Dividing up life into eras

This is just one of my silly "cocktail party" trains of thought (I've never been to a cocktail party). In short, more blog fodder I just felt like typing up without much careful thought or revision. It's simply amusing to me to try and divide up life, and indeed society at large, into small-ish eras focused around technological change, each suspiciously around 10 years long, with myself suspiciously placed at the start of interesting things.

The same sort of thinking drives the urge to divide up people based on their birth years, though the periods that have achieved greater consensus don't match up on neat decade boundaries. (On that front, I'd self-identify as a 90s kid, or even Gen Y, but not a millennial, a group I see as different though the consensus groupings lump both together. A friend born in 1985 disagrees with my self-identification because I have no memory of the early 90s. In any case, there's what majority consensus says, and there's also what is popular online. I think it's trendy to think of there only being 2 groups: boomers and zoomers. The divide used to be anyone over 30 is a boomer but it's getting lower.)

Anyway, I'd classify the 90s as an era of peace (I'm an American) with growing technological change. A transition is underway, by the end almost everyone has a PC in the house when they did not at the beginning. Those of us growing up in that decade are in some senses special for being at ease with both sides of low tech and high tech, for being able to see and understand and comfortably live in multiple worlds. This is in contrast to older generations who are uncomfortable with all the modern technology (and stereotyped as not knowing how to operate a computer), but it's also in contrast to the younger generations who are uncomfortable without all the really modern technology that hides away the details (and again stereotyped as not knowing how to operate a computer). The older generations have trouble when competent usage requires operating at a higher level of abstraction, the younger generations have trouble when competent usage requires working beneath the levels of abstraction. Only (conveniently) my generation of those born approximately between 85 and 95 seem to comfortably bridge the gap. (There are of course outliers, which include many of the pioneers of the technology in the first place going back to some of those born in the 1920s.)

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