With birth years from the early 1980’s to the early 2000’s, Generation Y is not like any other generation in history. This group is evolving fast, due to the rise in technology. Elementary school days for these children included Sony’s Play Station One and Nintendo 64 controllers in hand. Needless to say, this was the first generation born into the mobile device.
The way things worked in the past is changing drastically, which has resulted in a new way of doing things. Some of these changes have regressed the progress of society, while others helped us move forward.
As much as Blackboard is a convenience to check grades or homework rather than finding other means to get such information, it seems that parents to these kids are much more willing to go the extra step to do something for themselves.
This is an entitled generation that is used to being spoon-fed everything—perhaps even the life of dating.
Even though it was fun to spend middle school days on AOL Instant Messenger, and soon after that, MySpace, such technology has changed the ways of communication. Facebook has made it easy to meet someone by simply typing and clicking ‘send.’ It is almost as if this group relies on technology in order to interact with one another.
Older generations had to go through the daunting process of going up to their crush with some kind of sly remark in order to catch their attention. Now, it is as easy as a Facebook “poke” to get the point across that you are interested.
When it comes to dating, it is a matter of being grounded and understanding what technology’s uses are for and what face-to-face is for. Unfortunately, the majority of Generation Y struggles with this.
It is easier to get one another’s emotions through facial expressions or body gestures when communicating face-to-face. The only emotions being interpreted through texting are when someone over-thinks the content in a received text message. Such thoughts include “Is she mad because she answered with just ‘Ok’ and not “Okayyy’?” or “He seems mad because he ended his sentence with a period and not three exclamation points.”
As ridiculous as it sounds, this happens all the time. Parents of these kids never had to deal with such issues. Their only means of communicating with one another was through their house phones.
Furthermore, there seems to be more independence for this generation. For parents, there was no such thing as going on a first date without meeting the woman’s parents. Now, it is not rare for parents to get introduced to their child’s boyfriend or girlfriend a while into dating.
It is easy to dwell on how much things have changed after hearing parents talk about their high school or college days. It is scary to think about the changes that have yet to come if this much change has already occurred over the past 20 years. Who knows, maybe people will be able to fall in love with their operating systems someday just like Theodore in the new movie, “Her.”
Jordan Crowley can be contacted at jcrowley@keene-equinox.com