Generation what?

What generation am I? The Klapperstuck/Kearns article made me question whether I am part of Generation M. If I had just read the first two pages, I would have been like "YEAH! GENERATION M! WOOOO!", but as I kept reading, I felt more and more like I don't want to be a part of Generation M if that's how older people view them. Maybe I'm mistaking their tone, but it really seemed to me that Klapperstuck and Kearns and all their friends they quote don't think too highly of Generation M. Yeah, all the ways we're connected is great, but it seems that Klapperstuck and Kearns don't think too much about what that connection does for us...but I take issue with some of their points. Here are issues I have with the article:

1. It seems that Klapperstuck and Kearns consider all of Generation M to be narcissistic, self-centered teens. Ok, so according to Wikipedia, I'm one year too old to be a part of Generation M, but I still feel a part of it, and I don't really consider myself to be a narcissistic, self-centered teen (but maybe that's just me being narcissistic). Maybe it's because this article was written in 2009, but Generation M is growing up, and I feel like our connectedness makes us less self-centered. Yes, there's the occasional jerk who posts youtube videos of himself flexing, and Facebook is filled with teenage girls making kissy faces and taking 1000 pictures of themselves in bathroom mirrors, but aren't there people like that in every age group? But for us older Gen M's, I feel like begin connected makes us think less about ourselves and more about others. I use Facebook primarily to see what my friends are doing, not to tell them every single move I make. I use Twitter to follow the news, not to follow celeb gossip. I feel like the technologies I use make me more concerned about the world around me, rather than making me more self-centered, as Klapperstuck and Kearns suggest (although they do give social activism a nod, which slightly redeemed them in my eyes)

2. Yes, as Klapperstuck and Kearns said approximately 700 times, Gen M has a different sense of the difference between "public" and "private". I would argue that yes, we have a different sense of it, not because we're sensory challenged, but because the line between what is public and what is private are actually changing...and I'm not convinced this is a bad thing. Do I want to know every time my 14-year-old cousin gets a strawberry smoothie or see pictures of my friend's dog in surgery? No. I could care less. But I do think that the blurring of private and public material forces us to be more honest. The more people share their private lives online, the more honest they have to be in public - just look at Anthony Weiner and his weiner pics and a hundred other celebrities and politicians who have had secrets revealed through social media. And now, I'm definitely more careful about my behavior in places where pictures might be taken that end up on Facebook. I think the interconnectedness causes us (or at least the smart ones of us) to be more cautious in all areas of our lives, public and private.

Those are just some of the issues I have with the article. I'm slightly disappointed - I had such high hopes for a reading from someone with such a German last name as Klapperstuck.

As for the other readings, I found the Seeking article to be very interesting. I liked that a lot of the information was from a UM psych professor (Go Blue!), and thought the concept of seeking/wanting in contrast to liking is interesting. I can definitely identify times where I have looked up information without actually caring what it was or remembering it after I look it up. I also thought it's interesting that Dopamine controls our sense of time. If seeking/wanting raises levels of Dopamine, which causes people to think they've spent less time seeking than they actually have, I understand why I can be on Wikipedia for hours when I only intended to look up one article.

Also, I think Lauren Fardig's lesson was really cool. I'm excited to talk to her.