It’s slowly coming to that point where I realize just how much I’ve grown up. Whether it be because I have more dress shirts than I did a year ago, or because my wonderful genetics has given me the chance to have some (a bunch) gray hairs at the ripe old age of 21. But, if there is one thing that has made me realize it more than anything, it’s from an infographic that I found on Pinterest just an hour ago. I was trying my best to just put off writing the third of four blog posts, this is number four by the way, but in the process I found a little bit of inspiration mixed with creativity.
The graphic itself (figure 1) talks about how we can better understand Generation Z, those born between 1995-2009. It gives you an A-Z representation of how they speak. It’s a decoder ring of sorts. While I was reading it, I didn’t think much of it other than “this is funny” until I came upon the letter “I”.
Figure 1 (INFOGRAPHIC!)
The letter “I” reads as follows: “Because I am the centre[sic] of everything (and there is an i in everything!)”
It wasn’t until I got to that point did I realize that the tail end of my generation (that would be Gen. Y by process of elimination) along with generation Z, is that we focus primarily on one thing, ourselves. Even in the way we talk, it always comes back to “I”. We have pages upon pages devoted to this idea of “me” on the internet. Literally, I have eight that I can think of off the top of my head. I have: a blog, a Facebook, a Twitter, a personal website, a Google+ account, a Pinterest, a LinkedIn profile, and am now a (once again) new member of Myspace.
I seem to really care about myself. At least it seems that way. It’s funny because we call what we do on the internet “self branding”. By putting our name out there, we are branding ourselves for the world to see. But what are we really doing? We are doing our best to get people to look at us in the way that we want them to see who we are. We are giving them the magic mirror of sorts and letting them decide based upon a webpage, whether or not they will “like” us. The big picture scares a lot of people, including me, and it makes me wonder if we are a generation of “I”s, instead of a generation of “we”s.
Now, I’m not trying to get preachy, but for as much as I love social media, I do hate the fact that I have let it become such a part of my life. I hate that it has become such a large part of culture. We can’t escape it. We won’t escape it.
So, in the words of generation Z. I totes fear that kids I will hire, will one day say totes to me.
-Colin
