SYNDICATED COLUMN: Rise of the Young Codgers
a.k.a., Return of the Generation Gap
I'm a cartoonist, columnist, writer and editor. So most of my friends are cartoonists, columnists, writers and editors. And a few publishers. One topic towers all over all others in my circle of friends: the future of journalism. Print media is in trouble; online media is ascendant. But consumers don't pay for online content and online advertisers pay much less for x readers online than they do in print. As NBC CEO Jeff Zucker famously warned last year, the media is "trading analog dollars for digital pennies."
But not everyone is worried. Many aspiring journalists and cartoonists in their twenties have embraced the Web. They don't dread a future without print—they welcome it. If newspapers and magazines are going under, say these e-vangelists, they have no one to blame but themselves. "Considering most political journalism is editorializing disguised as reporting, what would be the big deal," asks Shawn Mallow, a blogger at Wizbang.com. "Does anyone have any illusions as to which way the New York Times leans in its political reporting?"
At Techcrunch.com Erick Schonfeld adds low quality to the list of old media sins: "The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked…News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck."
Remember the "generation gap"? In the 1960s and 1970s, it described the cultural chasm between rock 'n' roll-loving hippie Baby Boomers and their stodgy Lawrence Welk-watching parents. It came back in the 1990s, when snotty twentysomethings wrote books like "Generation X" and "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids," deriding their Boomer elders as sentimental, selfish and unaware.
Generational détente has prevailed since then. Gen Xers born in the 1960s and early 1970s are now in their 40s, America's culturally dominant age group. Sure they're inheriting the country just as it's collapsing. But whining is unbecoming when one of your own has just been elected president. Laid-off Xers (many of them canned by media companies) are coming to grips with failure, causing them to go easier on Boomers, whom they'd previously blamed for everything from global warming to blowing the chance for a revolution back in 1968. Stuff happens. We get that now. How's that alimony payment working out for you?
Besides, we Gen Xers get along with Gen Y types, who are roughly 25 to 35 years old these days. We're both cynical, distrusting of authority, pessimistic about our economic prospects, and dig a lot of the same music and movies. Generation gap? We're too cool for that.
Now here come the Millennials to wipe that smug we-still-listen-to-the-Dead-Kennedys look off our faces. Generational demographic gurus William Strauss and Neil Howe define the Millennials as Americans born after 1982—at this writing, people under age 27. Gen X never saw them coming. Now they're challenging Xers—and the generation gap is back.
This generation gap is the opposite of previous versions, in which young insurgents attacked their elders for being too arch and moralistic. Like Mulder in "The X Files," they desperately want to believe: their leaders, their government, their corporate executives. And they really want to believe in technology. In my little world of journos, they toil on blogs like the Huffington Post for pennies or nothing at all, perfectly happy because they're sure it will pay off someday. How? They don't know, but "someone"—some tech company, some entrepreneur—is bound to figure it all out. When those of us in our 40s point out that there's no evidence to support contentions such as theirs—my favorite is that online ad rates are bound to go up someday, just because—these Young Turk Millennials mock us as washed-up has-beens.
Young people mocking old people for being too cynical is weird.
According to Mssrs. Strauss and Howe, however, this clash was inevitable. Xers are one of four recurring generational archetypes in American society and in Great Britain before the colonies. (They trace these cycles back to the War of the Roses in 1459.) Gen Xers, they argue convincingly, are a "nomadic" generation. According to Wikipedia: "Nomads are ratty, tough, unwanted, diverse, adventurous, and cynical about institutions. They grow up as the underprotected children of an Awakening, come of age as the alienated young adults of an unraveling, become the pragmatic, midlife leaders of a crisis and age into tough, post-crisis elders…" Serious columnists aren't supposed to quote Wikipedia, but I'm Gen X. I'm ratty. I break rules.
