Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. 
 
 Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. 
 
 Beloit, Wis. – Born when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage, members of this fall’s entering college class of 2014 have emerged as a post-email generation for whom the digital world is routine and technology is just too slow. 
 
 Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset, the Mediasite webcast and its Facebook page receive more than 400,000 hits annually. 
 
 The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat. 
 
 Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older. 
 
 Most students entering college for the first time this fall—the Class of 2014—were born in 1992. 
 
 For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead. 
 
 1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive. 
 
 2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. 
 
 3. “Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.” 
 
 4. Al Gore has always been animated. 
 
 5. Los Angelenos have always been trying to get along. 
 
 6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High. 
 
 7. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo. 
 
 8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities. 
 
 9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend. 
 
 10. Entering college this fall in a country where a quarter of young people under 18 have at least one immigrant parent, they aren't afraid of immigration...unless it involves "real" aliens from another planet. 
 
 11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis. 
 
 12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry. 
 
 13. Parents and teachers feared that Beavis and Butt-head might be the voice of a lost generation. 
 
 14. Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine. 
 
 15. Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause. 
 
 16. Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways. 
 
 17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection. 
 
 18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess. 
 
 19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone. 
 
 20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed. 
 
 21. Woody Allen, whose heart has wanted what it wanted, has always been with Soon-Yi Previn. 
 
 22. Cross-burning has always been deemed protected speech. 
 
 23. Leasing has always allowed the folks to upgrade their tastes in cars. 
 
 24. “Cop Killer” by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording. 
 
 25. Leno and Letterman have always been trading insults on opposing networks. 
 
 26. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides. 
 
 27. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive. 
 
 28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day. 
 
 29. Reggie Jackson has always been enshrined in Cooperstown. 
 
 30. “Viewer Discretion” has always been an available warning on TV shows. 
 
 31. The first home computer they probably touched was an Apple II or Mac II; they are now in a museum. 
 
 32. Czechoslovakia has never existed. 
 
 33. Second-hand smoke has always been an official carcinogen. 
 
 34. “Assisted Living” has always been replacing nursing homes, while Hospice has always offered an alternative to the hospital. 
 
 35. Once they got through security, going to the airport has always resembled going to the mall. 
 
 36. Adhesive strips have always been available in varying skin tones. 
 
 37. Whatever their parents may have thought about the year they were born, Queen Elizabeth declared it an “Annus Horribilis.” 
 
 38. Bud Selig has always been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. 
 
 39. Pizza jockeys from Domino’s have never killed themselves to get your pizza there in under 30 minutes. 
 
 40. There have always been HIV positive athletes in the Olympics. 
 
 41. American companies have always done business in Vietnam. 
 
 42. Potato has always ended in an “e” in New Jersey per vice presidential edict. 
 
 43. Russians and Americans have always been living together in space. 
 
 44. The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs. 
 
 45. They have always had a chance to do community service with local and federal programs to earn money for college. 
 
 46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station. 
 
 47. Children have always been trying to divorce their parents. 
 
 48. Someone has always gotten married in space. 
 
 49. While they were babbling in strollers, there was already a female Poet Laureate of the United States. 
 
 50. Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps. 
 
 51. Food has always been irradiated. 
 
 52. There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church. 
 
 53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he? 
 
 54. The historic bridge at Mostar in Bosnia has always been a copy. 
 
 55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties. 
 
 56. They may have assumed that parents’ complaints about Black Monday had to do with punk rockers from L.A., not Wall Street. 
 
 57. A purple dinosaur has always supplanted Barney Google and Barney Fife. 
 
 58. Beethoven has always been a good name for a dog. 
 
 59. By the time their folks might have noticed Coca Cola’s new Tab Clear, it was gone. 
 
 60. Walmart has never sold handguns over the counter in the lower 48. 
 
 61. Presidential appointees have always been required to be more precise about paying their nannies’ withholding tax, or else. 
 
 62. Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine. 
 
 63. Their parents’ favorite TV sitcoms have always been showing up as movies. 
 
 64. The U.S, Canada, and Mexico have always agreed to trade freely. 
 
 65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus. 
 
 66. Galileo is forgiven and welcome back into the Roman Catholic Church. 
 
 67. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has always sat on the Supreme Court. 
 
 68. They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S. 
 
 69. It seems the Post Office has always been going broke. 
 
 70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping. 
 
 71. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing. 
 
 72. One way or another, “It’s the economy, stupid” and always has been. 
 
 73. Silicone-gel breast implants have always been regulated. 
 
 74. They've always been able to blast off with the Sci-Fi (SYFY) Channel. 
 
 75. Honda has always been a major competitor on Memorial Day at Indianapolis. ||||| The annual list offers a peek at the worldview of each new college generation. 
 
