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Generational politics are an often discussed topic, everywhere from graduate programs in education or business, to stupid "think pieces" on the things millenials are killing. Since these things are mentioned elsewhere, I wanted to start a thread to discuss them directly. There have always been generational conflicts, and there have always been old people complaining about "kids these days", as far back as Ancient Greece. In the United States, the idea of mass generations, as far as I know, is mostly a post-World War II phenomena. The first generation where talk of a "generation gap" was widespread was the Baby Boom generation, which turned post-war prosperity into a campaign for individual expression. This was a cause of consternation and discord. The rise of generational identity was caused by many things, one of the most important being an economy affluent enough to treat teenagers as a mass-market, with their own culture and product. Since the 1950s, there has always been some type of generational conversation, although it waxes and wanes in importance. There was a brief spike of interest in "Generation X" in the early 1990s, but the most recent and dramatic discussions have been around the "Millenial Generation", (often taken to be 1980-2000, but definitions differ), who are bad because...they have phones, and don't like eating macaroni and cheese. There are a couple of major topics I want to address in this thread: 1. Are there any primary academic sources on generational studies? I know that there are a number of pop culture books, but they are often cursory and depend on stereotypes. How much scientific research is done into generational differences, and how much does the data back up the "common wisdom"? 2. How much intersectionality is there in generational behavior? Especially with the Baby Boomer generation, many of the narratives seem to be focused on a white, suburban demographic. What are generational differences like outside of mainstream US culture? Along with this, how much do generational differences change outside of the United States? 3. What are the basic things we can say about people from a cohort that can be factually shown, as opposed to the narrative around them? For example, we could say that 95% of people under the age of 25 have always had internet at home. That is a fact. Or that 99% of Baby Boomers were exposed to leaded gasoline fumes in their formative years. We have statistics about these type of things, and sometimes they bolster popular narratives, and sometimes they don't. So, this thread might be a place for us to talk about serious research on generational differences, or it might be a place to post the latest stupid article and talk about our racist uncles. Have fun, just like you were posting selfies of your lunch to twitter.
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Sep 28, 2017 16:26
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glowing-fish posted:
I don't think the concept of generation exists outside of pop culture. The definitions don't match up with any sensible set of years.
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Sep 28, 2017 16:43
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I don't think the concept of generation exists outside of pop culture. The definitions don't match up with any sensible set of years. Boy Scout leadership training has a pretty decent focus on the impacts of generational differences and how that dynamic can impact the functioning of a unit... especially in places where Crews, Troops, and Packs interact on a regular basis and you can have members from 7 to 70 engaging in joint activities. It's definitely not an exact science... and BSA also stresses understanding the individual strengths, weaknesses, and goals of unit members... but it forms a useful framework for starting to understand where other people are coming from when you're trying to find common ground.
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Sep 28, 2017 16:54
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Bel Shazar posted:Boy Scout leadership training has a pretty decent focus on the impacts of generational differences and how that dynamic can impact the functioning of a unit... especially in places where Crews, Troops, and Packs interact on a regular basis and you can have members from 7 to 70 engaging in joint activities. It's definitely not an exact science... and BSA also stresses understanding the individual strengths, weaknesses, and goals of unit members... but it forms a useful framework for starting to understand where other people are coming from when you're trying to find common ground. I don't think it's totally not useful, but just the whole concept of "generations" is very loosey goosey and the ones that are commonly recognized have wildly varying lengths of time and apply very hyper specifically to only some groups.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:30
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In specific contexts where it is appropriate you're allowed to use a simplified abstraction like a "generation" as a heuristic device for making sense of very complicated social changes. This is especially true of the baby boomers - a generation that was, as much as anything, arguably created by the media. There's a section of Perlstein's "Nixonland" where he talks about the immense public discourse surrounding the idea of how different the new post war generation was in terms of style, affect, ideology and just about everything else. As Perlstein notes the idea of generation differences were not just something young people noticed for themselves - it was a concept very actively pushed forward in the media (and indeed, the idea of a new generation of decent young folk was held out by many as a sort of Utopian answer to society's intractable political problems, with a lot of hope invested in the boomers creating a better world in the future). In a context like that I think it makes sense to speak of generational differences. Likewise, today I think we can certainly talk, at least in broad conceptual terms, about how growing up with constant internet access leads to different attitudes and modes of socialization than someone who grew up in, say, the 1980s.
