The Napster generation

When I started at my university, I and every other entering freshman that I knew had a computer. Many dorms, including my own, offered high-speed internet access. I kept in touch with high school and new college friends through AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

The early days of the internet were lawless and chaotic. Even if you knew that a piece of information was out there in internet world, there was no guarantee that you could actually find it because the early search engines were unreliable at best. Half of your search results were inappropriate, and the other half were irrelevant. Google might be on its way to becoming the next evil empire, but the company's search engine rocked my world and changed the way that I use the internet. Now I take for granted that I am able to find what I am looking for.

The internet was great for finding information, but it was great for sharing stuff, too--in particular, MP3 files. Remember Napster? Another life-changing (albeit short-lived) technology. Napster rose and fell during my tenure at school, but while it was in its heyday, everyone was on it every night of the week, downloading their favorite tunes and then sharing them on the school network.

B's experience was different. Bringing a computer to school was not an unstated requirement. Dorms featured dial-up internet access, if they offered anything at all. Students checked their email on DOS machines with single-color monitors. B doesn't keep in touch with any of his college or high school friends over AIM because none of them had it back then.

The amazing part of this story is that we are only two years apart--and yet the advancements that were considered newfangled for him were commonplace for me. And naturally, the trend continues--people who are just a couple of years younger than I were exposed to advancements that I didn't even think about in college.

Take, for instance, cell phones. When I first started college, cell phones were rare and still expensive. But by the time I graduated, I and everyone else I knew had a cell phone. Circuits were jammed on graduation day from everyone trying to call their friends and find out where they were. Nowadays, third graders--and maybe even younger kids--have cell phones. You used to have to save up your babysitting money to be able to pay for your very own land line in your room--times have changed.

I don't always change with them, at least not as fast as the early adopters. I have even been known to resist new technologies. It still feels strange to take pictures without loading film into my camera. It took years of ridicule and teasing from friends before I began using online banking, and even now, B takes care of most of that work. And I refuse to join online social networking sites.

Myspace, Facebook, Friendster--I vaguely understand the differences between them, but I don't understand how they could possibly improve my life (and in fact, see only room for them to detract from it), so I have thus far resisted joining. However, I recognize these websites as entities that provide life-changing experiences. People who are just a few years younger than I would never question the value of their myspace pages, which they use to keep in touch with their network of friends. Many kids spend hours every night on these social websites, leaving notes for friends and responding to others' comments.

The passage of time between the late nineties and the late oughts can be counted on only two hands, but the changes in the technological experiences of young people who came of age during this time period has dramatically changed our life experiences. I am technically part of Generation Y, but my fellow older Ys and I have lived much different lives from the younger Ys that I wonder if we should even be grouped together. This rapid-changing technology, which has the tendency to widen generation gaps between those who are tech savvy and those who are not, is also changing the way that we have to look at generations. People who are just a few years apart experience life-changing technologies at different ages, so the advancements affect them in different ways.

In short, generations are getting smaller. B is part of the internet generation--because the internet was just getting big when he was in college. I consider myself to be part of the Napster generation (for better or for worse) because my generation took the internet and used it the way that we wanted to, regardless of a variety of factors (including reason, common sense, and the law--I did say for better or for worse). I'm not sure when the Myspace generation began, but I suspect it's the batch of kids who entered college soon after I did. As for kids who are in college now? I guess we'll have to wait and see what they come up with, but I do know this--it'll be techie and cutting edge--and I suspect that I will resist it.