 The Class of 2017 is part of the sharing generation, according to the Beloit College Mindset List. (Photo: Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images) Story Highlights Original list was released in 1998 
 
 Latest list has a total of 60 items 
 
 Technology helped shape worldview, list authors say 
 
 This year's incoming college freshmen were babies starting to crawl about the same time news bulletins started crawling across the bottom of TV screens. 
 
 That is among tidbits about the worldview of first-year college students highlighted in the new Beloit College Mindset List, out Tuesday from Beloit College in Beloit, Wis. 
 
 The list, which gives a glimpse of the worldview of each new college class, emphasizes that the Class of 2017, most of them born in 1995, have wholly embraced technology. 
 
 Ron Nief and Tom McBride compile the annual lists by looking at magazines, newspapers and television for cultural events, historical moments and social trends. They also get suggestions for items on the list's Facebook page. 
 
 "A third of the list has to do with technology," says Nief, the college's former director of public affairs. For example, the list points out that they the Class of 2017 has never known a time when certain ubiquitous technologies didn't exist: "Having a chat has seldom involved talking," it says. And "with GPS, they have never needed directions to get someplace, just an address." 
 
 The entering freshman class on college campuses grew up with GPS. (Photo: Chris O'Meara, AP) 
 
 McBride, a Beloit professor of English and humanities, says the list reflects a sharing generation. The members of this generation share information about themselves through Facebook and other social media, and they share transportation by carpooling and using public transportation. "They are multicultural -- they have a shared notion of national identity," he adds. "They have non-sectarian views -- they have an ecumenical sense of spirituality." 
 
 Jeffrey Cole, director of USC Annenberg's Center for the Digital Future in Los Angeles, agrees that technology is a central part of the lives of this generation. 
 
 "They are much less interested in voice communication," Cole says. "They believe it is rude to call somebody unannounced. When they do talk by voice, it is usually arranged by texting, IMing or Facebook." 
 
 The list was created in 1998 as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, the college says. Through the years, it became an increasingly popular "cheat sheet" for others about the worldview of each new freshman class. 
 
 McBride says the list sparks conversations between generations on campuses and in homes. 
 
 "It is an icebreaker," he adds. "It's a way of personalizing history." 
 
 Top 5 Items on Mindset List 
 
 1. Eminem and LL Cool J could show up at parents' weekend. (The rappers' daughters were born in 1995. They don't attend Beloit College.) 
 
 2. They are the sharing generation, having shown tendencies to share everything, including possessions, no matter how personal. 
 
 3. GM means food that is genetically modified. 
 
 4. As they started to crawl, so did the news across the bottom of the television screen. 
 
 5. "Dude" has never had a negative tone. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/163Xqsb ||||| There are a few articles one can anticipate every August, traditionally the slowest month for news. Reporters will go to the Gathering of the Juggalos. Bloggers will pick up the president's vacation reading list, and that can be enlightening -- remember Barack Obama reading "Freedom" in galleys, or George W. Bush checking out Camus? Another is a list produced by a small Midwestern liberal arts college that's halfway between pop theorizing and a BuzzFeed "nostalgia" post. The Beloit College "Mindset List," whose 2013 iteration was released today, even by the standards of August newsgathering, is an insult to the reader. Last year, it was covered by Time, Inside Higher Ed and the Huffington Post, among other outlets. 
 
 The "Mindset List" is a fairly lengthy list of facts that have purportedly influenced the worldview of incoming college freshmen at Wisconsin's Beloit College. It began, as the project's website indicates, "in 1998 to reflect the world view of entering first year students. It started with the members of the class of 2002, born in 1980." It was created by a professor of theory at Beloit and the college's P.R. director, "a 'Mad Men' era veteran of Madison Avenue." Don Draper couldn't have come up with a better way to call attention to a small liberal-arts college -- but, then, the term "trolling" wasn't widely used in the 1960s. That mind-set came later. 
 
 That first list gave a pretty good, if rudimentary and obvious, idea of how college students differed from their professors: "Their lifetime has always included AIDS," for example. That is pretty striking! 
 
 However, even the first list presumed that individuals spend the time between birth and matriculation at college avoiding as strenuously as possible any history books or even television. Individuals born in 1980 and matriculating in 2002, per Beloit, "have never heard of 'Pong,'" are befuddled by the expression 'you sound like a broken record," "likely" don't know what a polio shot is ... one could go on. One more: individuals born in 1980 "have no idea that Americans were ever held hostage in Iran." 
 