Millennials are a "heroic" generation. They "are conventional, powerful, and institutionally driven, with a profound trust in authority"—i.e., perfectly programmed to be intensely disturbed by Xers. If you're the gullib—er, trusting—type, what could be more threatening than to have a generation that doesn't believe in anything be your elders? "They grow up as the increasingly protected children of an unraveling, come of age as the heroic, team-working youth of a crisis…" That last part is dead on. When U.S. society came apart at the seams in the 1970s and 1980s, Millennials' Boomer parents smothered and coddled them. Now they're working for Teach for America. Or at a paid internship. Something will work out. Someone will think of something. Besides, with Boomer parents, money isn't a big worry.
A recent blog post at DailyCartoonist.com brought it home for me. "I'm starting to not comprehend Ted Rall's politics at all," wrote Jesse Levin, almost certainly under age 27. "His current slate of strips basically targets Obama's lefty ineffectuality. His blog rails against Bush...Things may not be black and white, but where on Earth do ya stand as a political cartoonist? Unless you're just an independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures, I think Ted's logic centers are failing on several levels."
"An independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures." Sounds like the perfect definition of a Gen X pundit to me. And perfectly calibrated to piss off up-and-coming Millennials.
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously." He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids." His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
I'm a cartoonist, columnist, writer and editor. So most of my friends are cartoonists, columnists, writers and editors. And a few publishers. One topic towers all over all others in my circle of friends: the future of journalism. Print media is in trouble; online media is ascendant. But consumers don't pay for online content and online advertisers pay much less for x readers online than they do in print. As NBC CEO Jeff Zucker famously warned last year, the media is "trading analog dollars for digital pennies."
But not everyone is worried. Many aspiring journalists and cartoonists in their twenties have embraced the Web. They don't dread a future without print—they welcome it. If newspapers and magazines are going under, say these e-vangelists, they have no one to blame but themselves. "Considering most political journalism is editorializing disguised as reporting, what would be the big deal," asks Shawn Mallow, a blogger at Wizbang.com. "Does anyone have any illusions as to which way the New York Times leans in its political reporting?"
At Techcrunch.com Erick Schonfeld adds low quality to the list of old media sins: "The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked…News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck."
Remember the "generation gap"? In the 1960s and 1970s, it described the cultural chasm between rock 'n' roll-loving hippie Baby Boomers and their stodgy Lawrence Welk-watching parents. It came back in the 1990s, when snotty twentysomethings wrote books like "Generation X" and "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids," deriding their Boomer elders as sentimental, selfish and unaware.
Generational détente has prevailed since then. Gen Xers born in the 1960s and early 1970s are now in their 40s, America's culturally dominant age group. Sure they're inheriting the country just as it's collapsing. But whining is unbecoming when one of your own has just been elected president. Laid-off Xers (many of them canned by media companies) are coming to grips with failure, causing them to go easier on Boomers, whom they'd previously blamed for everything from global warming to blowing the chance for a revolution back in 1968. Stuff happens. We get that now. How's that alimony payment working out for you?
Besides, we Gen Xers get along with Gen Y types, who are roughly 25 to 35 years old these days. We're both cynical, distrusting of authority, pessimistic about our economic prospects, and dig a lot of the same music and movies. Generation gap? We're too cool for that.
Now here come the Millennials to wipe that smug we-still-listen-to-the-Dead-Kennedys look off our faces. Generational demographic gurus William Strauss and Neil Howe define the Millennials as Americans born after 1982—at this writing, people under age 27. Gen X never saw them coming. Now they're challenging Xers—and the generation gap is back.
This generation gap is the opposite of previous versions, in which young insurgents attacked their elders for being too arch and moralistic. Like Mulder in "The X Files," they desperately want to believe: their leaders, their government, their corporate executives. And they really want to believe in technology. In my little world of journos, they toil on blogs like the Huffington Post for pennies or nothing at all, perfectly happy because they're sure it will pay off someday. How? They don't know, but "someone"—some tech company, some entrepreneur—is bound to figure it all out. When those of us in our 40s point out that there's no evidence to support contentions such as theirs—my favorite is that online ad rates are bound to go up someday, just because—these Young Turk Millennials mock us as washed-up has-beens.
