"WE ARE THE GENERATION GAP!"

source: Stollen and Wolf

Toward the end of Company, Bobby’s friend Joanne (a bit older, and perhaps a bit more cynical), tells him, “Do you know that we are suddenly at an age where we find ourselves too young for the old people and too old for the young ones. We’re nowhere. I think we better drink to us. To us – the generation gap. WE ARE THE GENERATION GAP!”

In our production, set today in 2018, this line takes on a special resonance. Bobby, Joanne, and most of Bobby’s friends actually do fall precisely into a generation gap. Too old to be from Gen X, too young to be Millennials, they are sometimes referred to as Xennials (others refer to this group as The Oregon Trail Generation, a reference to a video game series that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s). Born roughly between 1977 and 1983 (some demographers extend the years to 1985), they experienced an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.

Marleen Stollen and Gisela Wolf, both Xennials, describe the experience this way: “As children we played outdoors, engaged in games we made ourselves, a long time before the advent of gaming consoles. We made macramé bracelets for our friends and wrote each other postcards.” And Anna Garvey, another Xennial, shares these reflections on what childhood was like for her and her peers: “We used pay-phones; we showed up at each other’s houses without warning; we often spoke to our friends’ parents before we got to speak to them; and we had to wait at least an hour to see any photos we’d taken.” As they progressed through their teen years and into early adulthood, their personal development kept pace with the growth of technology and the internet (See the Feb. 11 blog post, “Anyway, you’re thirty-five” for a timeline).

Stollen and Wolf reflect on one of the outcomes of having been born at this singular time: “We use social media like we were born to do it. But we can remember a life without them.” That recollection of a life without social media may be nostalgic at times, bittersweet at others. Garvey looks back on it with a sense of relief: “We [she and her peers] frequently discuss how insanely glad we are that we escaped the middle school, high school and college years before social media took over and made an already challenging life stage exponentially more hellish. We all talked crazy amounts of shit about each other, took pictures of ourselves and our friends doing shockingly inappropriate things and spread rumors like it was our jobs, but we just never had to worry about any of it ending up in a place where everyone and their moms (literally) could see it a hot second after it happened.” Garvey and her friends clearly rejoice in a life before social media.

As much as we love our smartphones, they can be a tyrannical force in our lives. More on the push/pull, love/hate relationship with technology in the next blog post!

Click here for a quiz from The Guardian to see if you qualify as an Xennial.

Sources

"Are You a Xennial? Take the Quiz," The Guardian, 26 June 2017, 
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jun/27/are-you-a-xennial-take-the-quiz

Garvey, Anna. "The Oregon Trail Generation: Life Before and After Mainstream Tech," Social Media Week, 21 April, 2015, https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/04/oregon-trail-generation/

Grosvenor, Emily. "Going West: The World of Live-Action, Competitive Oregon Trail," The Atlantic, 25 Sept. 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/the-true-story-of-real-life-oregon-trail/380730/

Stollen, Marleen, and Gisela Wolf. "There's a Term for People Born in the Early 80's Who Don't Feel Like a Millennial or a Gen Xer," Business Insider, 10 Jan. 2018, http://www.businessinsider.com/people-born-between-gen-x-millennials-xennials-2017-11