Emphasis Added : Social Trends, Millennials

Generation Generalizations

Rob — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:35:00 GMT

This brutal takedown of Mark Baurlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or Don't Trust Anyone Under Thirty over at the Huffington Post raises some good points about the perennial efforts of older generations to sound alarms about the insufficient learning, respect, and work ethic of those darned youngsters.The reviews, Kevin Morris and Glen Altschueler, write:

Like Allan Bloom, Bauerlein yearns for an age of citizens, gentlemen, and believers, unspoiled by Freud, Dr. Spock, Mr. Spock, the Yippies, and YouTube. A time when professors could and did force students to read the "canon" of "Great Books" and regard Rembrandt with reverence. And tell them, again and again, that without these "counter-poisons to mass culture" they'd never become complete persons.

This is especially amusing to me as a GenXer who was going through college (one with a conspicuously rigorous "great books" curriculum, actually) in the era of Allan Bloom. Back in those days, it was hip-hop, 8-bit videogames, and big-budget Hollywood blockbusters that were driving teen illiteracy and the cynical, "slacker" attitude that so perturbed the elders of the moment. Now, reading Jeff Gordinier's X Saves the World, it turns out that we were the last young people to appreciate anything and find value in simple pleasures like vinyl LPs and furnishing our wardrobe from thrift stores. Indeed, Gordinier is as hostile and dismissive of the MySpace generation as Baurlein, albeit in a much more witty and ironic way.

Sitting comfortably in my own glass house, having written a book that paints in as broad strokes as any on the workstyles of different generations, I am nevertheless troubled by the trafficking in facile intellectual stereotypes of generations. Common historical experience does create some shared frames of reference that render generations distinctive, but there are smart people and stupid people of all ages. It is in no way clear to me that cultural factors, much less technology, make smart Millennials any less intellectually curious, literate, creative or knowledgeable than smart young people of any age group. And if they don't make the dumb ones any smarter, that it not a unique failing either.

The bottom line is that no one knows everything when they're 18 or 20, even if they've read good books or been to good schools. Test any population and you will find troubling gaps in knowledge, especially now that we live in an age where there's so much more to know and so many ways to get information. Anyone who writes a book like Baurlein or Gordinier necessarily represents an intellecutally elite perspective as well as an older one, and it's easy pickings to sit in judgment of people with less intellecutal experience and accomplishment. As always, it's a stupid project. In time, the cream will rise to the top, and those Millennials with the propensity and interest in defending cultural continuity (e.g., the canon of great works, or the superior audio fidelity of old vinyl) will do so, while others will discover new ideas and shape new tastes in areas that the Baurleins and Gordiniers of the world are blind to.

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Helicopter Parents and Free-Range Kids

Rob — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:05:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, there was a minor furor caused by Lenore Skenazy, a New York parent who allowed - even encouraged - her 9 year-old son to find his own way back from Bloomingdale's to their home on the Upper West Side, riding the subway on his own. Skenazy, who wrote about her experience in the New York Sun amid much public criticism, has apparently emerged as an outspoken advocate for "Free Range Kids," even starting a blog on the subject (subtitled: "Let's Give Our Children the Freedom that We Had!")

As a latchkey child of the 70s who walked home alone from kindergarten and rode public transit from the age of 7 in 1970s Philadelphia, I have always been a bit perplexed by the syndrome of "helicopter parenting" that came into vogue in the late 1980s. It was probably seen as a necessary and reasonable corrective to the permissive approach which produced the Boomer-GenX cusp cohort born 1960-1964, with their historically-high levels of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, arrest and imprisonment, and low academic achievement. Still, the whole routine of providing a constant supply of structured activities and intensive supervision of kids seemed to be at least as much about satisfying the consumerist tendencies of Boomer parents, and mitigating the guilt experienced by workaholic breadwinners, as about the kids themselves.