Young people mocking old people for being too cynical is weird.
According to Mssrs. Strauss and Howe, however, this clash was inevitable. Xers are one of four recurring generational archetypes in American society and in Great Britain before the colonies. (They trace these cycles back to the War of the Roses in 1459.) Gen Xers, they argue convincingly, are a "nomadic" generation. According to Wikipedia: "Nomads are ratty, tough, unwanted, diverse, adventurous, and cynical about institutions. They grow up as the underprotected children of an Awakening, come of age as the alienated young adults of an unraveling, become the pragmatic, midlife leaders of a crisis and age into tough, post-crisis elders…" Serious columnists aren't supposed to quote Wikipedia, but I'm Gen X. I'm ratty. I break rules.
Millennials are a "heroic" generation. They "are conventional, powerful, and institutionally driven, with a profound trust in authority"—i.e., perfectly programmed to be intensely disturbed by Xers. If you're the gullib—er, trusting—type, what could be more threatening than to have a generation that doesn't believe in anything be your elders? "They grow up as the increasingly protected children of an unraveling, come of age as the heroic, team-working youth of a crisis…" That last part is dead on. When U.S. society came apart at the seams in the 1970s and 1980s, Millennials' Boomer parents smothered and coddled them. Now they're working for Teach for America. Or at a paid internship. Something will work out. Someone will think of something. Besides, with Boomer parents, money isn't a big worry.
A recent blog post at DailyCartoonist.com brought it home for me. "I'm starting to not comprehend Ted Rall's politics at all," wrote Jesse Levin, almost certainly under age 27. "His current slate of strips basically targets Obama's lefty ineffectuality. His blog rails against Bush...Things may not be black and white, but where on Earth do ya stand as a political cartoonist? Unless you're just an independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures, I think Ted's logic centers are failing on several levels."
"An independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures." Sounds like the perfect definition of a Gen X pundit to me. And perfectly calibrated to piss off up-and-coming Millennials.
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously." He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids." His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
posted by Ted Rall at
10:44 AM
28 Comments:
Great insight! Perfectly explains my X'er speechlessness when dealing with Millenials.
Ted Rall, master of pissing people off. Failure at accomplishing anything. Congrats!
we're doomed. :(
Obama isn't an Xer. S&H get the division wrong, because they are... boomers. Obama is at the tail end of the boom, and has the moral outlook of a boomer. "Yes, we can" is not a slogan that an Xer would self-identify with.
Millenials start out with faith in institutions, but, a few more years of no hiring out of college, no employment for those people without college, and an administration whose policies are geared for geezers about to retire, will change that.
I love Levin's reasoning - "Things may not be black and white, but where do you stand (in terms of a system that allows for only two official opinions and points of view)."
Yes, because it's so hard to imagine that someone who found Obama to be too right-wing would have a problem with Bush as well...
Apparently, Scott has found (or created) a job. You know, the guy who calls several times a day from several different area codes. His calling card is, "Hi, this is Scott!" I want to reach through my phone and strangle the son of a bitch. What generation might Scott identify with? The ASSHOLE generation? Does Scott wear a baseball cap backwards all the time? Hopefully, Scott's little misadventure will end behind bars or in a refrigerator crate beneath a bridge. Open letter to Scott:
Scott! "Hi, this is ME! Fuck your enterprising, stalking ass on this Thanksgiving and may you choke to death on a turkey bone as people watch and do NOTHING!
Generation labels? Generation labels? We don't need no STINKING Generation labels.
Turgenyev wrote Fathers and sons around 1862. The story has not changed. I remain enthusiastic about your views. There are so many different flavors of koolaid today, I'll stick with water and tedrall.com...
Nice.
From a Y to an X:
the problem I see is that the King of 'Yes, We Can' is an X. He's aimed straight at Millenials, a Clintonian calculus that serves him well but jams us.
I never heard of this theory of recurring generation groups, but I think that there is more than meets the eye.