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Sep 28, 2017 19:04
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I don't think the concept of generation exists outside of pop culture. The definitions don't match up with any sensible set of years. One of the major proponents of Generational Theory, William Strauss and Neil Howe, had backgrounds in history and public policy from Harvard and Yale. I don't disagree that there work seems to lack rigor, but it is obviously coming from a place with some academic background behind it. I think it is a lot like gender theory: gender studies are an actual academic discipline, but for every academic paper on gender differences, there are 99 articles written about how Women Be Shopping.
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Sep 28, 2017 19:28
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I don't think it's totally not useful, but just the whole concept of "generations" is very loosey goosey and the ones that are commonly recognized have wildly varying lengths of time and apply very hyper specifically to only some groups. A useful framework, like Feynman diagrams. But yes, definitely very loosey goosey in application to any individual.
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Sep 28, 2017 20:47
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All the stuff I've read on it seems very weakly supported, like most sociological work. That's not a dig either, reporting acceptable P-values of 0.3 and R^2 values of 0.655 means what you're measuring is so highly variable sampling chance can wildly distort your data. That being said, I think there is some merit in considering how mass experiences affect individual psychological development. There is no loving way that leaded gasoline exposure and the violence in the 1970s didn't screw up the Baby Boomers and older Gen-Xers, and there's no loving way that social media and ubiquitous computers isn't affecting Millennial development, though the jury is out on if those are overall negatives or just A Thing.
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Sep 30, 2017 18:44
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glowing-fish posted:One of the major proponents of Generational Theory, William Strauss and Neil Howe, had backgrounds in history and public policy from Harvard and Yale. I don't disagree that there work seems to lack rigor, but it is obviously coming from a place with some academic background behind it. Wow cool a real appeal to authority and achievement
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Oct 1, 2017 00:22
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I feel like you may have surrendered to capitalism and now believe that marketing demographics are meaningful classifications of people.
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Oct 1, 2017 00:29
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How strongly are a generations susceptibility to political influence affected by nearby mountain ranges?
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Oct 1, 2017 00:31
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So ughhh I'll preface this, I'm a psychology student starting a PhD next year but it's not in tthis specific area so it's only what I'm aware of/can dredge up. 1) Yes but it's often not as exciting as clickbaiting titles like Declining resilience a serious problem in colleges, and often you get researchers who do "generational research" engage and perpetuate generational stereotypes, like this author. Twenge is the person I immediately thought of, as she's consistently been doing the whole "Gen" thing since forever, and her 2009 article "Generational changes and their impact in the classroom: teaching Generation Me". There's a great misunderstanding of what a personality disorder is (you don't have bouts/episodes of personality disorders), and what a mental disorder is in general. If there's a higher incidence of a disorder in younger people, it may a) indicate a problem or b) indicate that diagnostic criteria isn't great. 2) Not aware of anything beyond Western cultural stereotypes, but theoretically you could do cohort comparisons anywhere. 3) Ah jeez I'm not sure if it's a great idea because there's a ton of variety and really I think it's engaging in the "culture wars" where younger people are often painted with unfavourable stereotypes.
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Oct 1, 2017 00:50
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we knew the solution but we left it too long and now the baby boomers are too old and stringy to be palatable, all we can do now is compost them and try to do better ourselves
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Oct 1, 2017 00:59
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the old ceremony posted:we knew the solution but we left it too long and now the baby boomers are too old and stringy to be palatable, all we can do now is compost them and try to do better ourselves agree
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Oct 1, 2017 01:15
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mycomancy posted:All the stuff I've read on it seems very weakly supported, like most sociological work. That's not a dig either, reporting acceptable P-values of 0.3 and R^2 values of 0.655 means what you're measuring is so highly variable sampling chance can wildly distort your data. One of the things about statements about generations is that many of them are incredibly important facts that don't need any research to support them. But then it is what people don with those facts that causes problems. Take personal computers. If you were born in 1960, you had virtually no chance of growing up with a computer in your house (with the exception of the children of professors at Cal Tech or something). If you were born in 1980, you had probably a...10% chance of having a computer in your elementary school years? And if you were born in 2000, you had a 90% chance of that. The problem is when we try to paint sociological portraits based on this. Like I've heard that people born after 1990 are "digital natives", they don't have to learn these things, they just grow up knowing them. But its harder to operationalize these types of concepts, especially since there are people born in 1960 who are just as natural with computers as people born in 1990.
