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this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Millennials are ignorant of Rodney King Riots, Desert Storm, Waco / Oklahoma City Bomber (far right domestic terrorism), Newt Gingrich's rise of the 'Party of No', and other such political events of their era. Pop quiz, what is the Cranberries's Zombie song about?
Gen Z however is keenly aware of the problems occurring around them.
I remember the politics of the 90s. It wasn't as happy as others point out here. We really didn't start the fire.
Columbine happened under our childhood yo. And the 1980s going Postal craze was a different brand of public mass shootings. 9/11 was the SECOND attack on the Twin towers after all.
What an idiotic take.
Mate we were literal children during these events.
Much like Zoomers are young adults or teens today, look at our teenage years and young adulthood and focus on those events. No Zoomer was politically motivated at 4 years old nor was I during the Rodney King Riots.
We fucking had global protests with hundreds of millions standing up against the 1% and American wars.
We were and still are well aware of the problems around today as well.
My literal 7 year old niece knows about both the Israel-Hamas War and the Ukrainian War.
I duno how old you were, but lets say 3 years after the Rodney King riots of 92? So lemme pick a random 1995 event. Were you aware that Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated when you were 7? Something I do remember was the USS Cole bombing. Do you remember that? That happened a bit later, Wikipedia says 12 October 2000.
The issue isn't "we were children". The issue is that research and information was far more difficult back then. Newspapers cost money and required manual reading. (Though I was able to pickup a few Newspapers when I was waiting for a haircut or other such events). We didn't have online forums (well, ignoring BBS and USENET)... or at least online forums weren't popular. And internet was very expensive and slow back then. So we didn't get information anywhere as quickly as children today get information.
Secondly, it wasn't "cool" to be politically informed before 9/11. That was just nerd shit back then. 9/11 changed our collective mindsets and everyone became more aware of world events.
You literal 7 year old is not 5. Of those events you listed, the Troubles is the only one I was over 4 years to experience the end portion.
Go ask your 7 year old niece what Bombs Over Baghdad by OutKast is about and see if they don’t guess the War On Terror/OIL.
That isn’t the issue, by the new millennium, it’s millennials were well and truly getting all our knowledge digitally.
Honestly you sound more like a Xenial or Gen X’er, because your experiences sound so outdated.
Okay so you were 7 during the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and you were 12 during the bombing of the USS Cole and you were 7 during the Oklahoma City Bombing. You were 9 during the US Embassy Bombings (linked to Osama Bin Laden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_United_States_embassy_bombings).
We all know children today, even literal 7 year olds, are more informed than we were back then. Like seriously, we couldn't look up information back then. Its nothing against us as a generation, its everything to do with our technological level.
I know 2/3 of those events, I’m also not American and have my own countries events to remember.
Also I 100% doubt any Zoomer (or anyone else) today will remember 90% of this stuff in 30 years either.
And by 1995 we already had search engines and could look up information. WebCrawler, Lycos, Alta Vista, Jeeves, Dogpile, Yahoo, etc.
You seem to think the 90s and 2000s were some technological dark age on par with the 80s.
Do you not remember how bad search was before Google?
It was like being at the library and using that card index system. It was like "welp, hopefully there's a book someone decided to tag 'field mice' because that's the only way I'm gonna find information about field mice".
Uh huh. Peak AOL was 2002 my dude.
And with 25-million subscribers, that's only some ~25% of American-households with AOL back then, at its absolute peak. Internet in general was never a common thing for Americans to get until the Broadband era.
If you want to talk about the internet in the 90s, be my guest. But any Millennial who lived through that era remembers that the internet was relatively rare. Most people's exposure was through libraries and maybe schools/university systems.
I think this ties back to the original question. Gen Z is way more exposed to social media and therefore world news including propaganda at levels millennials never saw until adulthood. In the 90s you needed to watch the news or read the newspaper to know what was happening and if you missed it you would only know about it if it was broadcasted again. Nowadays we’re bombarded 24/7 with all kinds of news in the same place where you watch funny dog videos.
Yup. Its nothing about "better" or "worse". Its about the technological differences of today's children vs myself as a child.
Here's a memory for yall who are too young to remember how dumb we were in the 90s. On 9/11, bullies were blaming China (and me, being a slanty-eye Asian) for bringing down the Twin Towers. I think people don't grasp how unfathomably ignorant pre-Internet and pre-9/11 people were. Such a mistake wouldn't happen today.
Nothing against those bullies. Everyone was that dumb back then.
