Re: My Generation
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I'm 27, so I guess I'm part of your generation.
What really irks me about young people today is their total lack of any sort of attention span and their obsessions with electronic socializing. They'd rather text with their friends than simply pick up the phone and give em a call.
Our generation also seems to be hopeless followers, blindly influenced by "hip" media like MTV, which sells itself as some sort of counter-culture when in reality it's a corporate machine that influences kids to listen to bad music. And let's not even talk about Emo.
Also, I hate, hate, hate Internet shorthand and humor: Pwned, Rick-rolling, QFT, stupid YouTube virals, like that idiot college comic team Smosh, etc... But kids today love that crap. But get 'em to try to sit down and watch a WC Fields movie and they'd probably think it's stupid and old. It's bothersome they have no interest in anything beyond their self-contained world, which usually revolves around the Internet and terrible music.
For me, the discussions about various crap in NVG highlight the current twenty-something mindset, which craves something quick, digestable, and easily forgotten.
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This is a very good point. The attention span of this generation, and its easy cop-out of calling it ADD with anyone who could possibly be diagnosed with it, or would just like to claim it, is a real loss. When I went to college, a sort of meta-goal was expanding one's attention span in order to cope with the increased intellectual demands. Now it seems Americans are getting fairly good at multi-tasking, but often terrible at working in depth. And a narrow attention span is actually quite limiting when it comes to multi-tasking, too, because multi-tasking is about successful coordination of tasks and ideas, too, not just riffing through them real fast. Many young people I've worked with who pride themselves on their ability to multi-task actually do it quite poorly, because it's not enough to be able to do a whole lot of things poorly.
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