My name is Janel and I was born in 1980. Which makes me an odd generation, not really either a Gen X or a Gen Y or Millennial. When you read the general description of each generation, like your horoscope, it never quite fit. Depending on who you talk to, those from 1980 are either on the tail end of Gen X or the beginning end of Gen Y. One comedian uses the term Elder Millennial to describe being on the front end of Gen Y. But to me, neither group seemed just right. And apparently I'm not alone. Someone decided to define a new cohort to bridge this gap - the Xennial. My tiny cohort of a generation is distinguished by the fact that we grew up alongside technology when it all changed from analog to digital rather than being an adult when it all changed like the Gen X'ers or never knowing anything else such as the Millennial. To illustrate I'll give you my life story in terms of technology.
As an aside, yesterday I was in the resource room for the volunteers as I'm currently serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Vanuatu as I write this. One of the other volunteers said (and I paraphrase) "Imagine what it would have been like in here with no technology. Every time it gets quiet and you look around everyone is on a device. But what about when there weren't any, people probably talked to each other." I don't imagine, I recall what it was like before the laptops, the phones, and the tablets. And people were just as self-involved as they are now, just with analog technology.
When I first became aware of technology and it's importance in my life was when I was in elementary school and watching my older brothers play video games, and of course trying to get my turn. First it was my big brother's Atari which he paid for himself and would let none of little kids touch. Next was Nintendo with it's games on cartridges. Blocks of plastic with electronics in a slit which you had to blow on to make it work. When you slid the cartridge into place at times the game console couldn't read the cartridge and it would be in and out, blowing, try again, until either the game loaded or you gave up. After this came Sega which was same same but different.
A little YouTube video on how to properly insert the cartridge, which we did not have back in the day.
When I was in middle school my mom married guy who had an 80's computer; green screen, no mouse because those weren't invented yet, DOS system that ran on (an actual) floppy disk. This was a step up from the original computers because it was a personal computer or PC and was small enough to fit in the home. Plus it ran on floppy disk instead of Punch cards. Whenever there was a program or in my case a game you wanted to run you inserted the appropriate floppy disk that yes, was actually floppy. And yes, I played Oregon Trail which is apparently a defining characteristic my cohort.
A year or two later we upgraded to a new PC which had an operating system that allowed you to load programs into the hard drive. The screen become colored and it had graphics instead of pixels. Floppy disks became hard, smaller plastic cartridges. And you mainly used them to store personal files, in my case, homework.
Middle school also introduced me to the compact disk or CD. Up to this point cassettes were the way to go with an older version I sometimes came across, the A-Track. With CDs came an assortment of other laser media devices but they quickly died out. If you had invested in one of those other new and awesome but flash in the pan and then gone systems - well, sucks to be you.
In middle school and high school a playlist was a mixtape or CD. Once the songs were on the cassette or disk it was there to stay. Copying songs onto a cassette required a special cassette player that would allow you to insert two cassettes, one being the original the second being the new copy. Plus there were tabs to control the copying of music so you had to learn the tricks around that. CD's got the music burned into the disk by a computer. The computer had to be able to burn and the disk had to be burnable. And first, you had to get the music onto the computer, again getting around those pesky copy write protections.
CDs came first for music and quickly followed by DVDs for movies. I'm not sure why, but I recall DVDs coming out much later than CDs. That's probably because DVD systems were so expensive that it didn't ever fully replace VHS. VHS hung on tooth and nail and even now I will still see VHS cassettes for sale in the occasional bargain bin.
High school was about the time I stopped using cassettes and everything was CD for music. For movies it was still a mix of VHS and DVD. This was not just consumer preference but what was available in stores. More and more you simply couldn't get new albums on cassettes. And overall, VHS systems and cassettes were cheaper with the same basic quality as DVD so they still prevailed on the store shelves.