Quite a few Millennials are the product of helicopter parenting and the very strategic, self-conscious approach that parents, schools and society took towards shielding them from risk and unpleasantness. We are even hearing stories about parents who attend their children's job interviews or call employers to keep up to date on how junior is doing. For Boomer managers who raised their own kids in this way, I guess it's par for the course, but suffice it to say that most GenXers I know have a different reaction. Anecdotal evidence that I have seen from reading blogs of Millennials in the workforce demonstrate that differences over the role of parental involvement and independence are one of the biggest sources of misunderstanding (and sometimes conflict) between young workers and GenX bosses.

Personally, I credit the independence that my parents gave me at an early age with many of the more positive and productive aspects of my later life, but, being childless, it's kind of an academic question for me. However, now that many of my (GenX) friends have kids themselves, it is interesting to see whether they follow in the footsteps of the protective Boomer parents of the 90s, or embrace the "free range" approach advocated by Skenazy.

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China's Millennials

Rob — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:21:00 GMT

American Millennials enjoy (or perhaps not) a reputation as conformists and group-thinkers among some generation-watchers, but apparently they have nothing on their peers in the PRC. My old pal Matt Forney had a piece on the New York Times Op-Ed page over the weekend called "China's Loyal Youth," in which he bluntly observes: "Educated young Chinese, far from being embarrassed or upset by their government’s human-rights record, rank among the most patriotic, establishment-supporting people you’ll meet. As is clear to anyone who lives here, most young ethnic Chinese strongly support their government’s suppression of the recent Tibetan uprising."

In China, it is the GenXers who are the radicals and troublemakers. They are the ones who remember (and may have participated in) the 1989 uprisings culminating in Tienanmen Square. Matt notes: "It is received wisdom in China that people in their 40s are the most willing to challenge their government, and the Tibet crisis bears out that observation. Of the 29 ethnic-Chinese intellectuals who last month signed a widely publicized petition urging the government to show restraint in the crackdown, not one was under 30."

Chinese Millennials, although globally connected and more participative in the international economy than any previous generation, have taken different lessons from the experience than Western twentysomethings. Instead of internalizing a sense of ownership over the world's big issues, Chinese youth appear to view the problems of everyone else as a validation of the policies of the Chinese government and the virtues of the Chinese people, given their unbroken run of economic achievement in the past decade and a half. Matt conlcudes on a sobering note: "Barring major changes in China’s education system or economy, Westerners are not going to find allies among the vast majority of Chinese on key issues like Tibet, Darfur and the environment for some time."

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Way Past Normal

Rob — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:41:00 GMT

Clay Shirky writes: "Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn't create change; it has to be around long enough that most of society is using it... for our young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming."

This observation, better than anything else I've seen so far, encapsulates the differences I talk about in Generation Blend. Pre-digital generations find social computing technology novel, and perhaps threatening. At the very least, it takes some conscious effort to embrace and understand because it is so different from prior experience. GenX finds the technology interesting, having grown up concurrently with IT innovation and surrounded by a constant conversation about the improving capabilities of new tools. We tend to be the ham radio operators, fiddling with the tubes and transistors instead of listening to the broadcasts.

Most Millennials, except those very self-consciously participating in discussions about technology and society, don't seem to think much about the tools, anymore than you would think about the pane of glass in a window rather than the view outside. I suspect they secretly laugh at GenXers (like Shirky and me) who fetishize this whole relationship between technology and social transformation and are much more interested in the content of new conversations than the wires through which they travel.

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Teens and Transparent Technology

Rob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:06:00 GMT

Posts today over at Salon ("What's the Matter with Kids Today? Nothing, actually. Aside from our panic that the Internet is melting their brains") and SmartMobs ("A Poor Excuse for a Social Life") offer two different takes on one of the more interesting generational disjunctions in the way we perceive technology. The Salon piece argues that ubiquitous networks and information access, far from being a stupefying distraction, actually encourage a high degree of literacy and conversation among young people, and that the behaviors of consuming huge amounts of text-based media and writing discursively to friends in far-away places would draw no negative comment - indeed, would be seen as praiseworthy - if they were conducted in the analog world. The author argues that parents and older folks in general have mystified and mythologized the workings of the Internet and social networks, such that they have become a receptacle for traditional parental anxieties about the behavior of adolescents. Bottom line: if you are worried about behavior, worry about behavior and not the technology.

