I think there really is something to the idea of "Xennials" as a mini-generation caught between two very different generations. I remember going from rotary phones as I started grade school to broadband internet by the time I graduated from high school. (And my family was not unusual at all: we got our first touch-tone phone the same year that 50% of American homes had it, and got our first broadband connection just one year before broadband was in 50% of American homes.) We Xennials didn't grow up with the internet, the internet grew up with us. The vast majority of us don't remember a time before personal computers were commonplace, but we were also the last to have a large portion of our childhood before the internet was widely used.

I think it shows in the way Xennials interact with technology compared with younger generations. We got comfortable with computers at a time when most things on computers were text-based, and the default way of operating a computer was with a command prompt. (I still prefer to use a keyboard over any other any other input device.) We also tended to have big, detailed manuals for all our software, and did a lot of computer repair and hardware upgrades ourselves. I get the sense that, apart from those who go into tech work, younger generations aren't forced to learn the nuts and bolts of computers the way we had to. I've been surprised at how many people just five years younger than me, who in many ways seem more comfortable with computers than I am, have been confused by what I would have considered basic computing knowledge.

At the same time, younger people seem to be much quicker to pick up on things without a manual. I sometimes get confused by the wide array of text-free icons that appear in present-day software and some present-day websites, with not much explanation of what everything does, and a lot of the ins and outs of using touchscreens aren't intuitive to me. I'm definitely not comfortable using a tablet without a keyboard. I have friends who recently moved to Oregon, and it turns out their new neighbor's daughter is a musical prodigy who just composed her first symphony at 13. When they described how quickly she wrote the symphony on her tablet, my jaw dropped -- because I wouldn't be able to physically write the music that quickly, either on paper or with notation software, even if every note was already in my head! (I wasn't as surprised by how fast the ideas came, because I've known people in my generation for whom the limiting factor in how fast they compose is their ability to physically write the music.) Even if equipped with the same technology, I suspect I would not be able to write nearly as quickly, just because the thought processes involved in using newer software are so different.