A Millennial's Take: Old Media vs. New Media

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'

In a world where the old dinosaurs of media are trying to put a cap on new creation of new ways to distribute to the masses, we have a new group of us out there not accepting the status quo of the world.

We cross ideological divides. We ignore our differences of thought, accept our differences of background, and celebrate our common similarities as they exist.

We do not take "no" for an answer. We take it as a challenge to do better, to strive to improve not only our place but also the world around us. We don't accept the answers of the old vanguard at face value. We question thoughtfully and fully what is presented to us with an eye of discretion. We do not want to be lectured to on what direction to take. We want to be talk to—like human beings.

We are disappointed in the old way of doing things but don't think they should be completely ignored like was done by other recent generations that came before us whose complete rebellion was the answer but was hardly the solution to the generational problem.

We are constantly yearning to find the answer to the Human Condition. We are striving to bring peace to a world torn by strife that is consumed in "us-against-them" rhetoric. We are constantly dreaming not of impossible dreams but of ones grounded in reality and bits of fantasy all the same.

We are the 9-11 Generation. We are the Columbine Generation. We are the Internet Generation. We are the generation of the Virginia Tech tragedy. We are the Echo Boom Generation. We are the Millennial Generation. We are a generation that defies labels and wishes to transform what might be a tragedy or loss and turn it into something greater.

We are a generation born into a world where terrorism and our fight against it is all we have ever known our adult lives. The Cold War is but a distant dream and a harder one to juxtapose against the present day's wars. We are the generation of disappearing borders.

And yet the Old Way wishes to continue putting up the borders against creative change and against innovation in media, in technology, and even in the way we think and live. The Old Way wishes to hold back the winds of change, the winds of new creativity never before seen on such a scale. Why? Why must they try to stop the inevitable? The eventual?

Because they are dinosaurs of understanding in a new world of connectivity, of continuous mixing and mashing. They cannot see beyond the old paradigm of locked creativity where things were static and not dynamic. They have limited their reach of understanding like every aging generation before and like every generation in the ages to come.

What we all must realize as Americans and as free people of the world is that we must find new ways, inventive ways to bridge the new with the old, to bridge the traditional with the cutting edge, or we as a civilization as a whole will cease to exist.

We are the Millennials, and we are ready for change.