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Oct 1, 2017 03:04
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I'm glad all thr Baby Boomers will be gone soon but we'll probably all be dead by then because of their fuckups
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Oct 1, 2017 10:07
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icantfindaname posted:I'm glad all thr Baby Boomers will be gone soon but we'll probably all be dead by then because of their fuckups I really dislike this opinion. I find the Baby Boomers no more morally repugnant than any other generation they were just lucky and got to be young when the institutions that benefited working people where strongest. As soon as the greatest generation got out of WW2 they pretty much decided to forget how they survived the depression and even during the depression they never shared the wealth with anyone who was not white or straight and oh boy did they go in for McCarthyism and suburbanization. And what can you say about GenX other than  , oh wait I know, Southpark and Family Guy some up that generations attitudes very very well, a pointless cultural rivalry between amoral libertarians and milk toast liberals both which are utterly indifferent to the institutions of capitalism or as you, cocksuckers, like to describe yourself socially liberal but economically conservative.
side_burned fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 00:05
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Nah the Greatest Generation passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it sure wasn't the Baby Boomers the oldest of whom only turned 18 that year and therefore could not vote in the 1962 election that ushered in that Congress. And the Greatest Generation voted reliably Democratic until the day they died, staving off as long as possible the depredations of their Nixon and Reagan loving younger siblings (the Silents) and children (the Boomers). They never forgot what pulled them out of the Depression, it was their kids who attributed the prosperity they were born into to their own inherent bootstrapping and voted again and again to burn every bridge and pull up every ladder behind them in order to live as large as possible while sticking their own children with the bill and then blaming them for not boostrapping the way the Boomers think they did. Also it's probably only because of the Greatest Generation that the lead-brained Boomers failed to sign their own death warrants in the W Bush years by ending Medicare back when it was only helping people who weren't them, at least it's safe forever now that even the most myopic generation can't keep the realization that they're about to need it from working its way through their stunted tetraethyllead-lined brains. Although I still wouldn't put it past them to grandfather themselves in while ending it for everyone born after 1975, luckily for us their dull stupidity and their gullible credulity to only the loudest and dumbest con men (the louder and dumber the better) has resulted in them saddling the few competent evil geniuses in the Republican party with a gaggle of legislators as dumb and incompetent as the average thickheaded Boomer and therefore incapable of crafting legislation that would even function if enacted.
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Oct 2, 2017 07:07
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I will say though that early Baby Boomers are more liberal, and in fact I think it's early Gen X who are the most Republican
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Oct 2, 2017 11:27
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side_burned posted:I really dislike this opinion. I find the Baby Boomers no more morally repugnant than any other generation they were just lucky and got to be young when the institutions that benefited working people where strongest. As soon as the greatest generation got out of WW2 they pretty much decided to forget how they survived the depression and even during the depression they never shared the wealth with anyone who was not white or straight and oh boy did they go in for McCarthyism and suburbanization. And what can you say about GenX other than yeah and now that they've been in power for decades you'd think they'd try to do something to either bring those institutions back or maybe not just completely destroy the world yet here we are, watch as an endless parade of baby boomers claim to be self-made and just don't understand why these kids today can't afford to purchase diamond engagement rings or huge mcmansions QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 12:30
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QuarkJets posted:yeah and now that they've been in power for decades you'd think they'd try to do something to either bring those institutions back or maybe not just completely destroy the world yet here we are, watch as an endless parade of baby boomers claim to be self-made and just don't understand why these kids today can't afford to purchase diamond engagement rings or huge mcmansions On the one hand, dialectical materialism suggests that material conditions inform social outlooks and thus it is somewhat futile to complain about the social effects of a thing after the fact because those social effects were shaped by the formative material condtions of those who hold them. On the other hand, gently caress me there's a lot of old cunts who don't think about why people might not be as rich as they are and I want to kick all their heads in.
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Oct 2, 2017 13:32
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:How strongly are a generations susceptibility to political influence affected by nearby mountain ranges? Serious answer to a non-serious question: The Baby Boom generation was the first generation raised in the suburbs. Of course, not all of them, but the 1950s were the first decade where the suburbs were a political and social force. Before the 1950s, people lived in urban areas or rural areas, with not much in the middle. Before the interstate highway system, living 40 miles from a city was a big deal. The Appalachians actually were mountains, then, because they stopped people from getting in to the cities. The Baby Boomers were the first generation raised without having to deal with either the natural world, in the form of farms and mountains, or with the social world, in the form of neighbors and institutions. They were raised in an artificial world deprived of context, they could use consumer products without any reference to where they were produced or manufactured.
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Oct 2, 2017 16:55
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glowing-fish posted:Serious answer to a non-serious question:
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Oct 2, 2017 17:06
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Or the concept of suburbs.
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Oct 2, 2017 17:13
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OwlFancier posted:Or the concept of suburbs.
