In Response to: The Oregon Trail Generation’s Most Important Battle

Ashley
Ashley
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

Even before I heard the phrase Oregon Trail Generation, I would always try & explain to people that the “micro-generation” between Gen X & millennials was unique because we grew up *with* the internet (as in it aged along with us, as if it were are classmate per-say). It wasn’t until I discovered the 2015 article, Oregon Trail Generation: Life Before & After Mainstream Tech that I came to an “ah ha!” moment of realization.

I’ve done a lot of reading, research and writing about being a Oregon Trail Millennial. However, this blog post hit on an amazing point I never thought of — about how our unique experience growing up gave us the tools to know fact from fake on the internet. I don’t believe I ever had to take a test like the one mentioned in the post (not that I remember, at least), but there was always an ingrained sense of skepticism with the internet. Scrutinization of legitimacy became automatic when doing anything on the internet.

Now looking back over the past two years or so (before fake news was even a “thing”), the first two things I would do when I opened a news article on Facebook was:

  1. Check the design of the website — is it professional/clean looking?
  2. Check the URL — is it typical looking? Is it consistent with other things from that site?

I remember crashing our (only) computer because of a bad Napster file, even after throughly scrutinizing it (does the file name look legit? how many seeds does it have?) and being devastated until my mom was able to get someone to fix it. Never again would I download anything from Napster.

I’ve thought of several different ways the Oregon Trail Generation will/should play a critical role in today’s political universe, but this was not one of them. But, I think this role, of distributing the knowledge we have to educate others on disinformation and alike, is the most crucial role it will ever have.

I am very much looking forward to the next blog post!


The author of the original blog post is @XianJaneway on Twitter.

Ashley

Written by

Ashley

#OregonTrailGeneration Millennial addicted to the convergence of my generation &...pretty much everything. #TheResistance #FreeTheBear #StillWithHer

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