My generation
Somewhere between The Goonies and Facebook
I was born on July 4th 1980. A date full of meaning for my generation. 1980 was the beginning of a new decade (of a different millenium though). Fourth of July is known to be the birthday of the United States of America as a nation and later as the worldwide culture affecting us all since the ending of World War 2. Today we are all getting closer to blow 40 candles and we should feel obligated to stop for a while, draw a line on the map and see where we came from and where we are going. One of my childhood heroes used to say that “Where we’re going we don’t need roads!” and that kind of dream inspired me all along growing up. Roads don’t have to be paved portions of the Earth. I guess they can also be a metaphor for the many and different ways we can achieve adulthood and awareness. We walked down all those roads till today, leaving or taking something along. Some got lost. Others found the key to success. But our generation is undeniably unique and not replicable.
Movies. Home video consuming peaked in the ’80s when VHS tapes and players were available for most consumers in the western civilization. Hollywood did its part in feeding us with all kinds of genre but a burst of new ideas in the Special FX industry brought to life a bunch of movies still gaining success and revenue today. The Goonies, Back to the future, Terminator, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Predator. Listing could go on for hours. Each one of those movies had a new vision, a new perspective for the viewer. In the meanwhile American culture was spreading so rapidly that everyone could somehow relate to those characters and their mission. Nowadays we don’t see flying cars hovering above our heads (or at least we still have to call them airplanes). Recent movies do not inspire us so much since story and characters are often just a detail and all the effort and the money go to green backgrounds. Neverthless we crawl for Netflix series about the ‘80s (e.g. Stranger Things) and that must mean something. Cold war was about to end and that was a wonderful premise for entering the ’90s. Too bad that kind of peace would last for only 10 years before 9/11. As in the worst sequel we got new enemies and new fears. But heroes from that bunch of movies are still fighting their endless and victimless war in our memories.
Videogames. I started playing Super Mario Bros. when I was 8 years old on my NES console. At that time it looked like the state of the art, not only of videogame technology but of progress itself. The whole tech industry made a lot of improvements since then seeking for a better game experience. That’s exactly why I quit playing videogames. Later on they started to look too much real. Just like books, 8-bit bidimensional screens forced us to imagine, to fantasize. Usually there was one game cartridge and we had to share it following a strict calendar of borrowing and lending. But after school we were able to gain enough free time to start over from the first level when out of lives. On a PS4 you get a whole different experience. Opponents don’t need to be sitting on the same couch. They just need a couch and a broadband connection somewhere around the globe. Amazing. But it weirdly feels like free will from our childhood was lost into modern gameplay. In the near future videogames we’ll literally suck our minds into some new kind of reality and for someone who used to play Duck Hunt it doesn’t sound immediately cool.
Internet and social networking. The greatest breakthrough we witnessed, and some of us also developed, is the Internet. It was already there when I was born but only in the late 90’s it entered our homes and started changing our lives forever. Human knowledge, the whole human knowledge in few inches of plastic and metal reaching your screen through standard wires. In the beginning nobody would have thought about using the greatest invention of the millenium (besides printing press) for fake news so it was pretty cool to “surf the web”. Ok, phone bill was usually not that exiciting but it was definitely worth it. Communicating with a distant friend on the other side of the ocean became so easy and immediate. Just a few years later another revolution changed the way we perceive ourselves. A middle aged man from the 80’s would look at himself in the mirror to get an idea of how cool and handsome he could be that day. Today people just check their Facebook profile looking for Likes. But these new selves became weirdly addictive and interacting with real people is now odd. Even the truth is no more something neat and crystaline or based on the realiability of its source. Let’s just say truth now wanders in the cloud. Luckily we are enough young to know where to find it and enough old to understand if it is really true.
Whatever we shared let’s be honest. Everybody’s experience has been different depending on where and how we spent the last four decades. But I’m pretty sure there’s something connecting us all besides movies or videogames. For our parents we are still young but for our children we are more than adults. And that can only mean we still have time to figure out where we are going.
Whether there will be roads or not.
