worst generation

(Ha @ SCTV)

the dates don't always match america's, but yeah much of europe experienced a similar demographic bubble

she thinks back to the heyday of grunge, when she and her friends all wore baggy, sexless, second-hand flannel shirts and thinks, wow, my own parents lucked out in the kid fashion department

otm. I remember when i first became aware of grunge that some of the kids (we're talking middle school for me, like 1993) were into Grandpa/Grandma styles, which I thought was way cool. Cool Beans, in fact. In fact I still try to rock Grandpa pants, and probably will until I am a Grandpa myself.

As for the internet, I remember BBSes. Where does that put me?

did u kill the red dragon and score with violet?

No, but I did get a Doom II level pack I had uploaded somewhere into the PC Gamer magazine CD! Also downloaded the Anarchist Cookbook, Jazz Jackrabbit, and saw plenty of hentai.

jazz jackrabbit!

Just got done hanging out with a friend whom I share cultural touchstones with who was into the minneapolis zine scene, who dated some local musicians of note who I now know were younger than her, and who's sense of humor is completely compatible with mine, and who I thought was a peer, but I discovered tonight that that she was born in 1962. PS she is looking good. Totally surprised. No idea that she is 50.

Born in 1981:
Jessica Alba
Barbara & Jenna Bush
Hayden Christensen
Chris Evans
Summer Glau (Firefly)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (3rd rock, brick)
Eric Harris
Taylor Kitsch
Natalie Portman
Michael Sorrentino (The Situation)
Britney Spears
Julia Stiles
Justin Timberlake
Serena Williams
Elijah Wood

^ obv millenials, one and all

+1n

Michael J. Fox & Peter Jackson vs. Julia Stiles & Elijah Wood

In a bro-down, who amongst these are more my people?

I have friends ranging from 23-55 whom I relate to very naturally & I think these generational demarcations are reductive & silly, but I think I am somehow culturally closer to Kim Deal than Britney.

Geez I was all 'no way MJF is as old as peter ja... OH SHIT".

think I am somehow culturally closer to Kim Deal than Britney.

Are you closer to George W than to his daughters?

I'm more intimidated at the thought of hanging out with the people on the b 1981 list than the b 1961 list. Not sure what that means. Maybe just that they're hotter.

TBF, the born after 1980 crowd are in more fun because they can stay awake past 11 on a school night, drink all weekend, and aren't feeling death's finger prodding them as they creak and slump out of bed in the morning.

Also, millennials seem to possess a kind of levity and openness that is very engaging. This quality may just be not being old.

Also, millennials seem to possess a kind of levity and openness that is very engaging. This quality may just be not being old.

Also, perhaps, coming of age in a relatively liberal environment, vs. under the cloud of Nixon or Reagan, and especially the latter's hardcore anti-drug, anti-sex stances, which also coincided with the AIDS crisis, cold war stress, etc.. So millennials came of age during a period of relative cultural awakening (accelerated by the internet), economic stability and a laxing of sex and drugs panic. You'd be smiling, too.

Of course, I (and Gen X) came of age with prime Prince, Bruce, Madonna, etc, plus the best pop and punk bands and one hit wonders since the '60s, plus the euphoric joy of monoculture, so there's that.

Also, perhaps, coming of age in a relatively liberal environment, vs. under the cloud of Nixon or Reagan, and especially the latter's hardcore anti-drug, anti-sex stances, which also coincided with the AIDS crisis, cold war stress, etc.. So millennials came of age during a period of relative cultural awakening (accelerated by the internet), economic stability and a laxing of sex and drugs panic. You'd be smiling, too.

OTM. There's a refreshing lack of knee-jerk cynicism. And it's not naivete, but something more like engagement and enthusiasm.

Seedy flipside law of unintended consequences: Milton Academy scandal, sexting, porn chic ...

Are you talking now about the people on that most recent list (who are two years younger than me, i.e. my cohort, basically) or, like, my students (b 1989-1993)? Or both?

Because I feel like there are differences I can observe, that I'll get to after I do something useful with my morning.

Engagement is not exactly how I would describe the lols generation - there seems to be a general distancing amongst the people described*, an idea that this is their place and it's set, and here we can find out more about other people and laugh at them on youtube, but that's their place and it's set too.

This view of mine has been shifted a bit by the pleasant surprise of Occupy, but not by much.

* we're obviously describing how one winning sector does here, like the iconic 90s film thread but even more explicitly picking-and-choosing.

Ha! I know some Milton alums. Probably bitter they missed the wild times.

I guess I don't really feel like a millenial because my friends at formative ages were between two and ten years older than me. Which is why when DJing with two girls the same age as me last year I completely boggled that they had *never DJed with vinyl before*. I mean, wtf?

The D stands for ... digital?

oh man I had forgotten about the Milton thing

The group blowjob thing? Is there something particularly millennial about that? Teenagers have been fucking around for a long time.

