My early youth came at the very tail end of the whole hippie culture where it was all about sticking it to the man and everyone wanted to be a free soul who didn’t care what people thought about them or what they did. As in all things though reality sets in. For the vast majority of the hippie generation this meant having to join the very culture that they had railed against all the while hoping that there was nothing out there that could come back to haunt them; or endanger their new lives.

I was reminded of this when I read a post today by Steve Clayton where he said:

Led by Generation Y, who seems carefree about sharing their lives on the web, I suspect many of us are opening up what we may have previously guarded in a rush to stay in the vanguard of technology.

The generations maybe totally different but the attitude about not caring what people think or about what you say is no different. Today we have replaced the commune with the social network and instead of putting flowers in gun barrels for the benefit of photographers we put our lives up on YouTube. We marched through the streets to do battle with the police as we protested against the establishment, now we join MoveOn.org and let our fingers march across our keyboards as we fill our blogs with thoughts and opinions.

Then Madison Avenue discovered it could make fortunes from this hippie culture and it became a marketable commodity, now VC’s and corporations have discovered this new generation of electronic hippies and have made it a commodity.

We are a society that has forever lived in cycles of history only the generations and the technology is different - will this time be any different?

Listening to: Delerium - Morpheus - Gaza

Conversation Tags: social networks, internet, history