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Oct 2, 2017 17:18
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I feel like people are being shoved out of suburbs quite well by economical necessity without being particularly ideologically motivated to do so.
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Oct 2, 2017 17:19
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OwlFancier posted:I feel like people are being shoved out of suburbs quite well by economical necessity without being particularly ideologically motivated to do so. Desuburbanization is a complicated subject! In a lot of places, it makes a lot more economic sense to live in a suburb. I know that from the Pacific Northwest, at least, even while prices have risen in the cities, they have stayed somewhat reasonable in the suburbs. People originally moved to cities for cheap rent, but now they are moving for the amenities. But its still somewhat economic, because suburban living has its own prices, especially when it requires a car. One of the big generational things in reurbanization, is that I think for a lot of older people, especially in real estate and government, they might have known that young people were living in the cities, but they probably expected it was just a college thing, that it was people living in cities so they could see bands and go to bars, and that as soon as they hit 30, they would want to move to the suburbs and get a house with a three car garage. When the millenial generation started hitting their 30s, and these lifestyle changes were permanent, is when a lot of consternation seemed to start. City planners, real estate developers, etc., were trying to wrap their heads around the idea of people who wanted to live in the city and ride the bus, by choice.
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Oct 2, 2017 19:59
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I hadn't considered this dimension to the Boomer problem. I suppose then the proper course of action is not to target Boomers specifically, but anyone who was raised in a suburb. In the otherwise mediocre "Normcore Manifesto", there is a great line: "Previous generations were raised in a group, and found out who they were later. Now, people are raised as individuals and have to figure out what it means to be part of the group." The Baby Boomer generation in the United States was the first generation pretty much in the history of the world who were raised outside of communities. They were raised in houses outside of public spaces, had cars that allowed them to avoid interaction with strangers, were the first generation to shop mostly at mass market stores where they were anonymous. I mean, in some ways, this allowed them to break out of negative traditions, but it also deprived them of normal types of community, from saying hello to the cashier at the neighborhood grocery store, to having conversations on the commuter train, to just running into neighbors on the sidewalk. There was the individual pod at home, the individual pod of the car while commuting, and then work. The weirdest part about this for them is that this is so normal that they don't realize this is a total aberration in the history of the world, and it colors everything they do and think. They haven't adjusted to the fact that the economic and social situation they grew up under (especially with regards to oil allowing all that automobile travel!) is not a universal fact of nature. Caveat: not all Boomers, etc. But in broad strokes, I think that is true.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:06
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I mean historically there didn't need to be a dichotomy between suburban and "has some amenities" because the original suburbs grew up around mass transit because people didn't have cars.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:06
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glowing-fish posted:In the otherwise mediocre "Normcore Manifesto", there is a great line: "Previous generations were raised in a group, and found out who they were later. Now, people are raised as individuals and have to figure out what it means to be part of the group." Lots of people in history were raised on a farm, never met anyone new their entire life and married their cousin.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:10
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Lots of people in history were raised on a farm, never met anyone new their entire life and married their cousin. True but they also didn't get shoved into a society where their social dysfunction could set national policy.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:11
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OwlFancier posted:I mean historically there didn't need to be a dichotomy between suburban and "has some amenities" because the original suburbs grew up around mass transit because people didn't have cars. Well, urban planning history is a big subject. Of course there has been suburbs forever, I think the Romans used the word. When I say "suburbs" though, I mean residential suburbs without public spaces, sometimes without sidewalks. The anonymous, car dependent suburbs full of mass retail and six lane roads.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:17
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Lots of people in history were raised on a farm, never met anyone new their entire life and married their cousin. OwlFancier posted:True but they also didn't get shoved into a society where their social dysfunction could set national policy. Yeah, that is why I don't think it is a totally negative thing. The openness to personal expression and variation, that we had the good side of being able to "do our own thing", and that is something we should keep. The problem is that people raised in that environment have forgotten that almost everywhere else, people have cousins and neighbors they grew up with who help them through life. Like, we can have a medium between "marrying our cousins" and "never knowing our cousins"
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Oct 2, 2017 20:21
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I feel like working more menial jobs also gives you a sense of community that people who presumably did well enough to retire to the suburbs didn't get? Though I guess that falls a bit flat with that being once upon a time, an affordable thing for anyone to do.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:24
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Lots of people in history were raised on a farm, never met anyone new their entire life and married their cousin. A large extended family and somewhat related community is still a group. And boomers were the first generation to laegely lack that as well, although its even more of a thing with later generations
