By GRACE POLANECZKY – Staff Writer
Our generation, like every one before, will be judged by older generations. The so-called “millennials,” or those of us born around the 1990s through early 2000s, have been generalized as self-obsessed, lazy, dense and, perhaps a trait most synonymous with today’s teens, obsessed with technology.
TIME Magazine columnist Joel Stein described us as “The Me Me Me Generation” in his controversial article of the same name from TIME’s May 2013 issue. Although this opinion patronizes today’s youth, it is widely-held among adults, which is abundantly evident just in the ways that our parents joke about us or the articles that people like Stein write.
But why is this the prevailing stereotype? What is it that causes the Me Me Me-generation to be viewed in such a way? Above all, there is one big difference between young adults today and the young adults of the past: technology.
Just in the past 20 years, technology has advanced rapidly, hugely impacting the way that we go about our lives. We have the ability to receive information more quickly than ever before, with the click of a mouse or the press of a button, yet does that make us narcissistic? To utilize the knowledge available to us?
With this advancement in technology and information-sharing came inevitable social media, where we can project an image of our ideal selves for our peers to see. To know what others think of us is a lot of reassurance, even when that reassurance is superficial.
However, when it comes to the relationship between this generation and modern social media, who should get the blame?
Older generations are using the power of technology to invent networks like Twitter or the devices that teens are so dependent on like the ever-evolving iPhone. Young people are targets for corporations, and their advertising is often finetuned to them– we will always seek out the next best thing as the world around us is changing.
Just because we have access to all of these things, socializing more doesn’t suddenly make us vain and self-obsessed. Taking advantage of what we have is not only a simple concept but a predictable one.
Young people are dependent on their gadgets and desire to always stay connected, and sometimes it’s to an unhealthy extent. It’s unfair to be be blindly critical of a generation that is only following what they are used to, when it’s just what they’ve always known.
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