“What are the kids into these days, Kevin?”

I was in a meeting the other day when someone sitting at the table, a middle-aged man, turned to me and asked me that question. People who know me would laugh because I’m quite possibly the worst spokesman ever for Generation Now, but in this context (ignoring the mildly creepy phrasing of the question itself), we were talking about literal kids of 13 or 14 years old.

I had absolutely no idea how to answer the question.

I stammered out some gibberish about Justin Bieber and iPods, and we moved onto a different subject. But the question stayed with me, and I realized something pretty strange: We’re the last generation that knows anything about the non-technological world of just a few years ago.

What are people going to be like in the future, now that each new generation’s birth, life and death exist in binary code?

The kids born from about 1989-1993 are bridging the gap between the terrestrial universe and the universe where we post pictures on the Internet of every meal we eat for everyone to see. We grew up and became adults while simultaneously cellphones, computers, and everything else matured at the same time. Suddenly all devices have some kind of camera in them. All our medical, financial and personal information is stored in hard drives rather than file cabinets.

When I was a kid (I guess being 21 means I no longer qualify as a “kid.” I couldn’t drink when I was 7), I had to remember every single phone number I would ever need — all my childhood friends, my relatives, my school, my doctor — all of it was in my head. Numbers we couldn’t remember were written down on a sheet of paper taped to the back of a cupboard in the kitchen.

Now I can remember my house phone number and … that’s pretty much it. Everything else is in my phone. If my phone dies, utter catastrophe. I am unable to function as a human.

Radio, books, newspapers, television, film: just a few of the mediums that got destroyed (though professors in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications would feverishly tell you that they’re “evolving”) during our adolescence.

Kids after us — the generation in high school now — they’re the first ones to grow up entirely under the cloud of instant gratification. It’ll be interesting to see how they’re different from the rest of us. I see this going one of two ways: They’ll develop into superhuman information-spewing droids that turn our society into something out of a Ray Bradbury novel, or they’ll regress into fat blobs of sugar like the people living on a spaceship in “Wall-E.”

But my being wholly unable to shed light on the cultural preferences of people just a few years younger than me pretty well illustrates how stratified we’ve become in the past decade or so. Do I feel a million years old right now? You bet. What are the kids doing these days? MyFace? Do they still watch SpongeBob? Are we doomed to some kind of Twitter-based apocalypse once we hand over the reins to the next generation? Probably.

However, it’s possible you’re asking the wrong guy. I still have a BlackBerry. So what do I know?

Kevin Slack is a senior television, radio and film major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at khslack@syr.edu.

Published on September 4, 2012 at 3:32 am