GenX, We Bridged the Technological Gap
Boomers get made fun of because they don’t know how to use technology and Millennials get made fun of for always being on their phones but there is a forgotten middle generation called Generation X (GenX) that bridged the gap between these two extremes. The world didn’t go from writing letters in cursive to texts typed in Helvetica overnight and it wasn’t a single hop. GenX experienced, absorbed, and mastered more change and greater degrees of it than any generation before or since. GenX bridged the gap from the analog to the digital world and like everything else we’ve done, it has been overlooked.
Note: Links have been provided for devices and things the younger generations may not be familiar with
Because it varies, I will call out that I am using Pew Research’s definition of the generations so GenX is defined as people born from 1965 to 1980. GenX was born into an analog world of record albums and over-the-air radio stations. As children, we waited by the radio with our fingers on the red record button of a bulky cassette player in anticipation of capturing our new favorite song of the week. The alternative was to pay a fortune for a record album or 8-Track of 11 songs you didn’t like and one you loved. To be late to hit the record button or miss the timing altogether was so painful because who knew when you’d have another shot? The worst was when you nailed the timing but the DJ (Disc Jockey) talked over the first part of the song. Arggggg!
The first real technological miracle GenX experienced was the Sony Walkman that let us take our own, non-commercially interrupted music with us wherever we wanted to go on relatively small cassette tapes. This transformed our lives and opened us up to new technologies so when the CD (Compact Disk) came along it spelled the (temporary) death of the record album and you would see stacks of them next to garbage cans and piles of them at thrift stores. The CD again changed everything as heaps of cassettes now went to the landfill. With the CD came the concept of a music file which began the next and most exciting chapter of the music revolution.
The prevailing file compression that became the standard was the MP3. We discovered we could play them on our desktop computers and even “rip” them from our CDs. Now for the third time, in some of our lives, we had to transform our music collection to a new format or be locked in the past. Then came Napster. There were several services like it but the whole class of peer-to-peer file-sharing sites started with Napster and after having bought some of the same music in two or three formats already, we felt entitled to it. We had thousands of songs but were handcuffed to our computers. If only we could keep them in our pockets! Then the iPod changed everything, again, and then our phones became our iPods. The Radio survived probably because of cars but once streaming services appeared like Pandora and Spotify we saw the writing on the wall and another chapter of our lives gone by.
When we were children most homes had one landline phone and you had to pay extra for long-distance calls so you talked fast to your Grandma. If you were lucky, the twisty plastic-wrapped curly cord was long enough to stretch into a room where you could close the door for privacy. When cordless phones started going mainstream that was an amazing boon to our privacy, or so we thought, as we didn’t know every house with a baby monitor close by could listen in. Then came pagers (aka bepers) which were for doctors and drug dealers at first as they were expensive and then next up were the self-important people. Of course, once you were paged, you had to find a payphone and call the person back so people invented codes (911) to send to the pagers to prevent unnecessary calls. Yes, payphones, which were once everywhere (not kidding), where you put in a quarter, entitling you to one local call, with local being defined by area codes, which is why they were once a big deal. The area code your phone number started with defined what was a local call for you and what was a call you paid for by the minute! What a crazy world it was.
GenX next experienced the greatest expansion of communication capabilities ever as the cell phones came down in price and became ubiquitous, at least for adults. Everyone had one of those Nokia ‘candy bars’ or if you were cool, a flip phone which is now experiencing a renaissance. All these phones did was make phone calls and text, and you had to pay for each one so you used them sparingly, but it was amazing to get ahold of people no matter where they were. What we didn’t immediately realize we lost was the ability to not be gotten ahold of. As kids, we were off the grid the second we left our house and now it’s damn near impossible. Flip phones became smartphones and then we had the internet with us at all times and could communicate with damn near anyone on the planet. The revolution in communication was miraculous and we lived it firsthand and figured out a path that led to today.
GenX grew up at a time when people manually typed letters using a typewriter… un-ironically. It was that or write it out in cursive, which is a dead writing system used by the ancients. We were the first to experience the early PCs and could appreciate their game-changing nature because we played the game before and after their arrival. We learned how to add a sound card and update a DOS batch file, not because we wanted to but because we had to in order to do what we wanted to do. We heard the gleeful sounds of a dial-up modem screeching its siren song of connection and we felt the pain when someone in the house picked up the phone and broke the signal.
