worst generation

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

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.

and those things relative to edward r. murrow's WWII coverage, the ed sullivan show, etc...

Harry Potter was a monoculture moment, for sure. But Facebook, I mean ... 900 million users I bet is not really 900 million "users," you know? It's like being in the phone book, but I wouldn't have considered the Yellow Pages monocultural (is that a word?).

there's some kind of shared cultural thing of people just throwing the yellow pages directly into the trash as soon as they get it, because hardly anyone uses it anymore, but that's really like 'i know, amirite' hack stand-up material more than 'where were you when twin towers fell'

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

First heard about it on Buzzfeed. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have seen it on facebook or, if I had, clicked through.

its hard to be mad at generation z the world theyve inherited or will inherit is a garbage pit

i hate all other generations equally

I think gen z is the 2nd worst generation because they contain the genes of gen x

Josh OTM.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/06/young-voters-are-abandoning-obama-but-not-running-to-romney.html

Young voters gonna stay home

― curmudgeon, Monday, May 7, 2012 9:47 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

n terms of policies and priorities, the group appears more right of center than imagined. Almost four in 10 believe cutting taxes is key to growth. Just 19 percent think government spending is the answer. And those who believe health insurance is a right dropped from 61 percent in 2008 to 43 percent in 2012.

The top-10 issues ranked in importance for this cohort were creating jobs, reducing the deficit, lowering the tax burden for all, becoming energy-independent, ensuring affordable access to health care, creating a world-class education system, addressing Social Security, preventing the spread of terrorism, protecting individual liberties from government, and preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Combating the impacts of climate change fell near the bottom of the list.

4 years later, this must be a completely new batch of kids.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Case-for-Breaking-Up-With/131760/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

reposting this here ...

is this a common millenial thing?

A lot of the 21-24-year-olds in my grad program asked if their parents could come to our poster presentation today. Getting drinks after class. Hold on, gotta text mom to let her know where I'm at! I mean I love my mom and all but sheesh.

i actually think this is maybe a good topic for its own thread. it's certainly something i've thought a lot about. in some ways i'm a normative gen y'er in that regard. i've always talked to my parents once a day (at one point in high school that went down to once a week, but even that is frequent by some other generational standards). these days i actually see my parents every day bc i work in my father's company. we have dinner w/ them twice a week and see them at communal religious events etc. at the same time, i went away to boarding school at 14 and haven't lived in my parent's house (except for 6 months between yeshiva and college) since. i think some of this is cultural/ethnic/religious baggage, but some of it is probably generational baggage too. after all my parents are quintessential boomers and very hands on (and really would be so much more involved in the intricate details of my life if I didn't set hard limits). still, it's very nice to have strong family bonds and i talk to my siblings (2 brothers + sister) every day too, I also work with one of my three first cousins and my grandmother, and these aren't relationships that are interfering with other social attachments either. so idk how to adequately unpack this, or even if i could. obviously it's unique in terms of modern family constructs, but not historically unique in the least.

i'm not like this but i know people who are. didn't think it was some generational thing but it's fucking ridiculous to condemn it either way

hundreds of thousands of kids in group homes, foster care, abusive situations, and some douche writer is going to complain about millennials being friends with their parents, ugh

ha true, with 2,000 extra words of lit crit thrown in

full disclosure i did not read a word of that article past the title

She's romanticizing the Dickensian orphan and Moll Flanders to say no to helicopter parents.

the helicopter parent thing is so exaggerated though. i know it's the #1 thing teachers love to complain about, but they would all probably admit that these parents are rare. when you have one or two parents out of 120+ calling you every other day, they're the ones that are gonna stick out.

I was born in 1979 and I was the guy who screamed at my dad every time he called freshman year until he stopped calling me. I never moved back home other than a single summer. My brother, born 1984, still lives at home. I'm sure this in part reflects economic circumstances -- find a job that pays the rent is a dicier proposition starting out now. If it's generational in any other way, I'm not sure what the mechanism is, but it does seem curious.

Yeah man for real I wld much rather have a student w/a helicopter parent than the mom I tried to call the other day whose voicemail message said, "If you're trying to get hold of me, I don't give a fuck." ;_;

TBH though I'm sometimes not sure if the benefits are so great. Ok, so I'm my own man. I'm the protagonist of my own boring story. So what.

I talk to my Mum at least once a week via email and maybe every 2 weeks/or at least once a month via skype...but that's more bcs of being away. But if I leaved nearby I'm sure I would spend a lot of time with them. Hell my sister is only a few years younger and she probably drops in on Mum & dad every day.

And it's not so much that they expect it, or ask us to do that. It's more that they *allow* it? or they've set up a pretty open, friendly kind of dynamic where it's not an obligation, it's just something we all want to do. We like being home, it's nice to sit down and have a cup of tea or dinner with them.

and at least with my own parents we can go a while without much contact and it's still cool. it's pretty nice.

but maybe that's not quite what that article is talking about, so maybe this is tl:dr haha

My inlaws are a little more needy, and definitely ask Mr Veg to come over for dinner pretty much every Sunday. But it's still a very pleasant thing, it doesn't seem that unhealthy to me.