Go read!

I think I’m missing something here (though not surprised by the fact that whenever generationalism rears its head, the originary dissing of Gen X is reinscribed each time). Maybe it’s because the experience of the 80s was very different in Australia (and the UK) than in America, and this even similar cultural themes and texts and musical forms were read through distinctive lenses.

I feel so sorry for Generation X. They grew up without a unifying enemy. They grew up constantly criticized as a do-nothing care-nothing generation. They started the Internet boom but would eventually lose out to the young upstarts from the next generation, the Googles and Facebooks of the world. They truly are The Lost Generation, sandwiched between the crisis of Nixon and the crisis of today. Now, my generation is the second-born prodigal son, the boy-king who snatched the crown of influence directly from his parents, bypassing the first-born’s rule entirely. We are fighting the War on Terror. We are innovators in tech and energy and media.

Err… whatevs. Anyone who runs around talking about themselves as the incarnation of Gen Y triumphalism might care to chew on one of the few sociologically sound distinctions between Gen X and Gen Y – the differing attitudes towards security, expectations and the labour market caused by the presence and absence of deep recessions respectively. But, bitchiness directed towards the author, David Mekelburg, aside, I’d like to point out that one defining 80s generational coming of age film, St Elmo’s Fire, had, years before “Greed is Good”, already pointed to the emptiness of the material world Madonna was later to ironise. Just sayin, you know. I think the 80s – in pop cultural terms – were a much more complex assemblage of themes and desires than this stuff recognises.

So I give you Jules:

Image courtesy of Funkadelic at deviantart. Click through and click on full view for a higher res version.

Regular LP readers might recall that I’ve been emphasising for some time now research evidence which suggests that the “apathetic youth” narrative is nonsense. Just because no one’s marching in the street, doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. Further evidence for that case comes from a literature review prepared for the Whitlam Institute by Philippa Colin – Young People Imagining a New Democracy [link to pdf]. Colin finds that engagement is migrating online, and that it’s much more likely to be issues or cause based than the “citizen oriented repertoires” of involvement in political parties. The review also suggests significant disengagement with the formal practices of citizenship coincides with idealism and engagement around issues and networks.

This report was discussed in the most stereotypical possible way on last week’s Q&A (where most of the panel wanted to diss blogging and those intertubes). Doing it justice might force us to answer the question of what’s wrong with our democracy, rather than squeeze it into the most tedious and condescending media frame of what’s wrong with teh yoof… In many ways, one could argue that disengagement from an unresponsive and elitist “democracy” is an eminently rational choice. That might be something the professionally cynical pundits and pollies might wish to ponder.