Gen-edge

Jeffery Selin (Writers’ Dojo) said something in his presentation last week that touched on a growing concern of mine: “You know more about social media [than me]—you’ve been using it since high school.” Umm…nothing about that statement is true. He was speaking to a room of mostly twenty-somethings, and while I believe his assumption was inaccurate, it’s not uncommon.

As I face my impending graduation from PSU and re-entry into the workforce, I fear this assumption. I have not been using social media since I was in high school. In fact, I was a junior in high school before I ever “surfed the net” (with the exception of email, utilizing the web to connect with people didn’t begin until I was well into college). I remember sitting at the bank of computers in the school’s library and opening the web browser, excited at the prospect of all this information at my fingertips, with absolutely no idea where to start. I think I went to J. Crew’s website to look at clothes.

Unfortunately, people even slightly older than me expect me to have an inherent knowledge social networking tools, and I simply don’t. I am slowly learning and tentatively branching into this world just like everyone else in the workforce. But I fear this assumption of my knowledge will follow me into the workplace, and my superiors are going to be sorely disappointed.

The problem is, at twenty-six years old, I believe that I belong to a narrow fragment of the population that I like to call Gen-edge—too young to belong to Generation X and too old to belong to Generation Y. People a few years younger than me have been using social networking sites since they were in high school. And not only are they more familiar and comfortable in just using the sites themselves, they are more comfortable communicating in this way. When I was in high school, I called my friends when I wanted to see them. I still do. And cyber-bullying, such a problem in high schools today (at least according to 20/20) would have sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie when I was sixteen. Generation Y is entrenched in the cyber-world, and utilizing social networking sites is fundamental to this.

Generation X, on the other hand, is safely employed (or at least would be if our economy wasn’t crap). They may be asked by their employers to explore this world of social networking and the potential benefits it could have in a professional capacity. But they are assumed to be learning along with everyone else. And any achievements they make in this arena are a happy surprise. Gen-edge, however, will not have this luxury, I fear. Employers will assume that Gen-edgers can achieve company growth through social networking because we’ve grown up with it, we just “work this way.”

I actually felt that I had a lot to learn from Jeffery about utilizing social networking sites in a professional capacity. I have my little Facebook page, but mostly ignore the frequent posts about the personal lives of people I don’t really know that well. How to use Facebook, or any other social networking site, to benefit a company is something I would have to sit and think about for a while. I am constantly surprised at the power of social networking. How to rein this in for the benefit of my employer is something I just don’t feel equipped to do. Thank goodness I have been studying this very problem for nearly ten weeks now in the Online Marketing course! At least now I know how much I don’t know.