9/11 was a big wakeup moment. Society collectively decided that paying attention to world events was important, and we got smarter. Technology improved as well, so it became easier to look up news events after that. But deep down within our collective psyche was a turning point in foreign-policy mindset. I'm seeing that Gen Z today is far more anxious and worried about world events (both good, and bad, associated with that). The 90s "peaceful" era of my youth was an illusion, it was created by my (and my peer's) collective ignorance about the world.
I look at my ignorant Youth vs what GenZ grows up with today, I see pros/cons with both. I think knowing more about the world is a better thing overall though.
Where did you live that has people who blamed East Asian people for 9/11?
The ignorant people here were blaming Indians and other South Asians, and that was the limit of ridiculousness where I grew up
Your literal 7-year old probably isn't a Zoomer
The quiz was for other millennials, to drive home the point being made about awareness.
I'm also a millennial and all my friends are millennials.
Outside of my history-buff friends, most of my friends (despite being Engineers, Doctors, PH.Ds and other well-educated positions) are very ignorant of the 90s era of politics. All of us have had our awakening starting with 9/11 or so. In fact, the only reason why I know these things is because I explicitly went back and studied the politics of my childhood. Its not a thing I knew back then.
Typical Gen Z will know "This is America" references the Charleston church shooting. As well as adults.
You know why? Because today, we have the internet, and everyone is far more knowledgable and can pick up on references. Back in the 90s, "Zombie is about The Troubles" was obscure, and hell... just knowing what "The Troubles" were was kind of obscure with a lot of people completely ignorant to the events.
Today, we have things called cellphones, Wikipedia and Google. The level of obscurity and references in our modern media landscape is far more subtle because everyone and everything is smarter. Have you ever use the Dewey Decimal System, card catalog, and microfiche to look up information? Shit was hard to do research back then.
No, I’m a millennial I used the Internet.
Bullshit.
The best we had in the 90s was Encarta, ya know, that CD-ROM Microsoft sent with some computers?
My library was on Dewey Decimal / Card Catalog for a good chunk of my childhood. If I was looking up information, it was like that. The computers were some weird old DOS-like prompt screen that almost no one knew how to use. No fucking internet. My Dad happened to be able to get Microsoft Encarta and that was the first time I ever was able to look up information in any manner similar to today, but as a CD-ROM it was only about historical / cultural old stuff, not about recent events.
And secondly, bullshit. Wikipedia wasn't invented yet... and if it had been invented, it wasn't respected until the 2010s+ (unable to be used to write our school reports off of). So what website were you even using back then if you happened to magically have access to the Internet?
We were playing Neopets, maybe using GameFAQs or spreading memes on SomethingAwful. But looking up information? What is this, 2010s+ ?? No one trusted the internet yet for information.
Wikipedia started in '01. I was absolutely using it before '02/'03 for schoolwork. Just because you didn't know about it or how to cite things doesn't mean that applies to everyone.
You're very combative that anyone could've had a different experience than you. Internet in the 90's was not abnormal. Usenet/IRC/AIM/other various messengers were all big then even if it was the latter end.
Rage Against the Machine was huge in the 90s, just because you sang along not noticing the lyrics doesn't mean everyone else did either.
He's the one
100% bullshit. You're forgetting that I've actually lived in this era. No teacher was accepting of Wikipedia citations until the later 00s. There was no trust on Wikipedia's articles until much later. You didn't cite Wikipedia because your Teachers would penalize you for doing so. (and this culture was true well throughout all the 00s). Citations on the other hand, were just a Microsoft Word / .doc plugin so it wasn't that big a deal.
Furthermore: there were competing online wikis and webpages. I don't even think Wikipedia was the breakout wiki at that age, but instead the C2 Wiki.
Ok Boomer
I know every event you listed, including the implied first attack on the twin towers. I was born in 93. I used to read forums and remember chat rooms during the early modern internet.
Your experience was simply not like mine, did you download the old doom shareware wads? They were hosted by id, online, before I was even able to use a computer. Diablo? Downloadable updates! Anyone remember that?
Ummm... no. I loaded it through a floppy found in the mail through a system called shareware. (Where people would leave floppy disks in people's mailboxes, and we didn't know what viruses were so we just plugged them into our computers).
Did you actually exist in the 90s? That was floppy era of shareware, you'd spread games like Doom by mail and/or by copying the floppy and giving it to a friend. That's why it was called SHAREware, you shared it with friends. In some cases, computer stores would combine a bunch of shareware games into CD-ROMs (650MBs!!! So much space!!) and you'd get a lot of shareware all at once.
Oh my goodness, it's almost like what I said had nothing to do woth floppy disks or even discrediting their use.
