I’ve been running a bit of a crusade against lazy generationalist assumptions for a long time (ie ‘all Baby Boomers are x, Gen Y thinks z’.) These perennial sweeping stereotypes raised their head in Monday’s Woodstock culture wars. Recently, too, we were treated to a veritable feast of them when Mark Arbib started banging on about “job snobs”. These sort of arguments are not just empirically questionable, but actually logically incoherent. John Quiggin calls them “zombie ideas”, and wrote an excellent piece in the Fin which demolishes this harmful and silly style of thought which just refuses to die.
Tag Archive for 'generationalism'
Another risible article from David Burchell marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. In attacking “the Woodstock moment”, he criticises “un-remembering” (what a horrible coinage), the putative sin of the Boomers (whoever they may be), and in the process indicts himself with a ludicrous conflation of all sorts of things into a single generationalist narrative, which has precious little to do with history or cultural memory, and everything to do with right wing prejudices.
Burchell claims that Woodstock “was little more than three wearisome, mud-soaked days of musical chaos”, citing the Wall Street Journal’s music critic, surely itself an oxymoronic title. Apparently blind to the symbolic dimension of popular culture, Burchell blithely ignores the fact that the entire discourse of the culture wars is founded on the symbolic distribution of cultural value. An anthropologist would have no trouble recognising it for what it is – myth-making.
Update: Tim Dunlop.
One of the longest bows I’ve seen drawn about the effects of the global financial crisis is this obituary (and not in elegiac style) for the 80s. And Gen X. Apparently because of Robert Zemeckis. And therefore Gordon Gekko.
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. Continue reading ‘Oh noes! The 80s are over! Don’t tell Jules…’
Muting a generation
mute a generation by ~funkadelic on deviantART
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.