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Oregon Trail Generation

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Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#31

Post by empressplay »

jsonne wrote: post #29

Fwiw I grew up in a fairly small town in Illinois a few hours outside Chicago and though I was born in 89 I grew up without computers until I was like maybe 6 or 7? So not quite all my childhood but we didn't get internet until maybe the late 90s so to some degree this does resonate with me. I think with technological jumps like this your mileage may very a lot depending on if you're rich (we were solidly middle clas…

Agreed. Conversely I had my own computer when I was 6 in 1981 and my first experiences on what would become the Internet happened in the late 1980s. It all depended on your parents and where you grew up.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#32

Post by nickthemagicman »

THIS IS ME. I've never identified with X-gen or Millenials but THIS. YES!

I had a landline as a child but then around 12.....things started to get digital.

I remember hunting bears and rabbits in my 'computer processing' class in high school in Oregon trail. Which was a class that attempted to teach kids about the new technology that was coming out but wasn't great, because the teacher was a lady in her 60's and me and my friends were light years ahead of her.

The internet was all text for a while, then HTML came out and things started to get CRAZY!'

One friend made the newspaper because he was in high school making tons of money WRITING WEBSITES for people.

I had a beep beep boop modem and you had to pay for the internet by the MINUTE.

My buddys dad had a CAR PHONE because they were super rich.

I went from landline, to flip phone, to blackberry, to smart phone. Text and talk were limited to X number or X number of minutes.

My first computer was a 386 and I would hack the autoexec.bat files to get games to work.

It's pretty crazy being EXACTLY on the cusp of such a massive revolution and cultural shift.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#33

Post by Igelau »

I feel like Millennial doesn't really mean anything. When 9/11 happened, "Millennials" included some early 20s, teenagers, children, and some kids who were too little to grasp the situation. The way the world changed compared to what had been normal is dramatically different for each of these.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#34

Post by scottLobster »

codesections wrote: post #10

I was born slightly outside (after) the official years for this generation, but the description for this generation seems to fit my childhood memories much more closely than many "Millennial" descriptions. Does anyone else born in the mid/late 80s share that feeling?

Yeah I was born in 1987, which is theoretically well into "Millennial" territory by the numbers, and honestly a lot of the "characteristics" section of that article doesn't strike me as particularly well researched.

"AOL Adolescence" Yeah, AOL IM dominated late elementary/middle school.

"Developed relationships before social media". Myspace was the big thing in high school, with facebook taking over senior year because you needed a .edu address to get an account. Before that social mediate didn't really exist in its modern incarnation, every friendship prior to that was pre-social media, and the original social media relationships were largely predicated on real world relationships. Was rather nice back when that was the case.

"They usually weren't on Tinder or Grindr" Uh, Tinder's only been around since 2012, and took a while to gain prominence. Most millennials are outside of the window for Tinder to be their first dating experience. Most of my cohort had graduated college in 2010/2011, I know some people who got freaking married before Tinder even existed.

I could go on, but it seems like just another incarnation of "millennial means young and tech-addicted, so we're moving the goal posts so it means what we want it to mean and we'll make up a new word for what's leftover"

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#35

Post by ogurechny »

It's not obvious that there's a need to have a “generation” for everything. People then start countless discussions about the name as if the name is what really matters.

In my opinion, the characteristic aspect was the widely accepted (and promoted) idea that everyone should learn how to use a computer as a programmable device in the broad sense (whether it was kids with LOGO, professionals with professional software, or general public with general tools and UIs). That education was an important project on a state level. Then the goalposts were silently moved, and it was declared that user already knew enough, and the “intuitive design” or some other thing would deal with the rest. (That doesn't ring true: for some reason, people still need to spend 10 years at school instead of “intuitively” learning all those other things. Moreover, it was the crowd of already prepared people that allowed these practices to be viable.)

A couple of iterations, an today, in the “bright future”, there are crowds of computer illiterate people using computing devices as if they are another kind of TVs or phones. Which is, of course, good for the ones who sell those TV-like devices or software services, but is not good for the rest of the people. Despite all of the promotion, someone who, say, places “just” an internet-connected camera into a home or an office to “simply” check the video stream in a “convenient” smartphone application does not make it “more secure”. On the contrary, all kinds of trouble are to be expected, because a little bit of theory tells us that this system is only secured by someone's promises, and a little bit of practical data tells us that the hardware, software, and security practices in such a system are going to be awful most of the time.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#36

Post by dweekly »

letitbeirie wrote: post #13

I feel like this could have only happened to people in this very specific age range: In 1995, when I was a freshman in high school, they trotted my English class down to the library for a lesson on how to use "the information superhighway." For the next hour or so, the librarian dispensed wisdom to us about how to open Netscape, type URLs into the address bar, and that kind of thing. Put another way, they had a woman…

I took a programming class at my high school in 1994. I was a sophomore and had been programming for a decade, including several internships. It was the first time the school had ever offered a computer class and on the first day the teacher started copying down code onto the whiteboard and as she did I and several other punks in the class started pointing out errors in her logic and syntax. At the end of the first day the school administration decided to make it a "study on your own" class. I learned a lot, mostly by heading out to the local bookstore and going through a few tomes.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#37

Post by BuckRogers »

I always loved this name for my generation. I came across this term and this wiki article years ago and it's very fitting for people my age. Maybe those born from 78-84? I was born in 82 and I know for sure I'm the Oregon Trail generation because I played The Oregon Trail in grade school. And, I remember the Challenger blowing up when I was in kindergarten.

And the big differentiator for me is simply the lack of commonality that we have with the generations after us. Xennials really had the same basic childhood that someone had going all the way back to the 1920s. Anyone that grew up with electricity and at least the Model T that is.

The easiest way to differentiate between newer generations and all that came before if they ever remember a time before the internet at all. Because that and smartphones were the two big game changers for society that I witnessed.

The internet changed the economy enormously, and the smartphone revealed how stupid and manipulated people could really be.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#38

Post by kitsunesoba »

jsonne wrote: post #30
codesections wrote: post #10

I was born slightly outside (after) the official years for this generation, but the description for this generation seems to fit my childhood memories much more closely than many "Millennial" descriptions. Does anyone else born in the mid/late 80s share that feeling?

Yeah I was born in 89 and growing up middle class in a more rural American small town we didn't get internet until the late 90s and didn't use it with any regularity until the early 00s. I got my first laptop when I was going to college in 2008.

This is almost exactly my story. Didn’t have access to so much as a game console, let alone a computer or internet access, until late 1996. Grew up in a rural sleepy town, lots of slow offline time until my parents’ computer was given to me as a hand-me-down in 2000.

It’s a bit crazy being able to contrast the before and after. I can’t think of much that’s happened since that really compares… even smartphones were incremental by comparison.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#39

Post by tantalor »

letitbeirie wrote: post #13

I feel like this could have only happened to people in this very specific age range: In 1995, when I was a freshman in high school, they trotted my English class down to the library for a lesson on how to use "the information superhighway." For the next hour or so, the librarian dispensed wisdom to us about how to open Netscape, type URLs into the address bar, and that kind of thing. Put another way, they had a woman…

I'm sure some of your 1995 classmates did not have personal computers with internet access. Or know anything about the internet outside of AOL.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#40

Post by throwawaysea »

I feel like the date range here is wrong and should probably extend into the late eighties, as children of that age also had analog childhoods. Oregon Trail was a staple of school computers into the late nineties.
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