cartoons, memes, and retrospect

From what I can tell the "nostalgic groups of stereotypical characters are metaphors for my friends" meme has taken off well on Facebook. So far I've only gotten "the flirty one" but maybe "the one who never recognizes me until I wave my hands in front of him three or four times" is coming up soon.

The thing that we love about old cartoon characters now is that once upon a time before the internet we all had these shared experiences (saturday mornings and the like). And we can now all collectively reflect on them together. But we never really knew them as shared until people started calling us GenY's. There was no viral in the moment, only in retrospect.

I think that dynamic is no less true today. In fifteen years the guys and gals of today's youth aren't going to remember the memes, rather: "hey remember back when we used to want to be on FACEBOOK?"

"Yeah I think my brother did that or something?"

(the meme will be 'old twitter personality archetypes')

awkward, transparency, and mistakes

Thinking today about how much Gen Y has identified with the Milhouses, Chris Griffins, and George Michael Bluths of the world. Pretty much any character played by Michael Cera at least in some way approximates our understanding of "awkward." It's not even a negative thing to us. It's an admirable quality. We brag about it in retrospect as if we were the only awkward kids in school (or maybe that's just those of us who "SO watched [insert Saturday morning cartoon here] like ALL THE TIME"). Awkward has been a godsend to our generation, allowing us to feel perfectly OK about our fascination with - and the consequences of - our idea of transparency.

Transparency requires a significant degree of social failure, embarassment, and most discussed: a compromise of power. There's this idea out there held by our parents' generation, that we don't know just how big those consequenses are. I saw expressed it as recently as last night, a small quip during a Law & Order representation of Facebook, clearly on the "life, work, and social behaviors require formal interactions" side of the line.

There's a lot of change going on in the world, and we're a big part of it. I think our awkwardness has made us increasingly okay with making a lot of mistakes along the way. (While writing this I accidentally mixed the recipients and content of a few copypasted emails to people I didn't know, had to go back and resend the correct info and apologies. AWKWARD.)