Speaking as a 24 year old, the current crop of people are growing up with the internet. This translates into two major things in my oppinion, information overload and an echo chamber. Unable to deal with so many differing ideas, they shut themselves up with people that hardly sway from what they agree with.
Take that guy Jesse you pointed out. I don't see a problem with criticizing the politicans we have because they are doing a crappy job. But Jesse most likely cruises the internet looking at "leftist" websites and is reinforcing his Obama love or whatever the heck it is.
So when he sees someone that isn't practicing that echo chamber philosophy, he's having a hard time dealing with it. So he wants to know where you stand, because there has to be SOMETHING.
Just know there are people 27 and under that can have a multi faceted approach to things!!
This is a great piece.
One of the other differences defining this generation gap is the fact that the Millennials embrace the loss of privacy. They can't understand why people feel they have a right to privacy. Google wants to create a real-time people search, using cell phones to track your whereabouts all the time? No problem according to Millennials. What's the problem with that? After all, if you walk outside your private residence you're giving up your right to privacy. Millennial logic at work.
Somebody can't comprehend your politics because you criticize the left AND the right, and the person who can't comprehend your politics is under 27 aka a "millenial", a group well-represented at Huffington Post? Keep it up! You're doing something very right.
Generation X is constituted of possibly the most washed-up losers every conceived in history. Besides Janine Garafalo, you epitomize this generation most of any public commentator I know. You have no answers, nor do you have any real cogent criticisms to make. Your generation failed to alter the political structure of this country in any cognizably progressive manner because you have nothing to offer but undifferentiated, generalized scorn at anything and everything about the current state of our society. We Millenials -- i.e. the ones who elected the current president whom you seemingly despise so much -- aren't as hopelessly cynical as your lot because the often mediocre nature of this presidency is a far more encouraging achievement in a shorter period of time that anything your generation has produced in the several decades of your seemingly miserable lives.
Well Ted, this generally explains why I'm kind of pissed of at you constantly.
See, I'm under 25.
Any comments?
Y_S
But its also that you aren't helping kick down the right wing.
Y_S
As a 25 year old, I'm right in the middle of the Y'ers and Millennials, so I consider myself generationless.
BTW Ted, I find it ironic that you who complain the loudest about the death of print journalism happen to post your stuff online for free on a blog.
BTW - Ted, I never could understand some of those cartoons where you placed them in "The Former united States". That sort of dystopianism is for places that have already undergone a collapse like Pakistan (Bangladesh) or the Soviet Union. It was very shocking coming from an American. It was a distinctly Soviet way of thinking.
Most people in any generation are conformists. Big generations, like the boomers, have the luxury of creating their own culture to conform to. It sucks that they had to ruin sex and drugs for subsequent generations, but that's beside the point.
Give the millenials some time. The only people worth remembering are those who go against the grain. The millenials haven't been around enough for us to determine which of them will do so.
Nice to see "Generations" referenced in your column. It's a useful tool for analyzing mass behavior in our country (and a useless one for examining individuals, such as Ted Rall).
S&H wrote years ago that Gen X will: 1.) Face some sort of national crisis (ahem); 2.) The hard-nosed cynicism of Gen X will give them the stomach to deal with said crisis; and, 3.) Gen X will be reviled by subsequent and previous generations for having the stomach to deal with said crisis.
Strap yourselves in, Gen Xers, we got another thankless haul ahead of us.
Anon @ 4:42, actually mister, people on the internet are exposed to divergent views on a consistent basis.
We deal with these consistent views and then we re-evaluate our positions.
We don't troll for echo chambers.
I don't. The reason is simple; we like people who follow the broad outline of what we believe in but every one in the world also has the innate human love of learning. People who use the internet like to learn. And if we learn something unsavoury about O-bomb-bomb we re-adjust our position on him and push for what we believe in. Ted may not like the Kos and may thrive on criticism but at least people like Fire-Dog-Lake are harassing congress to GET SOMETHING DONE.
Their action needs to be commended and encouraged.
(Cont.)
