Nothing’s Changed?
Articles about generations litter the media, especially news items explaining how one generation, Generation X for example, is different from the one which preceded it, the Baby Boomers in this case. Avidly read, these hyped-up stories offer a fascinating and telling example of how half-truths become realities, while much of the evidence is missing or misunderstood.
In the mysterious world of research on generations, successive groups are strangely labelled: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y or millennials, and now Generation Z. It takes only a few minutes to discover this is a messy area. The first clue is confusion over the dates for each group: conventional wisdom in the US suggests that the Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964 (or 1965); Generation X from 1965 to 1976 (or as late as 1982); and, leaving the Millennials aside, Generation Z from 1997: maybe! We’ve left out the generation before the Boomers, (not a bad idea since they are either called Traditionalists or the Silent Generation!). The Millennials are particularly frustrating, given there is considerable variation in the dates that define the birth years for this group. Right now, the favoured dates are in the 1980s and 1990s, with the time from 1981 to 1996 being a typical example of the period you’ll see identified.
All this uncertainty is revealing, for two reasons. First, it is obviously absurd to suggest that a generation is different merely because of a calendar date. There was a major demographic shift that began in 1946, with the first of the post-war babies, resulting in a huge group that followed. However, such a clear starting point is unusual, to say the least.
Second, to identify and label a generation indicates there’s something distinctive about them, and that was the case after the war. The Baby Boomers were different. Children born after 1945 grew up during an extraordinary time, in a new world. Quite apart from the fact that people felt more confident about having a family in peace time, technologies developed during the war were translated into commercial products, many with quite revolutionary consequences.
First, building on developments in electronics, television, which had been invented in the 1930s, suddenly became cheaper, appearing in many homes in the 1950s, followed by colour television from 1967. There were two sides to the arrival of the idiot box. On the one hand, it sustained the belief families could enjoy entertainment together. All sitting in the lounge, dad would check the program guide and switch it on the television (yes, it was usually the dad); then the family would watch, ready to ooh and aah together. However, television station programming quickly led to a broadcast day divided into segments, with distinct programs for different age groups: drama at lunchtime for adults at home; children’s television for the late afternoon; family entertainment in the early evening; and adult fare for later. It didn’t take long for family viewing to fragment, each group separately watching what they liked (and were allowed to see).
Television brought the wider world into the home, every day. More immediate and engrossing than newspapers, more wide-ranging than the cinema, it provided a window into anything and everything. Young children in the playground would play games based on afternoon shows; older children would gossip about the serials they had been following; the family would laugh over dinner about the latest adventures in the Andy Griffith Show (poor confused Barney Fife); and adults at work would talk about the latest Perry Mason drama, (Dallas was yet to arrive!).
The world expanded in another sense. Based on the success of the German autobahn, in 1956 Eisenhower announced the development of the US interstate highway system. The growth of the road network meshed in with other changes. The huge and elaborately finned cars of the 1950’s and 1960’s began to shrink, with sleeker family cars, hatchbacks and sedans. More people chose to live out in the suburbs, travelling by car to work and away on holiday trips. The wider world became accessible. This was further accelerated by the appearance of commercial jet aircraft. Though they started operating in the 1950’s (the ill-fated Comet first flew in 1952), jets became established during the 1960s. In this way too, the world was brought closer to home.
Yet another change was to have a profound effect on the Baby Boomer world. The contraceptive pill was approved for use in 1960, and was in widespread use by 1962. This was the beginning of a sexual revolution, albeit one largely for the benefit of men. As it happens, you can see the change through popular music, so often a reflection of the world around us. There was a shift from rock and roll, perhaps epitomised with Elvis Presley’s 1956 warning ‘don’t you step on my blue suede shoes, to hedonistic pop in the next decade. You can choose your emblematic song from the late 1960s, but perhaps Jim Morrison’s slow burn invitation to Light My Fire in 1967 will do (“come on baby, light my fire”). Yes, sex was a major item on the agenda.
Nearly all of these changes reflected a new-found freedom. Ignorant of the privations of the Second World war and its aftermath, the Baby Boomers were released from constraints. As they were growing up, so the Civil Rights movement was under way, followed by other key events like the 1964 Berkeley free speech movement (itself resulting from students working on voter registration in the south). It was the beginning of years of demonstrations, of revolution in the streets from LA to Paris (and we could watch it on our televisions!). Protests for sexual freedom, for the idea of the free university, and marches against the US involvement in the Vietnam war. Freedom to be what you wanted to be, even if this didn’t extend to everyone.
As a demographic group, focussing on the Baby Boomers makes sense, a huge bulge in the population, youngsters needing new schools, new facilities, and access to all those new technologies. Different from their parent’s generation, they were living in what appeared to be a time of plenty. To be clear, there were other things happening. In 1963, The Beatles caught another theme with their song ‘Money, that’s what I want’. As the Boomers grew older, they wanted money, and they wanted to be successful. Even as some were revolting (!!), more familiar changes began: they started working, competing and seeking promotion, marrying and starting families, but, despite all this, they were still unlike those in the previous generation.
As the Baby Boomers became adults, this was the time when another generation is claimed to have appeared. However, I am going to suggest that Generation X is a furphy (for US readers, a furphy is Australian slang for an erroneous or improbable story that is claimed to be factual). As a recent commentator observed, “Before we declare a new generation has arrived, the differences have to be profound.” [i] As far as I am concerned, there were no profound changes in the late 1960s and 1970s that would have the same impact on children as those changes beginning in the late 1940s had on the Boomers. Generation X is a marketing concept, but the reality is that the generation that began in 1946 lingered on for a long time. The ‘boomer’ part was over by 1964, but the next decade or so was much the same as before, possibly just a little less exciting.
