Have large portions of my generation devolved into a vapid, faux-counterculture mess? Maybe. I may be loathe to label myself a hipster (which, as HRO puts it, “is a term for mainstream news publications & startup ‘progressive’ journalistic outlets 2 talk about to cultivate interest in what they are doing with people who use the internet”), I’m well aware of the possibility that I probably am one. I have numerous American Apparel t-shirts. I enjoy cheap beer. I keep up with underground music. I have a blog. I am a Philosophy major at a liberal arts college.
I’m not sure which part of all this makes me hip. Before the internet came around, it was hard to be a member of a counterculture group. Music had to be discovered through cheaply-produced zines. Fashion trends spread slower without party pics sites. If I had been a teen in the 70s, 80s, or even the early 90s, I would have had no idea what was going on in Brooklyn.
So what all this says to me is that my generation can be pretty well divided into two groups: the one that reads blogs, and the one that doesn’t. If Hipster Runoff (my personal favorite authority on all that is hip, alt, electro, or otherwise) is right, then by virtue of you reading this, you are probably a hipster (or maybe my mother). Get used to it—we’re a demographic now.
Today I found out (through Boing Boing, while we’re name-dropping blogs) that an organization called the Digital Youth Project has been working for the last three years on a case study of what kids are doing online and what this means for society. The BB article explains it a lot better than I can, but the findings are pretty awesome. The idea is that all the “time-wasting” stuff that kids do online—instant messaging, social networking, blogging, what have you—is actually an integral part to online exploration and education. The internet is not just for research, and I’m glad for that.
I feel like I’m in a weird age group. I don’t get too much into generational definitions, but Wikipedia says that I’m a member of Generation Y or the Net Generation. I think that, in general, this generation is one that has grown up in the midst of the technological boom. I remember not having a computer or cell phones, and I feel nostalgia for early-90s cartoons. I think that this is a key characteristic. This generation has been the first one to embrace technology wholesale, with a willingness to integrate it into nearly every aspect of our lives.
The next generation (Gen Z?) is weirder. They’ve never experienced life without computers or cell phones. They are being raised on high-speed internet. This is astounding and kind of scary; I wonder how far they’ll go with what my generation has started.
For the last couple of years I’ve been considering a Masters in Library Science for graduate school. I feel like it would marry my loves of technology and information quite nicely. I’ve recently found, though, that there’s a burgeoning field in New Media Studies. I don’t think that the two tracks are mutually exclusive, but I spent a good bit of time today looking at New Media programs and what they entail. I like what I see. The future is going to be increasingly user-generated, and I feel like my place in the world is part of that.
I’m contemplating a move away from Tumblr. I like the interface and everything, but it’s really more suited for short snippets of internet joy than longer-form, numerical blogging. If anyone who reads this has a suggestion for a different system (not Blogger), I’d be happy to hear it. Users, Generate!