In junior year of high school I got introduced to the internet. That's right folks, I was 16 years old when I first started using the internet. Not a baby that grew up with it or an adult who had to try and wrap your head around this new fangled tech. One of my classes was library helper so I spent hours with the school librarian figuring out 'surfing the web'. I got into a special workshop because of this interest at a local college which taught how to write web pages. I was the youngest person there. From there I found my way to GeoCities and started my own website, a Sailor Moon fanpage. I mainly used the internet to find out as much as possible about Sailor Moon, to buy Sailor Moon VHS, and to read the fan fiction.
Writing a website in the 90's was about typing out long strings of commands. You went into edit mode and just typed in the appropriate code. Which in turn required you to have a good binder of codes. That's why computer hacking was so interesting in those days. These binders and the sets of code in there could be gold and worth something. I would trade codes to make improvements to my site. There was a certain status of your site having cool programs from visitor counter to moving gifs. But I never got into the hard stuff of actually hacking anything. Promise.
Senior year of high school introduced me to a new set of programs called Excel and PowerPoint. My first PowerPoint presentation was a Sailor Moon primer. And my internet use expanded to all things manga and anime. Thanks to the internet I got VHS cassettes of Cowboy Bebop, Evangelian, Sailor Moon (of course), Ramna ½ and so on. Stuff the would never be available in any of the stores I had available to me. It was awesome.
From there I don't recall any great advances in technology that affected my life until I was 21 when I got my first cell phone. Game changer. I was a Lance Corporal in the Marines and a cell phone bill was no joke. Plus you had to pick just the right carrier because blanket coverage didn't exist. There was no such thing as data on the phone yet, so all I had to worry about was phone calls. But you still had to have a land line so I had two phone bills until was about 30. My first phone was a lavender flip phone. That I immediately forgot and left behind in the movie theater the day that I bought
As for social media - first it was chat rooms with handles. I was Ananda44 and spent hours in chat rooms just talking. I met a guy (IRL) in the year between high school and joining the Marines who went to Antarctica and we would talk to each other in these chat rooms. Then came MySpace and Facebook. I had a MySpace account for a hot minute but never really liked it. I set up a Facebook account about the same time but have always resisted it. Then there was Twitter and I resisted that with a passion, don't really know why. But I broke down and made an account when I was in college in my mid 20's because I wanted to find the cheese food truck. They only posted their location for the day on Twitter and had the best grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup. Nom nom nom. Now it's things like WhatsApp along with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
From there technology just became more of what it already was. The internet is still the internet even if webpages are designed completely different now. My phone is a hand sized computer which I rarely use to make phone calls. But a computer is still a computer whether it's your phone, PC, laptop, or tablet. Apps are just programs in another form. Instead of installing a new program with a CD you download it. But a program is still a program. Music and movies are still on CD and DVD respectively with the addition of digital media to be downloaded or streamed. Floppy disks for storing personal files have been replaced by the cloud, sim cards and external hard drives. But personal files are what they are. All of these changes are minor, relatively speaking, and not hard to keep up. For me at least.
What makes my generation different? I have that unique perspective of my cohort. I spent my childhood relying on payphones. But quickly adapted to cell phones, in all of it's incarnations, since they came out when I was still young. I understand technology and how it works since I've seen it get built up over time. I understand problems like saving space on your hard drive by fragmenting the data in order to assemble it into tightly packed package. So I appreciate and am grateful for affordable data in vast quantities. I also sympathize with trying to reassemble said fragmented data now that space is no longer so difficult to attain which the US government is having to deal with for files they are required to keep but can't actually access anymore.
I have a cynical eye to the latest and greatest, willing to wait until the shine wears off to see which product is left standing. And I'm a little miffed that after than that big boom of technology, we all settled in and just get kept reinventing what is already here and then calling it a break through. But not so miffed that I actually care. In the end, it's all just more of the same. I don't have my Sailor Moon website anymore but I do still use the internet to keep up with all things Moon-verse.
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