Do you read Penelope Trunk’s blog? I do. I don’t always agree with everything she says, but I love her brutal honesty with respect to both her professional and personal life. Her latest post talks about movements through history – the industrial age, the space age, etc., and how the current generation often doesn’t acknowledge the prevailing age of the time. She argues that we aren’t in the information age right now as is often discussed, but rather we are in an age of personal responsibility, since we find ourselves taking charge of our own health, retirement, career, and the education of our children. Taking charge is something Gen Xers excel at. I don’t know about you, but I am often frustrated when I have to leave something in the hands of others… It’s not that I think I’m going to do it better than them (well, in the spirit of brutal honestly, it often IS that), but it just feels good to be in control. I think this is why we find ourselves wearing lots of hats in the workplace (as discussed at length in the AAM session). We spot the areas at work that are crying out for someone to take charge, and we immediately leap in.
How do you think we will describe this era in years to come? Game developer Ed Fries argues that we are living in the game age, which I can definitely see, too. Any other thoughts?
Gen X Says 
That ‘age of responsibility’ doesn’t hold up when you look at it internationally. Same goes with Ed’s comment, though perhaps less so.
In 200 years, when they look back at the turn of the millennia, it will be considered the information age. The transistor and integrated circuit have changed every facet of lives around the planet in many, many ways. All else is trivial. For that matter, I’m not sure history will look back at boomers/gen-x/ers/etc as being any different that we currently look back at the different generations of Greece and question how successive generations differed.
This microscopic level of self-examination is self-aggrandizement
What’s interesting about both ideas – the age of personal responsibility and the game age – is that neither would be possible without the access to networked information that the “information age” has provided, so yes… it probably will outshine everything else.
And of COURSE we’re self-aggrandizing… we’re Gen X! đŸ˜‰