Are you a member of The Oregon Trail Generation, the last before mainstream social media?

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If you count yourself among The Oregon Trail Generation, count yourself lucky.

How do you know? Writes Anna Garvey, "If you can distinctly recall the excitement of walking into your weekly computer lab session and seeing a room full of Apple 2Es displaying the start screen of Oregon Trail, you're a member of this nameless generation."

The upside of being exactly this old? Your transition from youth to adulthood may have been tough, but every moment of it wasn't chronicled online for your mom, your crushes, your tormentors, and your future employers to see.

Snip:

The importance of going through some of life's toughest years without the toxic intrusion of social media really can't be overstated. Myspace was born in 2003 and Facebook became available to all college students in 2004. So if you were born in 1981-1982, for example, you were literally the last graduating class to finish college without social media being part of the experience.

When we get together with our fellow Oregon Trail Generation friends, we frequently discuss how insanely glad we are that we escaped the middle school, high school and college years before social media took over and made an already challenging life stage exponentially more hellish.

We all talked crazy amounts of shit about each other, took pictures of ourselves and our friends doing shockingly inappropriate things and spread rumors like it was our jobs, but we just never had to worry about any of it ending up in a place where everyone and their moms (literally) could see it a hot second after it happened.

[socialmediaweek.org]

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