For most of the millennial group, those talents are used to invent new, cartoonishly futuristic ways to abuse technology in means never thought possible.
I’m sure if you looked at Abe Lincoln in 1864 and told him it would be possible to send letters via devices called “cell phones,” he would have laughed your ass back to four score and seven years ago.
There are a number of advances that have helped the world for the better. Modern medicine is evolving and becoming more and more helpful, the space program is pretty neat and those fools at NASA are pretty close to finding aliens, right?
Unfortunately, millennials don’t get to take credit for mind-bending, world-changing techs. No. Millennials don’t get to stand on top of a pile of cash, lay their heads down at night and drift off into blissful sleep because they invented the newest brain scope to remove brain tumors through the ear canal. Millennials get to be excited about viral videos, Nicki Minaj’s hashtag rapping and Buzzfeed.com’s “9 Cats Wrapped Like Burritos” photo gallery. That’s right, while baby boomers and Generation X-ers get to invent useful new gadgets, millennials get credit for being lazy and weird. In a time when people become famous for “going viral” or falling while dancing on a table they shouldn’t have been dancing on in the first place, there is a disappearing category of real accomplishments.
Nowadays, instead of celebrating academic achievements, sitting down for family dinners or flipping through photo albums with Grammy and Grandpa as they recount “the good old days,” notifications are set up on their smartphones to tell them Demi “unfollowed” Ashton on Twitter. No one can even stay at the Hard Rock Hotel downtown without hearing how Ashton brought his shady hookup there. Heidi and Seal are getting divorced? Someone said something mean about Justin Bieber looking like a lesbian? The sanctity of marriage has been compromised, yet again, by some airheaded bimbo who got married 36 hours after her engagement because her “momager” and some vertically challenged show runner decided it would make for a cool special? This, apparently, is news.
Even things as simple as chart-topping hits have changed their ways. This generation is responsible for some of the most offensively misogynistic and appalling lyrics ever to exist. Remember when songs were about sunshine, lollipops and rainbows? When people could sit around the living room and listen to a record as a family? What would Grandma say about Lil Wayne and all those tattoos? What would she say about Eminem’s blood pressure because he’s that angry all the time? What would she say if you turned on “Dance (A$$)” by Big Sean and Nicki Minaj? The hook of that song is, literally, the word “ass” over and over again.
Millennials and the 2000s invented YouTube celebrities such as Kingsley, Jenna Marbles and Chris Crocker who sit in front of their computers and rant about Britney Spears, “White Girl Problems” and other things that bother them on a daily basis. A chubby 12-year-old dances around her lime green and pink room, lip-syncing to Rihanna’s “Disturbia” (search: doglover199709), and this is entertainment? Where are her parents? Why is she allowed to do that? These people are the same as anyone else in the world; the only thing that made them “anyone” is a semi-decent camera and an Internet connection.
New Internet technologies have given voice to the voiceless, and that voice sounds like a screeching feral cat. Just because you have the means to make a video, doesn’t mean you should. The Internet (especially YouTube) should be a privilege, not a right.
Remember that girl who made the racist rant about Asians at UCLA? Yeah, well she got kicked out of school. Next time you feel annoyed by your neighbors, remember, nothing posted on the Internet goes away, no matter how many times you push the delete button.
Instead of focusing on current events and issues that matter to people, such as the upcoming presidential election for instance, the only “news” that comes up on the Yahoo! homepage is a video of two twin babies sneezing and another article about Taylor Swift’s broken heart (because that isn’t evident enough from her terrible, terrible pop music).
If people channeled as much time and energy into useful inventions that may make the future easier (instead of dumber and more embarrassing to look back on) as they do into making bedazzled bras for upcoming, garishly overpriced three-day Vegas raves, maybe millennials would have something to brag about. Something, perhaps, instead of being part of the group that came up with Nyan Cat and Rick Rolling.
-Hayley Rafner is a media studies junior.
