Generation I

Searching for identity. Seems I've been doing a lot of that this summer. Not searching for a self or a personality. Searching for definitions, really.

I recently came across a peculiar reference to a generation I had never heard of: "Generation I." After inquiring, I discovered that the generation in question was mine, and that the 'I' stood for Internet.

Brilliant. This was almost as creative as the journalist who thought he'd name my generation 'y' because it came after the letter x.

To be named after the definitive technology of our day seems paltry to me.

Sometimes I think the Internet has not really changed anything. Our present era has been called the era of communication. My friends spend long hours on Instant Messenger; while my older sister, 33, spent long hours on the phone. The difference? Our talk is cheaper.

Until recently, I thought my generation was different from those that preceded us because we had no reason to come together. Every other generation, I believed, has had a war, an event, a something that fell on their laps.

Our parents were baby boomers. Named after our fruitful grandparents. In the late '60s and very early '70s, the years that defined their generation, culture changed. The U.S. was no longer the Father-Knows-Best times of the '50s, no longer defined by WWII. Dead kids, burned flags, revolutionary students, drugged-out rock stars, a famous concert characterize the baby boomers. As the classic Rock song goes: "Don't try to put us down, because we g-g-get around."

A baby-boomer friend of mine recently told me about the night he spent in jail in 1970, the night of the Kent State riots. I told him I thought the difference between my generation and his could be seen in our respective Woodstocks. His wasn't about the music, I told him somewhat confidently. It was about the scene, the culture. Ours, unfortunately, had to be about the music; there wasn't anything else for it to represent.

He corrected me by describing the level of naiveté he felt going through the gates at Woodstock in 1969. "That concert wasn't about anything except the knowledge it gave us. I had never heard of half the bands I was going to see. MP3s, the Internet, they didn't exist. Woodstock was about realizing there were so many other people who felt the same way I did about life, and about music."

Perhaps all my peers who attended last year's Woodstock bonfire realized they shared penchants for pyromania and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Perhaps not.

Our generation does know a lot more than our parents' did. We download songs from Napster before their albums are released. We pay less for cell phones than we do for home phones. We watch wars on television.

But what are we made of? Will we have a rallying cry? Even our older siblings took their unfortunate namesake and went with it. They bonded because they listened to '80s music and because there was nothing for them to share. They were X; stereotyped as nothings, they thrived on pretending to underachieve.

But we are the baby boomers' children. Some of us listen to our parents' music; others listen to the early '90s gangster rap and the current R&B that has yet to be seen as our music. No war, no concert, no Midwest nuclear family, no disco. Is there nothing original, nothing different, nothing that separates the late '70s/early '80s child from those who preceded us?

Suddenly, the Internet doesn't sound all too bad.

There are few events that define the turn of the century better than the communication revolution, the repeated use of the Internet and email. Never has a friend in Morrocco been so close to her home in Georgia, or to me via e-mail.

But a technology is something given to us by our elders. We only learned and used the Internet; our parents invented it.

Perhaps, the definitive members of our generation so far have been people like Shawn Fanning, who has used the Internet and his Napster to revolutionize copyright and the accessibility to information (albeit reluctantly). Or perhaps, we have yet to find anything definitive about ourselves.

When the Beatles sang in England pubs, they were a boy band. Somehow I don't think N'Sync will ever produce a White Album.

The latter band doesn't even write its own music. Perhaps my generation should start writing. I'm not trying to cause a big sensation. I'm just talking about my g-g-generation.