 Really? 
 
 I was born in 1988 and have heard of the Iran hostage crisis and "Pong," though I tend to think that people who dwell on cultural signifiers like the latter are pedantically dwelling on specifics that mean, in the broad sweep of history, very little. 
 
 Over time, Beloit's professors ran out of things like "the AIDS crisis" and delved deeper into arcana or just meaningless incidents; the list's entries often read like the setup for an observation, one that the list-makers aren't willing to make but are happy to imply. Here are the only types of entries on the mind-set list: 
 
 [any celebrity or public figure] has always been [either dead or, more commonly, famous] [something completely random that one thinks about quite infrequently] has always been the case College freshmen have never seen [consumer product that is an easy punch line -- think eight-track tapes, Betamax, etc.] OR have always been able to [thing you can do with technology] College freshmen have never known about or experienced [news event from the recent past that everyone -- EVERYONE! -- has heard of or experienced] Bad puns about technology 
 
 There are a few completely bizarre and unaccountable items on this year's list: "Gaga has never been baby talk" comes as news, given that Lady Gaga rose to fame in 2008. There are also weird quasi-jokes about these students' parents being more excited about the release of Windows 95 than having children and giving those children PlayStations in the crib -- the list is deeply hung up on technology as the primary if not sole determinant of how people live life. And there are a couple of hints of sarcastic political humor that's far more jaded and nihilistic than the typical 18-year-old's worldview, and go down sour: "The Pentagon and Congress have always been shocked, absolutely shocked, by reports of sexual harassment and assault in the military." 
 
 Otherwise, though, the 60 entries on this year's list, intended to explicate the mind-set of the Beloit class of 2017, follow the five types of Mindset List Entry exactly. To wit: 
 
 "Bill Maher has always been politically incorrect." "'The Celestine Prophecy' has always been bringing forth a new age of spiritual insights"; "Spray paint has never been legally sold in Chicago"; "There has never been a Barings Bank in England." "They have always been able to plug into USB ports"; "With GPS, they have never needed directions to get someplace, just an address." "As kids they may well have seen 'Chicken Run' but probably never got chicken pox." "A tablet is no longer something you take in the morning"; "Java has never been just a cup of coffee." 
 
 Woof! 
 
 Aside from the hackiness of the puns, the thing that jumps out is that the majority of these things governing a student's "mind-set" are actually not that important. Does an incoming college freshman have any idea who Bill Maher is? Has a spray-paint ban in Chicago any connection to, well, anything other than aspiring Illinois graffiti artists? The list's particular obsession with technology signifies both a nostalgia that's deeply uninteresting (these kids with their iPads -- things were so much simpler when we all played "Pong," or better yet, stickball in the street!) and a willingness to make sweeping implications about the degree to which Technology Has Changed Everything that is many things, but is not academic. 
 
 As a recent-ish college graduate whose degree is in American studies, I find the Beloit list a particular irritant. Cultural studies are too easily seen as airy-fairy exercises in aggregating random facts and nebulous trends from recent decades in order to make a point that may or may not be rooted in reality; as these fields have grown more popular, they seem less and less related to the more serious work being done elsewhere in the academy. 
 
 Compare the work of academics earnestly seeking to better understand life in America in the last quarter-century to a linkbait-y list that posits that, because "Barings Bank in England" closed or because computers have USB ports now, students are magically and fundamentally changed. 
 
 To those who believe the list has a higher purpose than getting media attention to Beloit (and, good for them! It's certainly working ...) consider when the list drops. Though Beloit students begin classes on Aug. 26 this year, the list drops neither close to September, when actual news begins peeking out again, nor in May, when those students graduated high school. It's calculated to make a splash. That Beloit's professors have this figured out means that they're far less naive about technology than they let on.
– US News & World Report is ready to shock us all with its Best Colleges 2011 ranking, which places Harvard smack dab on top. Again. But—news alert!—Princeton has tumbled from tying the venerable Crimson to No. 2. That list, which you can see here, doesn't wow us quite so much as does another annual list released today: Beloit College's Mindset List, which gives us a snapshot of the realities and events shaping the lives of this year's freshman class, born in 1992. Some highlights: The majority don't know how to write in cursive. They have never had trouble understanding what a "caramel macchiato" is. Clint Eastwood is some guy who directs movies. Fergie is a member of the Black Eyed Peas, not the British Royal Family. Czechoslovakia has never existed. The Post Office has always been basically broke. Click here for the complete 75-item list (Buffy and Barney and Beanie Babies, oh my!).