That view is supported in the SmartMobs piece by Marius Chitosca, who talks about a case where a shy teen is taunted by his more aggressive older brother and his friends for his "dedicated involvement with MySpace networking." He asks a couple of questions about the role of the online social network in this context:

Does it feel like a predator or a parasite on the back of the social networks in the real life? Does it provide a sanctuary in the face of bad real life relations with people? Is it a shy or handicapped people's substitute for not being able to build and manage a social network offline? Or can it go in harmony with what's outside the virtual environment, being a complementary tools and source altogether for practicing social skills, bonding more, learning more, having more fun and extending one's social networks?

It seems to me that this is simply a replay of timeless ritual of adolescent male dominance, humiliation, and social pressure. When I faced these kinds of situations during the "awkward years," my retreat was to comics, science fiction, and fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, etc.) - either solitary activities or rule-based recreation in collaboration with a tight circle of fellow outcasts. I also recall a fair amount of social handwringing among elders at the time about the negative effects of role-playing games, as if this particular outlet for the socially-awkward were somehow to blame for the uneven development of social skills among 12-15 year-old boys. If that's not putting the cart before the horse, then the phrase has no meaning.

The situations discussed in both of these pieces describe how older observers tend to overvalue the causative role of the medium of expression chosen by teens, leading to a predictable, almost comically stereotyped reaction of concern over the technology of the moment. This is natural: whatever teens of the moment are doing is new (to them). It's first in line to take the blamefor any worrisome departures from the values, priorities and traditional viewpoints that parents and teachers have tried to instill in the kids.

From the teens' point of view, however,the technology (or, more broadly, the medium) for personal expression, retreat, community, creativity and coming to an understanding of the world, is transparent and probably mostly irrelevant to the process of self-discovery. Young people may recognize novelty to some degree, but it rarely has the same threatening overtones it has to people who have a bigger vested interest in tradition and continuity. This is one reason why technology discussions between pre- and post-digital generations often produce misunderstandings. If you're a fish, you don't notice that you're surrounded by water.

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Generations International

Rob — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:37:00 GMT

Generation Blend draws most of its data about generational attitudes and experiences from the United States. There's every reason to believe that the digital age gap exists around the world, especially in societies that made an abrupt transition from pre-industrial economies to information economies.

However, it's not clear to me how the digital divide fits within the framework of larger generational issues in some of those countries. For example, the historical experience of those born in the 1960s and 1970s - what we call "Generation X" in the US - was remarkably different in Eastern Europe, where the 1980s were a time of dramatic liberalization and idealism, rather than an age of ideological reaction focused primarily on the accumulation of wealth. One must imagine that the outlook of the Russian Baby Boom (b.1946-1964), or the Chinese, has little in common with its American counterpart, especially given how little contact those societies had with one another, and how little common information they shared.

Now the Internet has changed all that. The Millennials appear to be the first truly global generation, influenced by a global media and pervasive cross-cultural connectivity. One example is this Cuban blog, Generación Y, where the young writer Yoani Sánchez (b.1975) provides a first-hand account of the transition of power that took place there yesterday.

Even so, "Generation Y" seems to have its own distinct, and amusingly specific, meaning in Cuba. According to this translation of Yoani's editorial (at Salon), "the "Y" a reference to the generation born during the '70s, when Russian and Russian-influenced names, many beginning with "Y," such as Yanisleidi, Yoandri, Yusimí, Yuniesky, etc. were in vogue in Cuba. These are the Cubans who came into adulthood after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cuban economy in 1989 and for whom the revolution was not a personal experience."

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