Are You A Xennial Baby?

I’ll never forget the crazy scary alien sounds playing down the landline at a friends house of a modem making a dial up internet connection as a teenager. I mean it was like nothing I’d ever heard, and in my young impressionable state was, if just for a moment, convinced the aliens were coming… Holler if you remember that! And if you remember your landline number. I mean actually using landlines to call up your pals to plan visits or sleepovers which many revolved around making mixtapes on old tape players – remember you needed two tape decks! Or the jealously inducing moment when your friend showed you their mini-disc player (short-lived as they were!) and all the other analogue stuff that went with being a kid in the 80s…

Specifically, being born between ’77 and ’83 – we’ve been coined a micro-generation of Xennials btw; hey, it’s a thing, there’s a quizz on the Guardian, The Goonies and all! 😉 – which meant you were a teenager when you got your very first email, used crazy search engines like Magellan and really weird email servers, beyond archaic in the face of today’s smooth digital lives we lead.

What charaterises Xennials though, is not only our experience and memories of life pre internet, but that somehow we have seamlessly adapted to and embraced digital life without a second thought. And this is what really resonates with me, in a way that those broad brush labels of Generation X (grew up in an analogue world) and Millennials (grew up in a digital world) never have. We’re the in-betweeners, nostalgic for video recorders and handwritten mixtape lists but fully au fait with what the digital has to offer – see us go, embracing the world of blogs, digital photography and Garageband.

What digital has done is democratise all the fun stuff – now you don’t need a printing press or studio full of synths to publish your own mini-magazine or make a record. It’s all totally doable from your bedroom, or kitchen table or sofa! And while we could bemoan the crazy elements digital has also brought us, I will forever love our digital leaps forward for allowing and enabling us to do things we never thought possible and to help up tap into doing the things we love best!

Hands up, all you other Xennial babies out there please!