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Oct 3, 2017 13:06
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Generations as a concept are such a joke that I don't even understand why we're taking them seriously. This is US-centric, but I'm sure most of it applies elsewhere. By their very nature, generations give the impression of suddenness in cultural change. We ascribe certain features to people born in an arbitrarily-defined period, and for whatever reason assume that these features emerged out of thin air. Instead of recognizing and highlighting trends, generations reduce change to a binary system: this generation has job loyalty, this generation doesn't. Even assuming that the characters of millions of people can be reduced to a handful of generalizations, which is an absurd notion, these generalizations are constructed based on a comically narrow group: middle to upper class, minimum second generation, generally white Americans. The common image of prosperous WWII vets (the "greatest generation") moving to the suburbs and raising the Baby Boomers paints a rosy picture of what was the most concentrated period of white flight in the 20th century. If technological change is a driver of cultural and societal change, then generations can not accurately map cultural change in an era of rapid advancement. 1980-2000 seems to be a fairly common range of birth years for the alleged millennial generation, a group of people described as "digital natives." At 15, a kid born in 1980 might have had a family computer in the house, possibly with a dial-up connection that was fairly expensive and mostly for his parents' use. At 15, a kid born in 2000 could very well have a computer more powerful than that in their pocket, with round-the-clock connectivity and a far more engaging array of uses. To call both of these individuals "digital natives" and expect it to mean anything about their relationship with technology is loving laughable. But the greatest reason to rebuke the concept of generations is that their entire existence in pop culture is as a tool to dismiss people. "Why aren't young people buying houses? Well because they're millennials of course! They're selfish, aren't interested in serious relationships, and want to mooch off their parents." It's an opportunity to turn off the brain and make yourself feel better by employing stereotypes about those older or younger than you. We have millions of people with varied experiences reacting to numerous social, environmental, and economic pressures. Instead of trying to recognize these pressures and perhaps bring about change, we allow pop scientists and opinion writers to convince us that these are simply problems with people of a certain age.
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Oct 4, 2017 21:16
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the baby boomers can't buy immortality the sands fall and fall without pause
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Oct 4, 2017 21:19
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I am very confused by the assertion that broad cultural shifts linked to periods of time are definitely a thing but the concept of generations is bullshit. Like what is a generation if not a group of people substantially affected by a major cultural shift occuring during a point their lifetime, generally a formative stage?
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Oct 4, 2017 21:56
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OwlFancier posted:I am very confused by the assertion that broad cultural shifts linked to periods of time are definitely a thing but the concept of generations is bullshit. the "generations" are weird and arbitrary time slices that don't match well with world events and the stereotypes of them are like a weird mythologicalized history of like, a hyper specific group of people. Like I don't even want to say the typical thing of saying "it's the history of white people" because it's not even really that. It's the history of like, suburban middle class sitcom characters or something. Like when you say "babyboomers are like X", you don't mean all the people in the world born from 1940 to 1960, you don't mean people in russia are like that, but then even in america what growing up in a black neighborhood in 1950 was like isn't the same as growing up in a white neighborhood, but even among white people being a white baby boy in new york and a 20 year white woman in the deep south in 1959 isn't the same. Like the group of people that lived the generational story of "went to the war, had many well off children who moved to the suburbs, then had generation X who didn't really do anything much until they had millennials who are computers and awful" describes a real story of some real families but it also doesn't apply at all to an awful lot of people, probably the actual majority of americans.
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Oct 5, 2017 00:22
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OwlFancier posted:I am very confused by the assertion that broad cultural shifts linked to periods of time are definitely a thing but the concept of generations is bullshit. The assumption you're making, which I disagree with, is that culture is a monolith and shifts for everyone equally. The US isn't one culture, it's a wide variety that exist together. I'm not just talking about ethnic groups either. Cattle ranchers of the American Southwest have a different culture than Greater Chicago-area suburbanites, or even fruit and vegetable farmers of the Pacific Northwest. Even if, for example, a technological change was constant across all cultures in the US, the different sociopolitical, economic, and environmental factors at play would result in a number of different cultural shifts occurring simultaneously. That's not really important, however, because change is never constant. Access to broadband internet has been subject to geographical factors since its inception, and there is still a significant digital divide in rural areas. Moving forward, self-driving cars are unlikely to be a significant presence on the road for several decades, but that same technology will have a much more immediate impact on farming. As a result, linking cultural shifts to a specific period of time, and then making assumptions about people based on those shifts, is akin to astrology. The point I'm getting at is there is no way to speak about cultural change at a national level without being so reductive as to make those observations useless.
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Oct 5, 2017 00:26
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