Con: Today's Generation is More Apathetic Than Others

X + Y = Obama

 

 

Ahhhhh . . . . the life of a hipster. To be removed from all concern & not give a shit about who, when, where, why, or how.  That sounds like my generation right? A generation of do nothing but expect everything. A generation of hipsters, Generation me, the Millennials, the Entitlement Generation, the Trophy Generation, Digital Generation, The Internet Generation, MySpace Generation, Generation Y . . .etc;  all names from the generations before us to label, package, understand & sell to us. You see to them, & by them I mean the Baby Boomers & Gen X’ers of years prior, we’re the new disconnected apathetic youth only magnified by modern technology. In their eyes we don’t care because we didn’t  live their motto of “turn on, tune in, drop out” but because we were too busy being logged in. We supposedly spend all our time MySpacing our friends, texting while driving, Youtubing, & blogging about nothing. In my eyes they haven’t been paying attention we‘ve never been a disconnected generation we’ve just been wireless.

Etymologically apathy drives from the Greek apatheia or a (without) + pathos (to appeal to emotions). This was a term used by stoics to signify indifference for what one is not responsible for. The stoics would have viewed apathy as “the extinction of the passions by the ascendency of reason.”  Much later it is believed that Christians re-appropriated the term to express contempt of earthy matters or concerns.  Well now that we’ve walked down the history apathy why don’t take a stroll down to the root of why our generation’s labeled such.

“My generation’s apathy. I’m disgusted with it. I’m disgusted with my own apathy too for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism, and all those other  -isms the counterculture has whining about for years.” – Kurt Cobain

Generation X, defined by birth years as 1961 – 1981, had significant overtones of cynicism against things held dear to previous generations. It was a dark horse demographic defined by grunge music, Northwestern aesthetics, & alienation from being but a slim 46 million shadow to the Baby Boomer’s 80 million spotlight. Being apathetic came with the territory of living in the Basque of boomer folklore of being the post pill pre AIDS post LSD generation but also the crushing weight of racial strife, homelessness, & federal deficits. Apathy was the way to be.

Now, let’s fast forward to Generation Y. A demographic of 70 million born between 1982 – to present carrying not only the burden of the generations before it but with a whole host of new issues that have grown to be more prominent such as higher divorce rates amongst families, Post 9/11 mentality, higher education, housing, & energy costs are to name a few. Also, Gen Y has a closer relationship to technology & media thus a greater degree of corporate marketing unlike any other generation in history.

In their 2007 book, Connecting to the Net. Generation: What Higher Education Professionals Need to Know about Today's Students, Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa found that in a survey of 7,705 college students in the US:

§  97% own a computer

§  97% have downloaded music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing

§  94% own a cell phone

§  76% use instant messaging and social networking sites

§  75% of college students have a Facebook profile and most of them check it daily

§  60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod

§  49% regularly download music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing

§  34% use websites as their primary source of news

§  28% author a blog and 44% read blogs

§  15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week

 

William Damon describes Gen Y as group of aimless slackers who have a sense of entitlement in his writings in The Path to Purpose. Professor Mark Bauerlin writes in his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeoparizes Our Future that we don’t give a damn, we have no values, & we don’t care about anyone else. Under his scope we are a future of bad citizens with our only interest being things of pop culture, celebrities, & our friends. He wrote, “They upload and download, surf and chat, post and design, but they haven’t learned to analyze a complex text, store facts in their heads, comprehend a foreign policy decision, take lessons from history, or spell correctly. Never having recognized their responsibility to the past, they have opened a fissure in our civic foundations, and it shows in their halting passage into adulthood and citizenship.” From the sounds of it, if apathy were a religion then Professor Bauerlin seems to believe that we’re the coming anti-Christ & every LOL or OMG being the sign of the beast.

"Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension." – US novelist John Dos Passos

Well doesn’t that seem to be a pretty bleak outlook of the coming generation. Thankfully not everyone was listening. Don Tapscott in his new book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World he sets out to find the truth about our generation. He headed a research project that interviewed 6,000 Gen Y’ers from around the world. Overall, he determined that we’re the first global generation; we’re smarter, quicker, and more tolerant of diversity than our predecessors. He describes eight norms that differentiate us from our boomer & gen x parents. We prize freedom & freedom of choice. We want to customize things & make them our own. We’re natural collaborators who enjoy a conversation, not lecture. We scrutinize you & your organization. We insist on integrity. We want to have fun, even at work and at school. Speed is normal. Innovation is part of life.

