Media Use as a Generational Marker

October 24th, 2008 by Sue Blaney

Here’s an interesting take on media use and your tech habits…you can take a quick quiz that evaluates your media habits and links them with your apparent membership in a particular generation. Are you a boomer? If you don’t text, don’t use Facebook, and don’t even share pictures from your phone you are likely to fall into the baby boomer category in this quiz. Generation Jones-ers are slightly more contemporary (never heard of Generation Jones? those of us born between 1954 and 1965…it is an important subset of the Baby Boomer group.) Of course, Gen X-ers are all over the web with music and video downloads, remixing, blogging and more.

We’ve talked about this issue a lot here, and I think this researcher’s assessment of boomers may be a bit more harsh than necessary. But, if you are still resisting the newer technologies, don’t. Start taking steps one at a time to get up to speed. One mom who is an educator recently told me that she has finally gotten her 17 year old son to open up a bit…and she did it by learning how to text with him on their phones. “He’s always been really quiet,” she said, “and getting him to talk has been a challenge. But now that we text back and forth, I’m amazed at the long and insightful messages he’ll send me!” My son, who is living in Colorado, is also one of those members of the male species who doesn’t want to spend a lot of time talking on the phone with his Mom, but he’ll occasionally send me a photo through his phone of something so special it needs no words. This kind of communication is a special message between us and I completely get it. Here’s his most recent message to me:

mountain sunrise

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1 response about “Media Use as a Generational Marker”

Adam Stanhope said:
October 26th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
The “Generation Jones” meme has been getting some real traction of late. I must confess that it is new to me, but now that I am aware of it I am seeing it everywhere.

There was a post on Huffington Post today about it:

[Huffington Post]

Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune and MSNBC fame has been touting it:

[Clarence Page]

Generation Jones even has its own website!

[GenerationJones.com]