The whole millenial privacy thing comes from being raised post-reality show. Just think, they don't remember a world without The Real World. I thought the MTVization of everything was simply annoying, but I was wrong.
We ARE doomed.
I remember seeing the "Millenials Rising" book back in '03 and thinking to myself that it was both offensive and hopefully not true in that the authors seemed to be taking joy in the fact that a generation that wasn't cynical was coming up. However, I think that part of the political aspect of this is growing up in a world where you're too young to have been aware of politics previous to either the '00 election or to 9/11.
I have lots of friends under 27, but strangely enough most of them are involved with arts, with a few people who are very political mixed in with it.
I should add that it's sort of ironic to see people in their early '20s being referred to as the kids of the political world. I came at the tail end of the progressive organizing that opposed the WTO and related things and was always the really young person in the general scene. Now I'm an old man :(
very interesting. i guess i'm gen Y, since i'm 29. When I was growing up in NYC, gen-X'ers were the kids of just a few years ago who graduated into being yuppies while my generation watched, partly amused, partly sad, partly in awe of how a bunch of irresponsible high school kids could get paid well after a little time in college. Millenials must be the ones who were teenagers in the 2000's- the decade we're coming out of. punk-ass kids, but dont underestimate them, they've got an internet-connected social consciousness unlike anyone over the age of 20 now. Once some truth comes out they will change sides quick. They just haven't had their moment of being sucked into politics yet, nor their moment of disillusionment with the US government, nor disullusionment with their own movement- for me the first two came in sept/october 2001, and the last in 2004 while watching kerry absolutely blow it. The Millenials will get there real soon, don't worry.
Come to think of it, I wonder what my 3-year-old's generation will be called :-) (not long ago I was sitting in an internet cafe in asia sitting next to a 6 year old with 1400 facebook friends)...
Anyway, you are indeed getting just a little whiny, Ted, but no worries. You had it way too easy with Bush and it's still the beginning of Obama's presidential cycle (year 1 about to end), so you got to be in cassandra mode. Give it another 2-3 years.
As for death of old-school media... well too bad. they blew it. internet media blows them away in credibility and reader satisfaction. no going back now. maybe in the future we'll be set up so that if you read a piece of news you like you can click a nickel or a dime the author's way without too much hassle. that would probably work.
We need not pay too much attention to classifications and profile of different generation. There are always people in each generation who stand immortal! Do not loose hope Ted.
Idiot are increasing as the population grows.
Food system completely messed with industrialization. The percentage of incapable people is increasing.
Take up on food industry and politics of toxins in food. We, no matter what generation we are categorized as, have become recycle bins that consumes trash as food and spend it on workout machines or just save to be mitigated by consumption of drugs... creep.
We demand better health care, but would not look at the products we consume as food.
Wake up generations X, Y, Mill, BB or F! Take on food industry. Ban processed food that has more than a week shelf life. Stop watching TV. Go out.
Eat good or die.
Do not live sick and fight for immortality.
I thought "Gen Y" and "the Millennials" were supposed to be the SAME GROUP.
People disagreed where it started, but they weren't separate objects!!
The first time I ever heard a young adult talk about "Generation X" (which definitely includes me, at 42, no matter which definition you go by) as if it didn't include her, it was a twenty-year-old in 1997. That would put the boundary in the mid-to-late '70s, not nearly far enough from 1981 to constitute an entire "generation."
I can accept these supposed "generation" things we talk about being about 15 years across instead of the statistically authentic 30, but not a "Generation Y" that covers only the mid-to-late '70s and that's it. That's not a generation, or a "generation," it's nothing at all.
Fluffy subjects like this attract fools, and people will pile extra entries into the list all day long if you let them.
"Anonymous said... Ted Rall, master of pissing people off. Failure at accomplishing anything. Congrats!"
More like failure at running a website. Hello? Comments like this are trash. No content, no purpose except to annoy.
"I should add that it's sort of ironic to see people in their early '20s being referred to as the kids of the political world."
This is not what the word "ironic" means.
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