Millennials. What are they anyway?

Response to: iWrite by Dana J. Wilber

Specifically, I am responding to a small section from "Chapter 1: What It Means to Teach Reading and Writing Today."  I wrote so many notes in the margins of the section "The Millennials" that I couldn't resist my first response being all about these crazy kids.

What are The Millennials anyway? According to Wilber, who borrowed the term from Howe and Strauss, people born after 1982 are considered Millennials. I always thought of this group as Generation Y. The basic concept is the same. These people don't know what it was like to live in an age that didn't allow for immediate access to their every desire. I am giving away a little too much about myself when I say this, but I actually know what a card catalog is and I remember what it was like before every living creature had a means of instant communication. I remember the days of using an encyclopedia instead of Google. I remember waiting for my mom in the nurse's office for hours because she wasn't home when I got sick. Millennials will think I was born in 1877. But alas, I was not. But these are the people I am expected to teach one day.

Here is some food for thought.

Okay, here are some questions I have......

1. Why do Millennials feel like they have to be "plugged in" to everything and everyone all the time? And I mean All. The. Time. Wilber writes about their constant interactions, but I didn't read anything about face-to-face interactions. This leads to my next question.
2. Is it easier for Millennials to communicate in a more "anonymous" forum that allows for responses to be vague and lacking in human emotion, save the randomly inserted smiley icon? 
3. If the Millennials are able to multi-task (which Wilber does acknowledge as impossible on page 10) are they really understanding what they are doing? I think it is more of a "search until I find the answer" sort of mentality because they all seem to think that cut and paste is the solution to all of their work. Enjoy this nugget of truth:

There is no way around the fact that eventually I will be teaching. And I will be teaching kids who are infinitely more savvy than I am with technology. I am trying to have an open mind about it, but how can I teach a generation of kids that writing is hard work when everything has been a few mouse clicks away and no more difficult than typing into an autocorrecting box? How do I get them to understand that they can have their own opinions about literature and text that may be different from the SparkNotes version?

With a mobile app, SparkNotes is more easily accessible than individual thought, I guess.