The Who have never been more apropos. Over the past decade, the amount of new books (a quick Amazon search for Generation Y yielded over 7000 results) profiling Generation Y has soared, sparking a new industry of those who base their careers pontificating over Generation Y, explaining the feelings and beliefs of the new generation to large corporate audiences for a hefty fee. Stereotyping Generation Y has become a new industry unto itself, and anyone with the platform to say something seems to have something to say about Generation Y, either negative or positive.

We have been described as dumb (in The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)), depressed (in Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before), great (in Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation), or just simply as taking over (in Generation We: How Millennial Youth are Taking Over America And Changing Our World Forever). Can all of these contradictory views of generation Y can be true? Does the lack of consistency between the views of generation Y show that these books and profiles are quick to stereotype what is actually quite a large and diverse group of young Americans? And, most pressingly, do any of these views answer the question: what is Generation Y really like?

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Before she goes to sleep, Sheena Yap often relaxes by watching TV sitcoms with her boyfriend. She looks into her boyfriend’s eyes, says good night and gives him a kiss.

She then closes the video-chat session and shuts off her laptop computer.

Yap, 21, an international student from Singapore, is a junior at NYU. Her boyfriend, also from Singapore, is studying in Shanghai, China. They maintain their long-distance romance through video chatting via built-in cameras on their computers. It had only been ten days into their romance in summer of 2007 when Yap had to leave for freshman year at NYU. Over two years later, they are still video chatting and still dating.

“It makes you feel like you’re there with the person, in a way,” she says. “At least with video chat, we ‘see’ each other everyday.

Video chat has become an increasingly popular way for college students to keep in touch with all loved ones, whether friends, lovers or relatives, especially while separated by physical distance. Not every college student is eager to jump in front of a camera just yet. Instant Messages, e-mails and phone calls are still most popular among the Gen Y community. Yet for tech-savvy college students who want to maintain relationships over distance but care about saving money too, video chatting is a simple solution.

Even Kevin Jonas uses video chat.

“This comes as a result of the prevailing technology that allows video chatting to be more than a fad,” says Tom Ricardo, an IT consultant for On Site in 60, a computer consulting company in New York City. Several years ago, video chatting was difficult and expensive. Since then, Internet connections have significantly increased in speed, video equipment has become quite cheap, and most computers now come with installed cameras.  “It is a utilization of technology that wasn’t available years ago.” Read the rest of this entry »

On September 22nd 2006, a 19-year-old college student, Reggie Shaw, was driving along a two-lane highway near Logan, Utah. His car swerved, crossed the divide, and hit another car coming from the opposite direction. Inside were two scientists. Both men were immediately killed when their car spun out of control and collided with a pickup truck.

It wasn’t until Shaw, sitting in the back seat of a police car immediately after the accident, pulled out his phone, and began text messaging, that the police officer on the scene became suspicious. After thorough investigation, it turned out that Shaw was texting behind the wheel only seconds before the accident occurred. Read the rest of this entry »

A Muslim named Kaivan and a Jew named Dylan are both typical members of Generation Y.  They both subscribe to a different religious belief, but neither is fighting over who is right.  For them, their religion is not about whose is the best, but which religion works best for them.

Overall, Generation Y breaks into three religious categories.  There are 27 percent who consider themselves “Godly,” 27 percent who are “Godless,” and 46 percent who are Undecided.  This is according to the survey OMG! How Generation Y is Redefining Faith in the iPod Era. This survey found that while today’s young people still follow the same religions their parents did, they differ in their expression of faith.

For many, this means replacing religious services that may feel outdated.  “Most young people today will say they are spiritual, not religious,” said Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, the Jewish chaplain at NYU.  Those spiritual youth believe holiness is subjective, and doesn’t have to be determined by an organized faith.  “People began thinking in terms of ‘me’ and not ‘the community,’” Rabbi Sarna said. Read the rest of this entry »

Laura Sessions Stepp, the author of “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both” asks audiences at her college-speaking engagements: Would you like to bring back dating?

The answer is overwhelmingly “yes.” Students are dissatisfied by the college hook-up culture.
Hooking up, defined as a sexual interaction outside of a romantic relationship and with no expectations beyond one night, is often problematic, particularly for women. Nonetheless, with dating -– romantic prospects formally spending time together — seemingly a relic of the past, college women continue to take part in the hook up culture.

