The Blog

As a self-anointed history buff, I’m always fascinated when I hear labels given to different generations. From ‘The Lost Generation’ of the early decades of the 20th century to ‘Generation X’, the somewhat illusory distinctions separating these groups of human beings, who just happen to be born into different sets of circumstances, baffles me.

Most specifically, I selfishly balk at the exalted status so freely given (and immortalized in Tom Brokaw’s book ) to ‘The Greatest Generation’, the group of Americans who grew up during the Great Depression and completed their coming-of-age during World War II. I asked a fellow history buff, my father, “Why are they so deserving of that title? What did they do that we couldn’t do?”

“Well, it’s just because of the extraordinary circumstances they were put through and overcame.”

It’s not that I feel this generation didn’t earn their meritorious title…but where’s the respect given to those of us not thrust into such infamously soul-hardening situations? How would we have responded?

Our parents, the ‘Baby Boomers’, had their share of excitement, too. From Woodstock to Wall Street, they witnessed several major American socio-political assassinations in the ’60s (including a pair of Kennedy siblings and several of our greatest African-American civil rights leaders ), either fought during or protested against the psyche-destroying madness of Vietnam , and ultimately began raising us during the fiscal boom of Reaganomics.

Once again, just like their so-called Greatest Generation predecessors who eventually enjoyed the peace and prosperity of the ‘I Like Ike’ ’50s , the Baby Boomers subsisted on a steady diet of tumult in their upbringing only to land smoothly and safely into a bed of complacency in the ’80s .

Enough with the history lesson. For years, pop culture aficionados and sociologists have equivocated in how to label our generation. I’ve heard ‘Generation Y’, a cutesy moniker which backhandedly suggests we are an irrelevant addendum to ‘Generation X’ . I’ve heard ‘MTV Generation’, which merely infers that we’ve spent all our time being raised by popular television.

As the years have gone on, it has been pointed out that we’ve also been raised congruently with the popularization of Web technology (1995-), post-9/11 societal fallout, and the advent of Pokemon…how flattering. Predictably, suggestions for the generations that will reach the ‘real world’ over the next decade or so include original titles such as ‘Generation Z’, ‘Generation I’, and the ‘LG Generation’ .

Saddled with the peacetime legacy of complacency passed down to us from our parents and grandparents, many of these labels suggest our generation is a nondescript collection of lazy, unenlightened halfwits who can’t find anything better to do than use our parents’ money to buy our next XBox 360 game or post whatever we’re doing Friday night on YouTube. Aren’t you sick of that assumption?

But while some of the older generations who are currently in power have failed our generation with a record-low economy and job market, many of us Generation…Whatevers have been growing up hand-in-hand with media technology integration, helping to push the envelope of what the most efficient and trendy forms of communication are in a progressively global free market economy.

And now as the traditional job market of paper resumes delivered by handshake and a personal reference is crumbling as more and more jobs are simply being eliminated to cut costs, a new digital job market, one in which Bizooki hopes to be one of the few good shepherds , is on the rise.

Why? Because in a exponentially-accelerating technological vacuum where the traditional powers-that-be are almost powerless to predict market trends and/or please investors from one quarter to the next, the generation that has come of age consuming each soon-to-be-defunct technological gadget or soon-to-be-expendable phone or instant messaging service should be the generation that ultimately creates the new and lasting revenue streams.

And it’s poetic that our generation will be in charge of these decisions because, as things stand, it is the biggest challenge our age group will face. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” and as the value of our undergraduate degrees and even our graduate degrees continues to be diluted, each of us is going to have to scratch and claw to meet the right people to partner with in an arms race of ideas. Who you know is, once again, more important than it ever has been, as the resumes for employers to sift through on sites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder becomes so overwhelming and monotonous that they stop sifting through the gluts of information altogether.

And suddenly, all that time that you got yelled at for spending on Facebook and MySpace, on Second Life or Skype doesn’t seem so worthless anymore. The like-minded geeks you’ve always been searching for, both locally and far, far away, are now your biggest allies as you try to both make ends meet and chase your idiosyncratic dreams. Bizooki is the next step.

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