It’s the end of the decade and it’s been an interesting one. We went from the “Me Generation” as the baby Boomers called themselves to “Generation ME” as the Gen Ys call themselves.
Generation ME focused on what happens outside of themselves. Everything begins and ends with “ME” – My videos, my Flickr, YouTube which is all about ME, MySpace, and numerous other online means of showing off how wonderful I am.
Admittedly, there were some positive aspects of creating videos for fun, but meanness, bullying and showing off was off the charts this decade. The decade was filled with incidents where the good Samaritans were scarce. If they helped at all, they did so *after* they took a video of the incident.
Book titles bore out the focus on one’s self. Books like “Not Everyone Gets a Trophy” and “The Narcissism Epidemic” chronicled the mindset of the new generation and looked for ways to connect with the mindset of the young generation.
Even when alone, some took videos of themselves in various states of undress while debasing themselves. It seemed as though no one knew the word or the emotion called SHAME. The hottest new means of becoming famous was a sex tape, done alone or with others.
Parents joined “REALITY SHOWS” to demonstrate how dysfunctional their families were. This type of ‘entertainment’ was so popular that one “D-List” couple crashed a White House Party so that they could get on a reality show. Another family pulled a stunt that included implying that their young son was trapped in a balloon that had taken off. After thousands of dollars were spend and hundreds of emergency personnel tried to save the boy, we learned that it was a publicity stunt.
So let’s close the decade on a positive note. We learned a lot about networking, connecting, finding and reconnecting and that there’s more to life than just ME.
What’s to come in this new decade?
Lets commit to making 2010 the beginning of a new decade called the “WE Decade.” Let’s use the connections we made with Social Media to help each other enter the decade of wonderful possibilities where we come together to create a better decade than the one we just ended.
Let’s commit to learning more about each other and communicate better. Like anything else, the decade will be what we made of it. We can use it to synergize our differences, use the best from each generation and forge a union of the minds.