While the youthful attendees of SXSWi were generally plugged in and busy pitching ideas to venture people, the rest of us were not so easily grouped together. I found major differences between people only a few years apart, as the seismic shifts in the culture in the past two decades show a type of psychological geological record among the people that grew up in these times.
Just five years on either side of my age - I was born in 1974 - and you may be social media savvy with complete profiles detailing your entire life, or you may be uncomfortable with using your real name in an online form from your own bank. You may believe television is fantastic cheap entertainment by fondly remembering Seinfeld or Cheers or the original Monday Night Football, or find it a tired old medium that became turned the nightly news into a bunch of patriotic cheerleaders during Operation Desert Storm or haunted you with images of Manhattan burning.Age is, of course, not the only determinant, as a person’s views could be much younger and much older on a given topic. I did find, however, there was quite a range among attendees, ranging from youthfully naive in the glow of Obama’s Twitter-powered ascent to others that were negative and jaded, though they may have been younger than me, and sounded quite old and disconnected after failed businesses, blown stock options, and a lack of understanding of all these people just typing on their phones all day. All these FaceSpaced kids, it was implied, were not really working, like back in the ever changing good ol' days.
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