Only 50 percent of college-age women indicate having been asked on six dates or more since beginning college, and a third of women surveyed were asked on two dates or fewer, according to “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right—College Women on Dating and Mating Today,” a 2001 report by the Independent Women’s Forum.

When dates are few and far between, women experiment with what for many is an undesirable, but unavoidable alternative: hooking up. “There’s a lot of just hooking up with people you don’t know, or people you regularly hook up with, but are not in a relationship with beyond the physical stuff,” said a junior at Stanford University. “Then, there are people who are practically married. But, there’s nothing really in between. There’s not much real dating.” She occasionally hooks up with strangers when intoxicated because she knows nothing else. “I feel like hooking up is the only way to satisfy my needs. It’s my only viable option,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »

Lucrative will probably never describe your journalism career–but will you at least be able to nab some sort of salary?

Not paying for news is fine when you’re a student subsisting mainly on ramen noodles and cheap watery beer, but what is going to happen when budding journalists enter the workforce and want to actually earn a living off of media-related jobs? Will they be willing to work for free?

Jeff Sonderman, Internet content director at the Scranton Times-Tribune, answers this question with a resounding maybe. “Honestly I don’t think that anyone can say right now what the future of the media is going to look like,” he said in an e-mail interview. “As a journalist myself, I like to think it will remain possible to make a living as a professional journalist. However, you will have to be exceptional at what you do.”

Sonderman describes a not-too-distant-future pyramid model in which raw information and breaking news will circulate in real time, mostly through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Above that will consist of a group of semi-professional bloggers and writers whose work focuses on a specific area of expertise. And at the top of the pyramid will be a small class of professional journalists whose function will be to “help explain and analyze the most important news bubbling up from the lower levels”.

The idea that the number of well-paid journalists is going to shrink seems to be the prevailing common wisdom in most media circles. “There’s no way getting around this,” says Judy Sims, online media professional and blogger, “There are going to be fewer paid journalists.” The reasons for this boil down to simple economics.

Back in the olden days (the dark ages that is known as the mid-1990’s), there were only a few sources of news; newspapers were bound by geography to the cities they were printed in, and even in those cities people generally only had two or—in rare cases—three outlets to choose from. There were exceptions, of course, such as USA Today, which was mostly meant for people on business trips looking to get a light skimming of the news in their hotel rooms, and the New York Times, which had phased itself into a more national paper, but on the whole, papers and by extension news itself, was generally bound by its location. After the Internet exploded in popularity, this was no longer true. Information had no boundaries, and anyone anywhere in the world could access any sort of information they so desired. This dramatically increased the amount of news in any one area, and when the supply of something rises, demand for it falls. As Sims puts it, “News organizations are not only competing with the passionate bloggers and citizen journalists in their own markets, but frankly, with every other content provider in the world. To survive, news organizations will have to focus on what they can do better than anyone else in the world: produce high quality, original, local or national news reporting and analysis.”

One thing we can be sure of is that despite the uncertain future of the media, college students’ interests in taking media jobs have not waned. In fact, the opposite is true. According to Forbes, applications for journalism schools at Columbia, Stanford, and NYU have jumped drastically, and show no signs of slowing. One of those students, Cristina Schreil, a 20-year-old journalism student at New York University, understands that her career path as a journalist will not be an easy one. “I’m well aware that the possibility I’ll be rolling in dough is slim,” she says, “but I’m still pretty hopeful. I am, however, thoroughly mentally prepared to have a second, steady source of income for the first parts of my career, especially if I expect to keep living in New York.”

As the newest crop of journalism students begins to graduate a clearer picture of the new media landscape will form. With a glut of wannabe journalists graduating to an increasingly less amount of jobs, the new media market could resemble, metaphorically, the opening scene from Jackass: The Movie where only the strongest are allowed to stay on the shopping cart, while the rest are strewn about covered in dirt clods and heaps of garbage. Or maybe this can be seen as a positive thing for journalism; newspapers have long been accused of wallowing in their own self-satisfaction, maybe a thinning herd and some economic pressure is exactly what is needed to shock some life back into journalism.

As Judy Sims put it when asked if students will be able to get paid as journalists, “I think in the long-run, yes. But only if you are passionate, dedicated and very good at what you do. And if you are all those things, not only will you get paid, but you will have the privilege of being one of the pioneers of the new journalism. That doesn’t sound so bad does it?”

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