The Last Analogue Generation

If Gen Z are the true “digital natives,” older Millennials are the last of the analogues — bringing a unique outlook into work and personal relations.

If you’re part of the Millennial generation, chances are parts of your childhood are documented in photo albums sitting in stacks in your parents’ house.

You probably have some early childhood photographs that are fading orange. Others may be Polaroid. Your school pictures bear the iconic Olan Mills sky and laser backgrounds. Your teen years are documented by photos taken on cheap “disposable cameras.” The VHS recordings of family events are stashed in a box somewhere along with the cassette tape collection.

Perhaps you’ve assisted your parents in digitizing all this stuff. You may have shared many scanned images of your “free range” childhood on Facebook.

Ah, the simpler days of kicking up dust on Huffy bikes. Running around until evening without parental supervision. Fighting with sticks or putting pennies on the train tracks.

You aren’t old, but those memories seem like they were made in another age of the world. Indeed, they were.

Generations are a way to group segments of the population by age. Generational cohorts…

Nevertheless, it’s a valuable category for exploring changes in culture and attitudes, since generations go through major world events and live through economic and social shifts together.

Millennials are generally categorized as those born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s. The US Census Bureau places the generation between 1982 and 2000.

After them comes Generation Z, usually referred to as true “digital natives,” since children born around the turn of the century have grown up in the Internet age.

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