My brain is so patterned after technology that my iPhone feels like an extension of my being. On my iPhone, I can find the best peer reviewed restaurant within a quarter mile radius, squash that debate about who was the 007 between Sean Connery & Roger Moore, post this blog entry, email a client, text my friend, call Moms & all within 5-10 minutes. That’s the best limb I’ve had in years. What sounded like an afternoon now was just accomplished in a coffee break.  

So why the hostility towards us? People become defensive and threatened by that which they do not understand. Plus, throw in a little Gen X hipster rub off for good measure. This is just a generational continuation of finger shaking. Just like the mid-century generation did to the baby boomers the boomers did to the Gen X’ers now the Gen X’ers & the boomers are tag teaming us. Part of the reason that we come across as an apathetic bunch is because we have had more media, advertisements, & fear mongering shoved down throats unlike any generational group before it. Due to this we’ve developed super consumer multi-tasking, a keen sense, & hyper bullshit detectors. Think about this when my father was growing up he saw a picture and it was a picture. In my childhood when I saw a picture was it actually that person? Or did someone use adobe photo shop to crop it or enhance it a la the latest celeb gossip nudie pic. We doubt everything, don’t get sold, & buy what we want.

But I understand, within the next coming years, we’ll replace those horrible ink residue leaving newspapers for blogs & phone applications,  TV’s for Youtube/Hulu.com, & DVD’s have just recent received their AARP membership. Business cards? On life support. Soon enough we’ll take out there desktop/laptop computers and leave them with an interactive display that will definitely make them scratch their heads. We already made their CD/tape/record players damn near obsolete & their phones impossible to use. No wonder the hostility. Oh yeah weren’t we the initiating political force for our new black president-elect Barack Hussein Obama. What a bunch of slacker good for nothings we are, huh?

President –elect Obama was the first of many political leaders to get us. I remember in 2004 after I heard him speak at the Democratic National Convention I got one of those “who is that” moments? I remember it clearly. That same week I did a little Google on him & I think I might have purchased his book. One of the most fascinating things about Obama for me, I mean besides living up to Oprah’s oracle like entitlement of “The One”, was that back in 2005 he actually had a podcast that made his day – to – day work load transparent online weekly for anyone to hear. Let me repeat that. A politician, from Chicago no less, made a weekly podcast for people to hear what he is doing on the daily like we were his managers to report to. He was directly reaching out to our generation. He got it & he continued to get it all the way through the primaries by defeating Hilary Clinton & then to the largest Presidential election landslide in decades. He took out the two most powerful political brands on both sides of the aisle. He did it by planting the seeds to the savvy Gen X & Y’ers through YouTube, podcasts, & the internet. The most brilliant being the “Yes we can” video that circulated through YouTube or the market campaign prior to his big win in Iowa during the primaries. We elected Obama the first president with a laptop on the oval office desk. The first president with a YouTube site & a blog. The first president-elect reluctantly stripped of his Blackberry upon stepping into the white house.

I don’t really remember much of the 2000 Bush v. Gore election but I seem to recall myself saying something to the likes of, “fuck it! My vote doesn’t count why would I vote for the lesser of two evils anyway?” So I didn’t vote & I didn’t care. Frankly, I was too inebriated off of Bombay gin & Old English malt liquor to have any concern at the time. Fast forward 4 years later & were talking a whole different story. Despair doesn’t describe the loss I felt from hearing CNN announce President Bush’s win in Ohio in 2004. I seem to remember experiencing knee buckling & throat seizing. It sucked, it hurt, & it was anything but apathy. Fast forward another 4 more years & the impossible is achieved. On that night I wasn’t surrounded by disconnected hipsters with ironic mustaches. I was encircled by countless kids smiling ear to ear, beating drums, clapping hands, dancing in the middle of Broadway & Grand Avenues, shouting “Yes we can!” & then again on Telegraph Avenue screaming “U-S-A!” Well how about world? How about that Boomers? You ready for an America 2.0?

 

 

 

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