Profound change did take place, however, during the 1980s. This was the time of a similar phase of major innovation affecting the lives of people: the digital revolution. Like the postwar revolution, this unfolded over more than a decade.
First, while mainframe computers had surfaced in the early 1960s, it wasn’t until 1975 that the first desktop or personal computers appeared, and only in the 1980s did they become became a common feature of offices and homes. Another significant step was the appearance of the mobile phone (Motorola’s DynaTAC appearing in 1983). As that technology raced ahead, so did others enabled by digitisation. For children, a key moment was the appearance of handheld electronic toys, especially Gameboy (it came out in July 1989 in the USA, three months after its debut in Japan). That was the same year Tim Berners Lee was creating the internet protocols which led to the launch of the World Wide Web in 1991. If television and travel changed the world for the boomer generation, so the digital era changed the world for the Millennials, (since I have discounted Generation X, there is no sense in categorising them as Generation Y).
Let’s date this generation from 1983, the year of Motorola’s popular mobile phone. This is a sneaky choice, because 1983 is also the date of Cyndi Lauper’s song ‘Girls Just Want to have Fun.’ A nice marker, because over the previous couple of decades the ‘Second Wave Feminism’ movement had been successfully addressing many issues in cultural inequalities, gender norms and the role of women in society, the issues the earlier sexual revolution had largely ignored.
Millennials are a distinctive generation. The impact of digitisation is still unclear, but one thing stands out. Millennials are highly connected, especially to their peers, through smartphones and messaging, and other social media The Pew Research Center suggests they are more accepting of gender, race and ethnic differences,[ii] although that has been somewhat true of young people born in successive decades for some time. Other differences seem to have little to do with technology as such, but rather driven by the economic environment. As a consequence of the global financial crisis and its aftermath, their unemployment levels are higher than those for the other generations already in the workforce, and their wages are often lower. Probably for the same reasons, they are marrying later, and they remain at home longer than previous cohorts. However, despite what you might have read, research evidence from the Pew Center indicates they do not ‘job hop’ any more than earlier generations at the same age.
I think the best description of the Millennials is that they are ‘digital natives’.[iii] They have grown up in a digital world. For them, digital communication and systems are ‘normal’ (the rest of us are, in Prensky’s terminology, digital immigrants). That can range from the ability to text without looking at the buttons on a mobile, to seeing communication with a friend as seamless between face-to-face, facetime or text. By the way, it is also not true Millennials can’t spell: their use of words like gr8 for great is a function of texting time economy. C what I mean?
You will not be surprised I consider the use of the term Generation Z to describe those born since 1997 as another furphy, as Daniel Kolitz has suggested. I mentioned him earlier. Here is a fuller quote from his article on the views of one researcher: ““Before we declare a new generation has arrived, the differences have to be profound,” Underwood said. “One generation ends, and the next begins, only when the times and the teachings that young kids absorb mold core values that are significantly different from the generation just ahead of them. And we haven’t seen it yet.”” [iv]
Why the fixation on Generation Z right now? Let’s look at what one site tells us:
“When it comes to the issues that matter most, Zs are taking a satellite perspective. The globally-native generation (over 60% are friends with someone online from another country) were significantly more likely than even their 25-34-year-old counterparts to name a global issue, or event, as the one they cared about most in 2018. Sixty percent of 18-24-year-olds vs. 49% of 25-34-year-olds named events such as North and South Korea agreeing to end war (35%) and the Syrian chemical attack (19%) as the most powerful, or culturally relevant events of the year. National issues, such as school shootings and gun reform, also topped their list. Interestingly, women’s empowerment came in last, below environmental issues and even “powerful pop culture moments,” with only 44% choosing events like #MeToo and #Timesup as ones that are most culturally relevant to them (granted, women and men differed greatly in their perspectives).[v]
I don’t suppose any of these differences have anything to do with the fact that those slightly older than this group are working, have families, and are under economic pressure?
Generation Z is a marketing product. Identify differences, emphasise them as far as you dare, and then you have a marketing profile to sell to companies. Once they swallow the bait, you can offer businesses clever ideas to sell to this ‘special generation’. As Daniel Kolicz put it: “Yet it seems we have learned little from our hyperventilating approach to the millennials. As they fade in the rearview mirror and Generation Z comes into focus, we can expect the usual hand-wringing (Is Generation Z too grimly pragmatic? Is their timidity, their cautiousness, in some sense a betrayal of American values?) and contrarianism (ACTUALLY, Zs are idlers and layabouts in the Romantic vein, deeply impractical and almost militantly committed to whimsy).” His sobering follow-up is clear. “[Gen Z] are distinct from their forebears, but distinguished chiefly by the magnitude of their debt and the paucity of their prospects.” And little else!
While market research is getting excited about Generation Z, it is missing a very important development. Companies are slowly accepting that knowing about generations (whether they exist as discrete groups or not) is irrelevant today. Now we can target each individual customer, profiled through data analytics. Broad assertions about a new generation are too fuzzy to help.
Overall, profound changes affecting the world in which children grow up are rare, maybe just two in the last 80 years. If there is anything else to be said, it is that young people are living in a world better in many ways than it was, and this pattern of overall progress has been true for a while. Perhaps that’s one change we can see going beyond any generational shift, a steady improvement we can only hope will continue – for everyone.
[i] He was actually talking about Generation Z: In Search of Generation Z, Daniel Kolitz, New Republic, 27 March 2019. I will return to his observations later.
[ii] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-young-adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations/
[iii] The term was coined by Marc Prensky in 2001: https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
[iv] Ibid
[v] http://www.culture.life/post/BKo5lscmrugY28E0CMECy, October 31, 2018