According to the US census, 18 percent of housholds had internet use at home. Yahoo was around in 1995, usenet usage started dropping, and school systems started getting schoolwide internet access.
Your memory is vapid and you are clearly misremembering large swaths of important facts.
Edit: spelling.
Us Census figure was 1997. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/1997/demo/computer-internet/p20-522.html
Looks like 22% had internet at home, but over 54% had a computer.
How do you think the majority of computer users played Castle of the Winds, Jazz Jackrabbit, Doom, or other shareware games? Hint: it wasn't the internet because most computer users didn't have internet.
1993, the previous census figures are even worse as that's before AOL
Btw, downloads weren't a thing even for those who had internet. Back then, you paid per ~~minute~~ hour of internet usage.
My family connected to the internet to download (POP3) out email and then disconnected. Because my Mom would then want to use the phone to call her friends. Unless you had two phone lines like a rich person, extended multi-hour download sessions at 33kbps (or slower) was just not a thing.
That's 14MB per hour, if you don't remember how slow 90s internet was.
The college students with T1 connections were the source of shareware / disks by the later 90s (like 97, 98 etc. Etc). But home users weren't doing online downloads yet, too expensive and too slow.
So quit your bullshitting.
We were poor as sin, still downloaded that diablo patch bro.
Happened to live In an apartment above a friend's business, during nighttime when the store was closed we had access to a second phone line.
If I recall correctly, the patch was 8 mb. Someone correct me if I'm wrong on the size.
Sorry but, there simply isn't any bullshit to be given pal. I was a child, so no idea how much it cost my dad. Maybe I'll ask him.
https://money.cnn.com/1996/11/01/technology/aol/
[Snip]
This is what I remembered. My dad always told me to watch the Internet usage, because it cost money for each hour. These were 5-hours / month plans back then. That being said, 1996 is a year before Diablo, meaning the "unlimited" plans came in soon afterwards. But "unlimited" didn't really work out in our favor because my mom and grandma who lived with us always wanted to use the phone.
And we were the only kids of the neighborhood who had internet. People came over to our house to surf the net.
I was around in the 90’s. I downloaded the Doom shareware (and many others) from either the internet or local BBS’s in like, 1994.
Most Millenials aren't actually Americans, so why should they give a fuck?
I’m a millennial who was aware of all the things you said we were ignorant of. Also, I was an adult when Columbine happened.
Good. Now look at the rest of this thread downstream. Plenty of people talking about how "peaceful" the 90s were as if they didn't live in that era.
I stand by what I said. Millennials largely were ignorant of world events before 9/11 and the overall explosion of information the internet afforded us. Meanwhile, GenZ always lived in post 9/11 world AND always had information at their fingertips.
Nerds weren't celebrated back in the 90s. If you knew too much back then (or showed that you knew too much), people would look at you funny and bully you. Today, knowledge is more generally appreciated.
Well, those people are wrong. They may have felt that way, based on their own experiences and perspectives, but they can’t speak for the entire generation. None of us can.
First of all, I think this is you being an older millennial, my formative millennial memories, especially politically, mostly happened in the 2000s.
I think what you don't even realize your comment shows is that most of these events, while they seem like paradigm-shifting events when put into historical context and tied together with the decade of history they were surrounded by don't actually have a significant impact on the individual.
I was aware as a millennial growing up of many events like these that happened in my life. followed the news in and out. But now I couldn't even tell you much if any of the significant details of any of them.
I noticed you didn't include 9/11 as a forgotten event, an event that was truly significant in a way. Much in the same way, I'm sure most of gen z will be aware of those same types of events when they get older but will only really remember COVID, maybe something about Trump too.
Sounds like you're a cunt.
Don't throw about references to The Troubles like it's hidden history.
How doesn't it sound like he's a cunt?
Go look at this "90s was full of hope" crap that the rest of this thread is full of.
There were the Troubles in Ireland/Britain, there was Osama Bin Laden (1993 Bombing, 1998 Embassy Bombings). The was far-right nationalism. There was Columbine. There was Rodney King race riots. There was Desert Storm 1.0. There was Ruby Ridge and Waco. Etc. etc.
I dare say that today is possibly more peaceful than back then. We just are more informed about various disasters today than we used to be. All this "Era of Peace" crap the rest of this thread is talking about is pissing me off. It wasn't like that in the 90s at all.
I'm bringing up the Troubles because 90s-era Troubles got pretty bad, up to the Good Friday Agreement in the very late 90s. The world was always on fire, and any 90s kid talking about "The Peaceful 90s" has extremely selective memory.