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by Arnold De Villa
May 16, 2013
“Millennials are a generation mostly of teens and 20 somethings known for constantly holding up cameras, taking pictures of themselves and posting them online”
– Josh Sanburn, Time Magazine, May 20, 2013
My wife and I belong to the latter batch of baby boomers, the generation for which the future of Social Security pensions is predictably dismal. Our demographics range from the post war oldies through the hippie movement of the 60’s and the Vietnam protestors after that. During that era though, many of us were still kids. Some label our generation as “Generation X”, suburban kids whose income has outpaced that of their parents. The polemics are significant but not my personal focus. As Baby Boomers, we saw the transition of television from a black and white screen encased in huge furniture to a colored flat screen with a slightly smaller box. The copying machine we knew was the one that needed a paste of ink and a stencil to type in a key. Our computers in College were the huge refrigerator-like main frames locked up in a room and all that we saw were dumb monitors with a twinkling white cursor manipulated by BASIC commands. Windows were not opened nor made. And when I was a freshman in College, the slide rule was on its way out while the pocket calculator started its trend.
Around three decades later, technology leaped a million years, innovations that used to be in vogue vanished in obsolescence, and new inventions which were mere futuristic idealisms took over the world and over the minds of this new generation called “Millennials”. A recent edition of “Time Magazine” labeled this era as a “me generation”, mired in a narcissistic world view of people who still live with their parents and possess a deep sense of entitlement.
As mentioned from the quote above, they are the late teens and the early 20’s who probably have never used a fax machine before, does not know what a slide rule is, and is the target focus of “Tweeter”, “Facebook” and “Instagram”. They love taking pictures of themselves in odd positions, text messages as if there was no end, and cannot survive without their iPhones, Androids or other forms of smart phones. They have the fastest fingers that convert telegraphic missives into a new symbolic language oftentimes deprived of proper grammar and syntax.
According to “Time Magazine”, Millennials consist of people born from 1980 to 2000. Allegedly, they are the biggest age group in America to date. Time Magazine also alleges that the Millennials have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any other previous groups. I am quite indifferent to what Time Magazine claims about this generation, except for the fact that my son belongs to this group. It was because of him that my interest in their article started. And as I read, I realized that he indeed belonged to that group with all the signs and symptoms that exemplify the generation. I panicked. We always have a high regard for our own children despite their tattoos, their attachments, the rings that pierce their noses and metal links in other parts of their body.
There is something in the Social Media software like Facebook, Tweeter and Instagram that is more of an oxymoron than anything else. Facebook, for instance, pretends to connect friends but the “like” button has functioned more like a virtual compensation for popularity, the likes of which are marked by full accounts with 5000 “friends” and a multitude of followers. “Tweeter” claims to be a micro blog which actually seems to be an accumulated collection of soliloquys with followers and following that took the stead of Facebook’s friends. And I say oxymoron because while it may be true that virtual relationships and cyber friendships are progressing, physical closeness and real communication due to Social Networks seem to be both deteriorating.
As I see my son thumbing his phone one letter at a time, totally engrossed on his Galaxy and his I-Pad in almost everywhere we go, I ask myself whatever happened to the “Social” event, the part of which he was supposed to interact with people. Just like other members of his generational tribe, physical people tended to be foregrounds secondary to individuals connected through a user name and a password. Hence, they chat or tweet their time away to as many people as they can, in the shortest possible while, with the briefest plausible message. In so doing, the microscopic short moments convert into an accumulation of fragmented hours marked by clicking and sending telegraphic missives encoded in their own jargon.
As a parent, even without chatting with other parents, I could probably assume a consensus on the sheer annoyance we all share every time our Millennial gets locked up in a social networking mode. In this mode, the distinction between social indolence and social productivity is as tough as reading the manual of a new software program. How in the world would we want someone to know everything that we do, what we eat and the places we go? And most of all, what is the rationale behind the frenzy of wanting others to know about a change in hair style, a different new shirt, or the way tongues stick out for a new pose? How in the world is it possible to virtually converse with other people on an incessant basis, on a 24-7 itinerary?
I dared not to ask lest I drove my son away. I allowed him to be him through the process of matured tolerance and a huge dose of “saintly” patience. There was a time when his phone broke down and I was euphoric convincing myself that he could probably have dinner with us without tampering with his phone. But of course, the I-Pad also had texting capabilities. How can I forget? I bought it for him. His texting never ended. His chatting was incessant. And I did not understand. I obviously needed a new code. Years passed.
Yesterday, at a convocation exercise, my Millennial son received various awards, one of which caught my attention more than anything else. Besides being recognized for his academic performance and receiving a transfer scholarship, he got an award for being the Student volunteer of the year who marked the most number hours in different undertakings from civic issues to political fund raisings and projects with habitat for humanity. Needless to say, it was the code I needed to decode what Time Magazine alleged and to understand the background of the technological foreground I witnessed under my own nose.
Time Magazine somewhat neglected to mention about the exception. The constant contact of Millennials among their peers is not an absolute conglomeration of superficial bantering and senseless chicanery. Somewhere along the chain is change we often do not see, not for lack of execution, but for lack of explicit narration. That which is often significant does not become popular until the right moment of execution actually takes place. The Boston Marathon Bombing could be a perfect example. Suspects were caught due to the speed of information and the agents that dissipated the information.
So in the end, I guess patience paid. The Baby Boomer has conceived the birth of the Millennial as both groups have dominated demographic growths in their respective times. Millennials may be accused as lazy and narcissistic. The Hippies of the Baby Boomer crowd were also accused of the same stereotype. Yet, somewhere in the untested benefits of technology, are social exceptions of hidden greatness. Patience and time perhaps are the markers of such events. They come when they come.
Just like any father is, I am proud of my son. And his awards are probably the best mother’s day gift that he could give his mom. Soon, he will stop being a millennial and form his own trend. Before that happens, I will probably have to learn from his texting methods and carefully watch the social changes that he does. Finally decoded!