Feels Like Another One

Every five, six years or so, we get a spate of "the next generation" articles.  This generally coincides with a new group of college graduates, usually a change of Presidents, and maybe some social phenomenon.  They're not the greatest examples of demographics (since they frequently from pseudo-sociologist commentators like David Brooks) research, and they usually come with built-in analysis - since the Baby Boomer columnists love to write them - around "why isn't this generation as committed/interested/active as we were?"

Memo to the new generation: shrug it off.

What prompts me to weigh in is a column from, yes, Brooks, as well as the simplistic ramblings of Thomas Friedman, which prompted this article in The American Prospect, this blog post from Ezra, and this partial squib from RedStar, my pal who isn't really in the generation in question. Yes, Red, these articles are about a torch being passed.  Welcome to my aging world.

I didn't intend to say anything, although I consider this pseudo-sociology very much my bailiwick; working in marketing, especially concentrated in the area of marketing analysis and reporting, I got to see a lot of the actual data behind years of pontification on the meanings of various generational differences.  Those of us in "Generation X" - a/k/a the group the right behind the Baby Boom, or the "Baby Bust" years - have had the most concentrated assault of generational analysis from the larger group ahead of us.  We were apathetic, we were too money focused... we were everything they were not, including younger, which meant that marketers, naturally grew to be more fascinated with us than with them, given our culture's endless obssession with youth.

In truth, we were, like any generational cohort, not easily put into convenient analytical boxes. Yes, we were the teens of the Reagan era, the MTV kids, the Alex Keatons if you will (I won't), the ones supposed to see ourselves in the kids of the Cosby show (we didn't), or in movies like Singles and Reality Bites (which I more or less ignored).  We were followed by "Generation Y" - the ones born in the late seventies and eighties, the kids of the boy band era, Britney Spears, tween movies and the rest.  The Baby Boom's kids, they were a boom themselves, and a marketer's dream.

Now we have the next bunch - the FaceBook and MySpace kids, the most web based kids ever (remember Generation Y, how that was supposed to be you?  Remember Gen X, how that was supposed to be us?). The kids, as of now, with no name (Generation Q is just dumb, Tom).  And here's Friedman to wonder about them being "overwhelmed" with information and "paralyzed" by the need to change so much - the global warming, the War in Iraq, the War on Terror... it's all too much.

It is all too much.  It's too soon to know what new generation of kids looks like, thinks, or believes.  Our pseudo science, especially pseudo-social science analysis fo so much these days is often just embarrassing, and nowhere moreso, I'd say, then in this generational analysis that we dissect so much and learn so little in doing so.  Sure, I know the sensation of being around the kids (the ones I know, anyway, still see ourselves as so, so young) my age and not having to explain some of the shorthand, the cultural signifiers, the fact that we knew Madonna way back when she thought rolling around on the floor was dancing. But life moves on, and the culture moves on, and so does our society.  We are all touched by the changes wrought by the web - the FaceBooks and MySpaces, the Googles and Wikis - whether we actively participate or not.  Blogging, it's become clear, is an activity for folks of all ages.

So no, I don't worry about Generation Overwhelmed.  I don't think they're the Second Coming, but I think there's a lot of good people, older than them, ready to help sort out the world and share our experiences.  It's the Baby Boom that likes to set up these generational "us against them" pictures, the kids who rebelled so concretely against the "establishment" of their parents... who could expect otherwise? I don't think those of us who've come along since see things in quite the same way.  It's a wonderful, amazing, complicated world we live in, and we live in it together, across ages, racial divisions, class backgrounds and all the rest.  We're breaking barriers down, not building them up.  And prehaps we should bust apart this notion of generational analysis as well.  It's outdated, it's tired... and it's time.

Comments

[Redstar]

If you'd read my comment on the Prospect article, you'd see I'm well aware of my ancient status! I was all "grain of salt" and patient encouragement to the young whippersnappers! (Though I refrained from condescendingly reminding the author that she was 23 and would grow out it.)

[jinbaltimore]

generalizing the generations is nothing new...your blind spot here is that you do the same thing when crediting the boomers for the impulse

[weboy]

I'm not "crediting the boomers" for generational analysis - demographics didn't start, and doesn't end, with them (though I grant, like so many things, they act as if they invented it; what I do think the Boomers brought to the "generational analysis" biz, though, is this sense that there's constant tension between and among generations. I think that's especially true of Boomers and, say their parents generation; but Gen X, Gen Y and the most recent group all seem to have a l;ack of intergenerational tension that may be remarkable... but I think is more the norm than not.