Thread by @thejournalista

There are a lot of boomers and cuspers taking issue with the fact I said Gen X is the first generation to have existed in both the analog and digital world.

I didn't make a mistake when I said it.

https://twitter.com/thejournalista/status/1371631094680809480

Gen X is bilingual in this regard. Boomer, with the possible exception of some Boomers on the cusp of Gen X, are decidedly NOT.

Sure, you have lived in both times, however, how accurately have you navigated it.

This is not a slight. What I mean is Gen X speaks the language. Honestly we built the gotdamn language. The social web started on weblogs, and who created weblogs?

Yes. Gen X.

Gen X, think back to when you had to explain to people what blogs were. Remember that?

Remember getting your invite to join Twitter (you had to have one to join when it first started. Thank you, @anildash for mine)?

We have to teach our parents everything. And yes, there are exceptions, as always, but again, those are exceptions and NOT the rule.

My mom is a social media pro. BUT. I gave her like two AOL lessons in the 90s and then told her to figure it out for herself. She did.

But for the most part, these technologies were slow to be adopted by Boomers.

So yes, Gen X has navigated this frontier and the one before it. We will also be able to navigate whatever comes next, because we have the skillset to do it.

(Because as soon as your Gen X auntie figures out TikTok shit, y'all are going to be SICK of me. Fair warning)

So while I get that y'all have lived during both time periods, you have not necessarily navigated it with the ease that we have.

Please. One older boomer not on the cusp. Tell me about the Lemonade game on old computers.

A lot of the tech things you guys enjoy—including this very app we are conversing on now—were created by members of Gen X.

Ev Williams (@ev), one of the initial founders and former CEO of Twitter, helped create this as well as both Blogger and Medium.

Blogger and Medium are still two of the biggest platforms out there.

He's a year younger than me. Gen X says you're welcome.

So, all of that to say, we may not have had computers in our elementary school classrooms the way Xennials and Millennials did, but we still adapted very quickly when we got access.

Boomers? Not so much.