Now this one is truly junk:
The Internet is something most of us have come to take for granted, so those of us old enough to recall a world without the Internet sometimes need to take a minute to be kind of amazed at how quickly the Internet went from birth to what it is today. Those of us not old enough to recall a world without an Internet can't even imagine it.
Growing Up A Second-Wave Baby Boomer
In order to share the perspective from which I view both the world and the Internet, I suppose I should share that I'm a Baby Boomer. Because the perspective and experiences of Baby Boomers can be slightly different, depending on which "wave" of the Baby Boom it was that swept them into American society; I'll mention that I'm, I guess, a "second-wave" Baby Boomer. There's actually another reason I feel the need to make it very clear that I'm a second-wave Boomer, and that is my apparent insecurity about having to admit that I'm over 45 in public, and on the Internet about which I write. The thing is, there is the "real world" (the offline world). Then there's the "Internet world", which is sometimes only the Internet world but sometimes a blend of both real world and Internet world. Then again, with its role in the real world, one can't forget that the Internet and the real world are also, in most ways, all part of the same universe.
Whether or not someone is considered a "Baby Boomer" depends, of course, on whether he was born in those years following the end of World War II, when the peace, prosperity, and American Dream that followed the war's end resulted in the population phenomenon that would result in a seismic shift in American society and culture. Exactly, which years are encompassed by the term, "Baby Boom", depends on who (and for what purposes) is defining that term, but the narrower (and most commonly used) definition of the Baby Boom is generally associated with the ten years following the end of World War II.
In any case, I always like to point out that I'm a second-wave Boomer, not just to hang onto any shreds of illusion associated with "not yet being THAT old", but because have actually been fairly noticeable social and economic differences between first-wave Boomer, second-wave Boomers, and "end-wave" Boomers (who sometimes aren't even really considered "Boomers" at all).
Even as a second-wave Boomer, my high-school graduating class marked a peak in terms of number of students (246, I believe) for the barely developed suburb to which my family had moved from the city. I assume that was a matter of a first influx of Boomer parents moving into the town and having younger siblings for their first-wave-Boomer kids; with the parents slightly younger than my own reaching the financial stability to buy one of the plentiful, new, homes to which they could move from cities. Some differences between my older sister's (and even older girl-cousins') place in the wave and my own was that I got to be among the first generation of girls to play with Barbie dolls; I get to count myself among the many, former, Romper Room viewers; and long, straight, hair was the most popular hairstyle shown in pictures in my high-school yearbook. (One girl in my high-school yearbook did have "a tease job", but who knows what her problem was.... but I digress.)
Another difference between first-wave Boomers and second-wave Boomers may be reflected in careers that were highly valued for high-school kids of the first wave, as compared to those that were most valued for second-wave kids. When my older, boy-cousins, made their parents proud by pursing degrees in business; aunts, uncles, and cousins all had faith that each of those future business-men would live an impressive, admired, and comfortable, lifestyle. It's probably worth noting that this kind of thinking was, I think, fairly typical of the suburban, middle-class (partly White Collar/partly Blue Collar) environment in which I lived.
By the time kids of my graduating class had begun thinking about careers, first-wave Boomers were already in college, or had recently graduated, and had already either created, or been influenced by, "The Peace Movement". Peace, love, drugs, and hating "The Man" , "The System", "The Establishment", and anyone over thirty was a common thread of thinking for those first-wave Boomers. By the time I was over the age when my friends and I were considering careers and educational pursuits, "The Businessman" wasn't held in awfully high esteem for a lot of kids (or teachers).
There were, I'm sure, kids for whom business and management was what their fathers did, and who knew their fathers weren't "horrible and corrupt people". A lot of these kids did grow up disregarding the then-popular contempt for business and going into business. Then again, there were kids who didn't think much about their business-man-father's values and who vowed never to be like their father. The point is that while there were certainly people of my age who went into business, a lot of the bloom had worn off the being-a-business-man rose.
Alongside the major shifts in a lot of the thinking at the time, advances in technology had blossomed to the point where not seeing where technology was taking the workforce and the economy would have required even the least tuned-in of Americans to close his eyes, or else turn his back on the world completely.
to be continued - or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment