The generation gap

I was wandering online and stumbled on this: http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/wh...eo-game-sucks-minecraft-1688203198/+tinaamini

(warning: link leads to minecraft disparagement)

I was amused, because: people 20 years my junior acting like old farts!

Then I started wondering if something more generally interesting was going on.

I attended high school from '68 to '71. The generation gap between me and my mother (my sole parent) was huge. I thought then and still do, that although she was a very bright woman, she never grasped the modern world: neither culture (not even the Beatles), nor politics left or right, nor tech.

There is always a generation gap, as youth always creates a culture that excludes parents, but it seemed to me the gap of the late 60s was much greater than those before or since . . .

Until now.

I really think the current gap may become as large or larger than that of the 60s, with as many permanent consequences. Tech and social media are of course a large part of that. Political watersheds also are important, though it is unclear if we are now going through a large political and economic shift or not. But I think the concerns of this board, particularly the increased understanding of gender and brain issues, may also be quite important.

I am just wondering what you young'uns think about all this. Does the world feel like it is changing quickly and unpredictably, or does it feel like business as usual? And are the concerns of this board an important part of what is happening, or not so much?

 

Hmm. I think people are changing in reaction to the world's changes, but, having no personal knowledge of any other way to live, I don't think that the world is changing quickly or unpredictably.
Sometimes it feels like things go much faster than they did when I was younger, but that also might be just that I have more awareness of things around me - and so when they change, I see many things changing rather than the few things I was aware of changing when I was a kid.

I do think that increased knowledge of gender and brain issues are a part of what's happening, but I think the scope is wider than that. I know I've heard that my generation (I'm 22 btw) has an increased involvement in nonprofit. (I'm going into Americorps NCCC when I graduate. Hrm, I've always felt like I owed the world somehow, some level of thanks for my existence, which I find pretty important to me). I think a lot of the changes happening to this generation are because of technology like the internet, which increases communication between many different viewpoints, instead of growing up with just a few in your immediate group.

#I just woke up so if i crammed too much stuff into a sentence let me know #i'm trying to quit that

 

put it this way:
I get the sense that things are getting faster and i'm 15.
it may be normAl.
what's interesting is that the millennial generation is the 15(as of 11:59 December 31 2014) through 30 generation, and people treat a span of fifteen years as a lump.
I dunnO.
saying random things while on mobile.

 

I think the accessibility of technology does "speed things up", in a way, but i also think the younger generation is always going to be a mystery to the older. You can find records of people complaining about when paper was beginning to be mass produced, kids these days just don't know how to write on a slate anymore! When the radio came out they were worried kids wouldn't read books anymore. When the TV was made they worried kids wouldn't listen to the radio. And so it goes.

It just seems like the pattern of human history repeating itself, albeit a bit differently each time.

EDIT: that article amuses me because tons of grown adults play Minecraft, including myself and a bunch of people on this board...

 

I actually feel like the generation gap isn't that big now, because I'm twenty-three and just graduated into the wide world of 'everyone from twenty-two to forty-five works in the same place and hangs out in the same social circles'. It's been very jarring; I always thought of people even a year or two different in age as totally alien beings, and it turns out that everybody's just people. But the internet and Adult Life In General mean talking to all kinds of different people, which is actually really interesting.

That being said... god, I don't know about world events. I'm a little burned out on that topic right now; it's... rather depressing.

 

its pretty weird to me...I'm 25 and was raised by a mother who claimed to hate technology, but now I know it had a LOT to do with how much her kids were paying attention to her/things she considered "worthwhile". Like, she LOVES her iPad and her smartphone and netflix, but video games, they're rotting kids brains!! I used to read books nonstop but once I started reading things online, that was "garbage". and she's still in that "video games are horrible and violent" mindset even though I asked her to watch me play some heavily story-based games to show her that they're narratives just like other forms of entertainment. (meanwhile...she loves murder mystery shows.)

I think a lot of it is, some people get worse at handling change as they get older, and also an inability to accept that something has value to people even if it doesn't to them. I used to call the person i was dating and talk to them on the phone for HOURS, but I basically couldn't do anything else at the same time. Now I can chat with them through texting/aim even if im just out doing errands. I think that's pretty cool.

You see all those things about ~TECHNOLOGY IS MAKING PEOPLE MORE ISOLATED~ meanwhile, people used to sit on public transport reading the newspaper, ignoring each other.

EDIT: I keep thinking of new things to say, gosh. I don't know what demographic Minecraft was marketed to, but I think it has an all-ages appeal because there's just...so many ways you can play it. Like you can just build stuff, you can tailor it to be hardcore or RPG-ish or anything. That's why it has such a huge playerbase, because it's so versatile.

 

I never really saw much anti-technology from older people. Grim (my guardian) is nearly 60 - and the person that taught me to use computers to talk, and then taught me programming.
When I see the anti-tech people (usually seem to be younger than Grim) saying how the tech hurts communication I just roll my eyes and resist the urge to point out that if it weren't for tech I would still be using a slate and chalk to talk to people.

 

Haha, wow, that article. I love it when people don't even try to understand the appeal of a thing. And the old, "why watch someone doing something when you can just go out and do it????" argument that I hear so often from goddamned sports fans just oozes hypocrisy.
It's always weird to me how people can do that? Not that they would, but that they can maintain the illusion that their personal shit that they 'get' is just the right stuff to get, and that everyone else's stuff is just so damn inscrutable and awful and probably causes like seven cancers.

 

whoa this is interesting because i always feel like i'm between 90s and 2000s because i was born in 1994 and i don't really relate to the 90s... early 2000s stuff is more relevant and formative to me. people who grew up in the 80s seem to have this sort of rough edge to them, pragmatic, but with a certain wacky/schaudenfreude sense of humor while people from my generation have that very absurdist internet humor and are exposed to more progressive(? words) ideas

 

y'know it's interesting, i think i've always leaned towards absurdist type humour? if amelia bedilia was anything to go by. i honestly wonder how much it has to do with the people producing the media itself, rather than those consuming it. i'm starting to think the people who were teens and young adults in the early 2000s (my generation) are gonna be some scary as hell world leaders in 15-20 years. we''ll get there when we get there, i suppose.

also, the term "hipsters" comes to mind when i think today's youth. thoughts? how similar are they to what people considered a "hippy"?

 

I feel like the underlying philosophy is different, but at least some of the behaviors are similar, maybe?

 

Welp. I'mma sperge about Strauss-Howe generational theory. Sorry in advance.

Disclaimers: Strauss-Howe is biased towards the way prosperous white Americans interpret history. Furthermore, any overarching Great Theory in a humanities subject is inherently prone to fudging to fit the data. Please insert two grains of salt to continue.

Basically, S-H posits four generational types, each of which lasts twenty years:

- Heroes (GI/WWII generation, allegedly what they forecast the Millenials being) - their main virtue is stability.
- Artists (Silent Generation, the kids who are in elementary school or younger all the way down to being born right now) - their main virtue is diversity.
- Prophets (Baby Boomers, Exty Great Awakening preachers in American history) - their main virtue is vision. (Not, like, eyesight vision. Vision as in having this overarching idea of how everything works/should work.)
- Nomads (Xers, people who were old enough to fight in WWI or just a few years younger) - their main virtue is survival.

The Heroes and Prophets tend to be somewhat more important in history than the Artists and Nomads are. For example, we haven't had a President from the entire Silent Generation (McCain would've been one, but now he's way too old).

They also posit four cyclical historical trends, each of which also lasts twenty years:

- the High: in which Artists come of age under the Heroes building institutions and an era of relative prosperity and stability, and in which the Prophets are raised. The most recent one was the post-WWII era.
- the Awakening: In which Prophets become adults and drag society out of being materialist and towards spiritual stuff, and in which the Nomads are born. The most recent one should be pretty obvious!
- the Unraveling: in which Nomads become adults as the society crumbles under the weight of increasing strife between rulers who are unwilling or unable to compromise, and in which Heroes are born. Think stagflation, the 1973 oil crises, "inner cities are degenerating out of control", etc.
- the Crisis: in which Heroes come of age, and are the foot-soldiers who put in the work to fix society's material concerns, and in which Artists are children. Strauss and Howe allege we are in one now.

There's entire sets of "what each group went through in various stages of life and what kind of effects they have on each other" things, but I'm not going to get into that, the Wikipedia page probably remembers this better than I do. There's also an attempted extension of this theory internationally that posits that different countries have their cycles "offset" from the American one by however many years. And so on, and so forth.

But what I'm trying to get at here is that these generations are roughly twenty years each, and the reason for this is because each generation comes of age in a different social climate. For example, the difference between Generation X and Millenials is that Generation X spent most of their life in the downward slide; they have a lot of experience at the "we do not have jobs commensurate to our ability because Boomers are hogging all the top positions" thing, the difference being that they're now too old to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and have more or less resigned themselves to being Millenials' advisors as the Millenials figure out how to wrest power from the Boomers.

