed my lease in an undergrad complex essentially. I'm sure this fall the generation gap between me and the undergrads will be clear. I'm fairly confident I'll be the only person who lives there, maybe aside from the complex manager, who was born in the 80s.
Man, now I feel old. I was born during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I'm right at the tail end of the Baby Boomers. To be honest, I have very little in common with other Boomers...they were Hippies, Woodstock. burning draft cards and actually lived in the era Happy Days was based on. However, what sets me apart for Gen Xers is that I do recall the 60's better then them. You know how TV shows used to brag that they were in HD a few years ago? TV shows that were shot in color used to do the same thing, not that it mattered though...most people stall had black and white TVs. With tubes. You turned the TV on and waited a minute or so for it to warm up. My first couple of years in school were in the Bay Area, which coincided with the Zodiac Killer. For a while we had police all along our route to school and had to keep the front door of the classroom locked and all the shades drawn. The nightly news usually led off with a story on Vietnam unless something like a riot or Kent State happened. I remember watching Bobby Kennedy's funeral prossession and the Beatles press conference when they broke up. There was also usually only one TV per house and you watched whatever the adults wanted to watch...ABC, NBC, CBS or PBS...because that was all there was. In 1972 my mother bought a new Plymouth. On the lot were at least a half dozen brand new Superbirds from the previous year that no one wanted despite deep discounts....they were probably right around $5K. You could still buy a new VW for under $2K. I remember when Michael Jackson died, I compared it to the deaths of John Lennon and Elvis and some dipshit kid told me the grief and outpouring of emotion was nothing at all compared to Jackson's...Elvis and Lennon were nobodies. That's when I started to realize how old I was. In the 70's when Barbara Walters became co-anchor with Harry Reasoner, the news itself was the news. Also, how many of you remember Geraldine Ferraro...the first female VP candidate when she ran with Mondale in '84? That was Earth shattering at the time. Professional athletes (Outside of the very elite like Joe Namath or Willie Mays ) had off season jobs such as teachers and car salesman. They were very much middle class citizens. Microwaves didn't come out until I was 11 or 12. Hell, calculators came out when I was about 8...we had one. It cost $120. It was 5"x 7" x 2" and would +, - X and / . That was it. And then phones....Telephone lines were all above ground when I was a kid. They were everywhere and really cluttered up the landscape.Long distance rates were astronomical and divided into 3 different rates...7AM-5PM, 5PM-11PM, and 11PM- 7AM. The 5-11 rates for a call from ID to NYC were something like $2.45 for the first minute and .88 for each additional minute. There were no "So what are you doing?" phone calls. Also rotary phones. And well into my teens when you dialed a long distance call an operator would come on the line and ask you what your phone # was so they could charge you for the call. Needless to say, this was very easy to exploit. I think the 80's was probably the decade with the biggest jump in changes that I can pinpoint and the speed which things change just happens faster and faster now.
Texas Hold 'Em is the most popular because it's the best of them. It has the perfect balance when it comes to the imperfect information the player has. Focus: Talking to any boomer about the economy, housing prices, national debt, taxes, student loans, or anything related is like trying to explain to a child with a butler the fact that someone pays for the things they own.
In the 420 thread, I mentioned that today is the anniversary of the Columbine Massacre. That was a real game changer. I was a junior in high school when it happened (fun fact: the next day, I wore a black trench coat to school and got sent home.). Anyway, the next year, security was heightened dramatically, and there were all kinds of revisions to the dress code (that would only stop the absolute stupidest of gunmen). Now that Li'l Bandit is in school, it's gotten even worse (he's in the same school district and high school that I went to). The entire school is fenced in, there are cameras everywhere, kids can't use the lockers anymore, and there are shit-tons of school district cops (yes, they have their own police force, as do most of the school districts down here. And there are cops at ALL schools now, even the elementaries.). All "for the sake of the children." I remember one time when I had an assignment about things that annoy me (I think it was for speech class), and I wrote about people who were always getting in my way in the halls. I included an illustration of me with a GE M-134 "mini-gun" mowing down the people in my way. I had to present it in class, and the teacher asked: "You wouldn't really do that, would you, Bandit?" To which I replied: "Of course not; where would I get a mini-gun from?" And everyone had a good laugh. If Li'l Bandit tried the same thing today, they'd throw his ass in juvey on general principal. A different generation gap is between my dad and me (he's 47 years older than I am.). My dad still thinks that the Metric system is some kind of fad that will go away any day now. The last couple of vehicles he's gotten, he's called me over when he was having problems working on them. The problem: He was trying to use standard tools on a metric vehicle. "But it's an American car/truck!" he said every time. "Dad, American cars have been metric since the '80s." One notable time, he was trying to change the transmission fluid on his truck (a '99 F150), and was rounding off all the bolts. AND THE TRANSMISSION PAN HAD "METRIC" STAMPED INTO IT. (cue facepalm) It was literally right in his face. And no, my dad isn't some illiterate country bumpkin (he's a college graduate, which is more than I can say.). He just doesn't think in the 21st century. There are a lot more examples, like how he needs me to come by and get his TV out of an alternate input mode when he hits the wrong button, or open up text messages that he's gotten because he can't figure it out, but I'll leave you with that.
I note generation gaps when it comes to comedy references a lot. A TV show or comedian or just random person will make a jokes predicated on referencing Brady Bunch or MASH or Thriller, etc. I always sarcastcally think "timely". That shit is three, four, five? decades old and if your audience is 25 they might know it... but in a distant non-funny way. And while I recognize and celebrate language evolution, "Bye Felicia" drives me insane. But I think it's because it's entrenching a casual dismissal of other people which is probably my underlying twitch. Trying to explain Chromecast to older people is hilarious and annoying.
All the people that are more of an adult than me are pretty hip and woke and I don't know anyone younger than in-their-twenties so I don't experience generation gaps all that often. But I have noticed that the biggest shifts have to do with people's experiences/understanding/attitudes towards things relating to sexuality and it's basically divided by people older and younger than 40. I've never known anyone who thinks sex is a special sacred thing between only a man and a woman and reserved for marriage, but more in terms of how comfortable, casual, and open people are about sex/sexuality/their own sex lives, the wider spectrum of sexuality and gender stuff, the different kinds of relationships, trans issues etc. (Or as my older friend put it when she was talking to me about how she had to get used to people in their 20s and 30s being comfortable with discussing and joking about each other's sex lives: "I know you kids today are all kind of gay and don't believe in monogamy anymore so I'm kind of square when it comes to this stuff.") Since I've spent my whole life very comfortably in liberal bubbles, it's not like That Side is condemning any of this, but with the exception of old hippies who are excited that there's a new sexual revolution happening and have been preaching this kind of stuff for decades, I notice that there's a struggle to understand and accept and participate in everything for the older generation whereas people in the younger group just kind of shrug and casually see the world that way.