The Text Message Generation

There is this silly shorthand that has taken hold of older writers who want to describe Generation Y. I missed Generation Y by only a few years. So perhaps I am just the right age to tell the world: I'm an early adapter of text messaging. I started texting in 2003. Even if you could argue that maybe texting started a year or two earlier, that still leaves quite a few formative teenage years for kids who are now graduating from college to have gone without texting.

As such, articles that contain sentences like the following really get to me:

For a generation that came of age texting and instant-messaging, driving two hours to sit at a cubicle outside the boss's office doesn't make sense if there's an office down the street.

A kid who graduated from college in 2008 would've been at the tail end of high school when texting started. Instant messaging did start much earlier, but that's half of the sentence that is incorrect. I would prefer some precision when I'm reading an article about trends for the future. If you can't get the basic facts right, am I really going to be able to count on your analysis and predictions?

Photo by: ee seuu via flickr page, used through Creative Commons.