We played on the pre-internet network of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) like CompuServe or America Online where we discovered we had mail. Then came broadband and instead of a 1-centimeter horizontal line of pixels arriving every 10 seconds, adding to what would eventually become one picture, we had dozens of instant pictures. Then came sound files and then video, to round out the “multi” in multimedia, and now instant everything everywhere. We not only were young enough to figure it out and adapt but old enough to know what came before and appreciate it. We went from fifty-pound CRT monitors with a 10-inch screen and pixelated graphics on our one household computer to hi-def, thin, cheap multiple displays all around us and with us at all times.
We grew up on board games and only later got a taste of the bliss of video games. When they first came out it was usually one or two kids on the block who got an Atari or NES and all the other kids would flock there. There would be six of us patiently waiting our turn unknowingly experiencing Twitch IRL 25 years before it existed. We got to see the arcade video games we spent stacks of quarters in the mall come into our living rooms and we saw graphics go from 8-bit pixels to the realm of the uncanny valley and beyond. We’ve seen Mario jump over barrels in an arcade and then in our living rooms then to our pockets and now wherever we want.
Technological obsolescence isn’t extinction, it’s irrelevance. Records didn’t disappear when the cassette, CD, or MP3 went mainstream. The radio and broadcast TV survived the iPod and DVD and live on today alongside streaming services. You can still buy typewriters, just ask a hipster 10 years ago. Retro video games live on and thousands of people still carry a pager. These ancient technologies are like dinosaurs flying around us in the guise of birds. The past didn’t disappear it lives amongst us and in us, but you have to have lived it the first time around to spot and appreciate it.
GenX grew up watching only a few Television Networks that were broadcast over the airwaves and may or may not have had a clear reception on a TV we had to share with the family. We only had kids’ shows for a couple of hours after school and on Saturday mornings. If we missed a show, that was it, we missed that show. There was no rewind and no rewatch just the hope that they aired it as a rerun otherwise you may have to wait years until it was put into syndication if it ever was. Syndication was when a show sold the rights to air its old episodes and that network would run them 5 days a week or more instead of the original once a week. VCRs were the greatest thing ever when they came out not only because you could pick movies to watch at home without commercials, but you could tape the shows that you were going to miss. The concept of missing out on a program is lost as even in live events like sports you may is the instant but the moment lives on in many forms visible at any time.
William Gibson famously said “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.“ and it was never more true than when talking about cable TV. It was true of the other technologies too as only the people with more money could be early adopters but for cable, it was about where you lived. Cable went to the cities first and was more a factor of the population density of your area than of other factors as they had to lay actual physical cables (thus the name) literally (traditional meaning) to your house. We waited and waited because we wanted our MTV…. HBO and many other channels we didn’t even know existed including porn which you could faintly make out if you squinted your eyes and stared at the scrambled signal on those channels. Once we finally got cable it was a game changer as we had crystal clear pictures and exponentially more choices.
Once we had cable and VCRs, and then later DVDs and DVRs we knew the picture was complete. If we paid extra for our cable packages we could get movie channels and if we drove to the local Blockbuster we could pick out what movies we wanted to watch over the next few days. Things could not be better and then Netflix came along and gave us the Blockbuster experience from our homes as all we had to do was put a movie in the envelope that came with it and mail it out and in a few days the next DVD on your online queue would arrive. Again we experienced a glimpse of the future and as revolutionary as it seemed then is as antiquated as it seems now in a world of streaming and casting and watching everywhere on anything.
GenX started with a bland analog world and had it upended and transformed on a revolutionary scale not once but many times. Today we get incremental improvements in things we already have or we’re waiting for that big leap in VR/AR or in robotics but we’ve been promised for so long it will hardly seem like a revolution when it comes, more like an inevitability. GenX experienced the before and after and after again of technology that transformed the way we communicate, were entertained, work, gather information, live, and even think. We experienced unparalleled change again and again and we absorbed and adapted and most of all appreciated it. The Boomers the younger generation makes fun of now for their lack of tech-savvy were the Boomers we made fun of for having their VCRs blink 12:00 forever. The Millennials experienced some of this change but were never grounded in the analog beforehand and GenY may yet see great change but for now kids, you ain’t seen anything yet. Make fun of GenX for having touched the past but let’s see who’s laughing when society experiences the next series of monumental changes and we shrug it off and adapt, as we always have.
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