Old People: Stop excluding us because we're old.

by Alex Steed

Published December 02, 2008 @ 08:31AM PT

Old People: We're Millennials too!

I have been getting a lot of feedback from older people who suggest that talking in "generational" terms (i.e. "Millennial activism") is counter-productive. They, too, are tech-savvy, and they, too, are interested in positive change. I should be talking to older people as well, they suggest.

I find it is important for my generation to form its own identity with its own voice, as if we don't contribute accordingly, that voice will be, like ones before it have been victim to, adopted and written for us by advertisers and news magazines. Fortunately, it is not in our disposition to let that happen and we're already predisposed to this mentality (Is this what was being suggested when we were being fingered for being narcissistic? We won't let other people . For me, the impulse of talking about Millennials - or Y, or Splinters, or whatever the hell we're supposed to be called - doesn't stem from separating ourselves from older generations. I've been told by five different people in the past month, "We used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30, too!'" It is not my intention, or in the intentions of nearly all of the people I met when interviewing Millennial activists throughout the country, to hold elder generations in contempt. Similarly to the way that we've become "first globals" by using the Internet to break abstractions like "collateral damage" into tangibles like Facebook friends, the Internet has helped this generation to realize that being over-30 isn't necessarily a death sentence with regard to one's capacity for upholding ideals and pushing for positive social change. For this reason, I'm led to believe that every time someone mentions having once advocated for never trusting anyone over 30, that person is projecting something that has little to nothing to do with Millennials.

Of course, there are plenty of older-than Millennials Millennial activists out there like Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Stacey Monk, and many, many others who are great examples of old people engaging in forms of activism/engagement that is typically associated with younger people.

[Note: Stacey, to be fair, is only a few years older than the years that typically define Millennials - I point that out because I don't want her to think that I am flaunting her old-ness. She isn't nearly as old as Jay Rosen, who's got to be at least, oh, I don't know - in his late 40s!]

Millennial Activists: A Transferable Essence

I do agree with an element to the protests of such definitive rigidity regarding the parameters of what is embodied in a generation. What is remarkable about the Millennials' predisposition to break down walls is its ability to perpetuate and spread its own transferable essence - that is, because a large part of our perception is based on access to globalized technology, while our age bracket has been more steeped in the  fruits of openness created by said exposure than others, the generational moniker - or tendencies that define it - aren't confined to its age bracket. I had mentioned this "transferability" in a radio interview a few weeks back, and apparently it's been on Penelope Trunk's mind as well (thanks to Alex Herder for bringing this to my attention):

We should determine our generation not by our age but by how we use media. This comes from Margaret Weigel, who has worked at Harvard and MIT doing research on digital media engagement:* "We should not judge people rigidly by the years they were born," she says, "If we want to define people by categories, it should be by behaviors because this is something each of us chooses."

In fact, on her blog, Trunk offers a quiz called "What generation are you part of, really?"

Be sure to check it out if you get a chance to do so.

• Are you an old Millennial (26-30+)?
• How narroly/broadly should this term be defined?