The Web Generation

At Forbes, E.D. Kain writes: “Maybe it’s just the inevitability of time, as older people with older views and attitudes are pushed out of the majority. Maybe it’s just demographics. But I really do think that social media, the internet, and the hyper-connectedness of modern Americans and especially young people has done more to shift public opinions than anything in the realm of politics could ever hope to achieve.”

Forbes is a little late to the party—they're not alone, mind you; most major cultural outlets have spent the last decade bemoaning the supposed stupidity, vapidity, egotism, etc., of the misnamed Google Generation. The internet is prompting a wholesale change in our society every bit as radical and all-encompassing as that of industrialization. The first generation to grow up with the internet are going to prove to be extraordinarily important to the way we conceive of these new tools and processes—it's Modernism anew. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, It Gets Better, silly memes, SOPA, slow food, digital reading, Anonymous: they're signs of values and battles to come.