For example, the reason why little kids in grade school like Minecraft right now is because they're so incredibly overprotected (because this is a Crisis) that they don't have anywhere to roam. But they're children! They need somewhere to explore to build up mastery! So they turned to the digital realm. Meanwhile, Boomers get all nostalgic about "back in my day, we used to be able to ride our bicycles to the county line and all we had to do was call if we wouldn't be home for dinner, man, it's a pity kids these days can't do that anymore" and then turn around and go "but this is a much more dangerous time clearly we should pass laws forbidding parents from letting their children go to the park by themselves" - without thinking about things hard enough or consistently enough to realize these are kind of contradictory positions to hold!

For example, the reason why Millenials are in such a bind about their parents not realizing or taking into consideration into their decisions that college costs a metric ass-ton of money (slightly larger than an imperial ass-ton of money) is because the Prophets were, as children, raised in massive prosperity and took for granted the institutions the Heroes had just built at the time. Including, say, the UC college system. Thus they could go to school for relatively little, since the GIs had noted that a well-educated populace is a social good. Unfortunately, once the GIs aged out of power and the Boomers could raid the coffers (or I suppose, in this case, do the Reagan thing and cut taxes since "we've got enough money in the bank anyway") higher education fell further and further behind in the priority list. As the Xers never did get enough power to fix this, it falls to the Millenials to figure out what the hell to do with the student loan bubble they are now facing. (Although I should note that at least a few Xers of the more sociopathic bent are going "okay, the student loan bubble's going to have to deflate somehow, I should take out loans and go to school now so that I get the benefit of whatever reforms are going to pass".)

I'd go on but frankly I have written too much already and it is late so I will stop here. Ask me more questions if you have any?

 

That's absolutely fascinating. I'm a Millenial but my parents are both Xers, not Boomers. They're more aware of how the economy has changed than Boomers tend to be, and adjusted their expectations a long time ago - part of the reason I wasn't expected to go to college - and so I don't have the problem a lot of Millenials do (being thrown out on their collective ear by parents who don't understand why their careers aren't advancing at the rate that they would have in the 60s). But I definitely value stability more than anything else.

So, how far back can you match the generations to types and historical trends? Also, what happens if you get an Unraveling coinciding with the wrong generation, do the generations reset? Or does that just not happen?

(ETA: Also, hilariously and a little sadly, my Xer mother has insisted for years that Americans are nomads. She meant it in the sense of having to chase jobs across the continent, but ... wow.)

 

So this is a complicated explanation for why tumblr is such an arena for heroic struggle? Or is it just a beacon of stability? ;>)

 

You could definitely interpret Tumblr's way of stuffing everyone into neatly-labeled boxes and demanding that everyone conform to certain standards (tagging things, not using certain words) as an attempt to Achieve Stability by making everyone Be Nice.

 

Hmm. The "Unraveling at the wrong time" isn't really something that I've seen in the theory, but a Crisis at the wrong time? That's in the theory. That's what the authors say happened in the Civil War. Also, these periods aren't really defined by what happens so much as society's response to it. WWI could've been WWII, but it happened during an Unraveling instead of a Crisis, so instead of going in with the attitude that they would solve the problem once and for all, the United States sent a smaller force later, and didn't really pay attention to the fact that the treaty ending the war was just going to lead to another one. (Kinda like Afghanistan and Iraq, really.)

I think they have posited the Anglo-American "saecula" (their term, yoinked from Latin) extending back to the 1600s in England. Again, Wikipedia explains this pretty well.

I am a cat, when it comes to labels and boxes. I love them because I fit into some of them, and if I fit in the box, I will sit in the box.

I think Tumblr is an emergent property of young adults, though. Other groups of young adults might latch onto other issues to get people to follow and to use as status games, but it seems to be just a thing that happens when you have teenagers and twentysomethings. And shutting teenagers and twentysomethings out of public life, while older people dream of it, is both infeasible and unethical. So it's just part of the human condition we have to deal with, I guess. I don't think it's generational.

 

Yeah, the Wiki page is nice and long and full of words. I might have to try to get my hands on some of those books, too. I like seeing things sorted out like this. Especially the bit where the Awakening and the Crisis are analogous to summer and winter? I love theories that match things up like that.