Millenial generation = 1st generation to start investing more time and thought into digital world than real world. The internet's a huge game changer. It really bugged me for a while when friends would be hanging out and they spent half the time staring at a phone, emailing, responding to fb posts, etc. I can't imagine what the children of the millenial generation will be. All socially detached 24/7 internet addicts.

TBF, the born after 1980 crowd are in more fun because they can stay awake past 11 on a school night, drink all weekend, and aren't feeling death's finger prodding them as they creak and slump out of bed in the morning.

I lost this ability at some point, but possibly I never had it.
Why am I not on that 1981 list upthread? My celebrity has failed me.

Which one was yours?

heyoo

I've had a mixed experience with millenials w/r/t their relationship with technology. I've definitely experienced the glued-to-a-screen-at-all-times thing, and have known people (late Gen Xers & millenials) on a local board who, when hanging out irl, talk about the board and post to it while hanging out with each other, but I also know millenials who have a healthy relationship with technology. Folks who've integrated the online world into their lives and who leverage it well--especially in the arts. The DIY thing picked up with late Gen Xers, but has really been expanded and normalized by the millenials, with some interesting results. They seem very comfortable and competent at moving from a concept to a material realization of that concept--I suspect that growing up with immediate access to information and networking is part of what drives this.

OTM.

In my experience, probably as a result of the death of monoculture, they also seem to have less of a need to rebel/react again the past, in the way that my cohort 'rebelled' against 80s music/fashion or a previous one 'rebelled' against disco (or prog rock). What's the point when you can download anything you want any time anyway? If they rebel, e.g. with Occupy, it actually seems to be in response to something that is worth rebelling against. I feel like people look at pop culture and its history less from the perspective of a narrative of progress and reaction now as opposed to just that there's this smorgasboard: all this stuff happened and we can sample from all of it.

Death of monoculture in a world where 900 million people all use the same social network site.

Ha, fair point. I'm just kind of riffing, I guess.

But I mean, even a "social networking site" isn't really the same thing as everyone choosing from the same handful of radio formats or programmes from a few TV networks. For all of Facebook's faults, it is still much more individualized and participatory than those media.

the site can be viewed simply as a frame, tool or medium though. like facebook itself isn't the whole of facebook culture, rather it enables the creation of subculture. all facebook users aren't engaged with the same things in the way that all telvision viewers were 50 years ago. otoh, it's hard to deny that facebook funnels different cultures into a kind of uniform equivalence, routinizes cultural variety and consumability so that it becomes a new kind of monoculture.

It's a different kind of monoculture. It has to do with how it intrudes on the real world, how you can be driving a car or having lunch and your phone gets hit with a notification and you instinctively zip to the site. It has to do with what what other online services are easily integrated into that framework, shaping your satellite web browsing efforts. Even my friends that are all "Ew! Instagram bought by FB!" still check FB for comments on their photos, etc.

The culture represented on there is a bigger net, and maybe more fragmented, but then again those fragments are all themselves now little monocultures. Whereas maybe in the past you had a good number of outliers, nerds, fanboys, etc, that sort of resided on the fringe of monoculture, now they have 100k groups, fan campaigns, etc, all under the watchful eye of FB.

Facebook is not a culture, come on. No more than "Windows 97" is a culture. It's just one of several means to an end.

That is, it's a tool, an adjunct to the web at large. But I don't see it as more than a mere (albeit pervasive) component of a bigger machine.

Windows 97 got out of your face as soon as you fired up doom.exe though, Facebook's schtick is to be always there, part of your internet HUD.

Facebook is more like TV than like TV shows

Facebook is the end product of a long slog of blogs figuring out ways to connect and make connecting feel like fun, which suddenly metastized into a paradigm* - now you can express the same enjoyment of a random thought as of a pre-released single, as of a blog post, as of someone growing a melon on Farmville.

*Hello yes I am Grant Morrisonning a bit here.

Facebook is not a culture, come on. No more than "Windows 97" is a culture. It's just one of several means to an end.

Maybe. But it's a weird feeling when you don't use it for a while and then at a party people are connecting over some post made a few days ago and you have no idea what's going on.

The Kony thing, surely, is a good example of FB monoculture.

yeah, but that could just as well be a major news story of the day. the fragmentation of the old "monoculture" isn't disproven by the fact that certain things are still shared among a lot of people.

kony is more an example of the ways in which social networking contributes to mainstream culture, but that's not exactly the same thing as monoculture

The Kony thing, surely, is a good example of FB monoculture.

If you think this is in any way comparable to the way people bought Thriller or watched The Cosby Show, we understand monoculture very differently.

I mean, there are still things, like Apple or Starbucks products, that 'everyone' purchases but I do think there's a difference.

Are kids as cliquish as they used to be wrt 'goths', 'jocks', 'punks', etc? My sense was no?

I also thought that between Harry Potter and Mark Zuckerberg, 'nerdiness' might be less stigmatized than it used to be. Big Bang Theory might or might not disprove me.

Oh, I guess they have hipsters and emos and stuff.

I think nerds who are not billionaires/don't have magic powers still get shit

if anything harry potter and zuckerberg have just raised ppls expectations of what a good nerd should be