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Scary fairies and other melodramatic assumptions about the generation gap

By Jane Rankin-Reid - posted Monday, 12 December 2005


We boomers do have a fairly insistent way of bringing it all back to ourselves at moments like these, don’t we? Teenage identity in media emerged clumsily from a relatively monochromatic outlook three decades ago, rarely capturing our luxurious experimentation, inherent suspicion of consumerism, relentless reinvention and self expression, as it amplified into our life choices.

Whereas today’s young people manoeuvre deftly through price-pointed marketplaces’ generic externalisation of their (retail) distinctiveness. So we don’t get kids’ tastes in music, sexualised antithetical sartorial codification of celibacy, tattoos, tummy baring tops and crack yielding bottoms, body piercings, hysterical makeup and cheesy hair. But they’re a generation far less likely to be making personal market choices to state their differences to us, than among their peers. It’s not always about us after all.

“They’re not the ‘don’t have’ generation, says one mother, “they’re the ‘don’t want’ generation …”

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There’s another worrisome subtext in presuming that today’s younger generation are driving our society into what may actually be an historically inevitable homogenisation of (traditional views of) national identity. Australians collectively of all ages forget the words to our national anthem. For children, it’s a duff hymn devoid of meaningful sentiment. To me, homogenisation anxieties imply lost or misperceived market opportunities, especially when it comes to young adults’ disengagement with mainstream media.

In his essay (On Line Opinion October 25, 2005) on the consequences of conglomerate media ownership, independent publisher Eric Beecher notes that today’s youngsters aren’t tracking favorably for the future of conventional media.

Relatively few people, especially those under the age of 40, care about the subjects that matter to serious journalists. As a result, they regard traditional high-end media as increasingly irrelevant to their lives and interests …

He’s right and he’s also dead wrong in simply delineating disinterest in “serious” treatment of issues as a generationally segmented problem. But he’s not alone in his thinking. Mainstream newspaper publishers have been wresting with falling readerships and generational market shifts for at least a decade, with little apparent success. So it must be fairly galling for younger readers to learn that rather than it being time for some variety - after hearing the same thing from serious commentators, mainly about themselves - for most of their working lives, in relation to the big issues of today, they, the new target audience are accused of not caring about the world.

As Thomas Zengotita said in “Why We Are What We Are; review of Mediated: The Hidden Effects of the Media on You and Your World” (The Guardian, July 24, 2005):

Take the supposed political apathy of the young. If for years on end, they’re sifting mediated options, deciding who they are or want to be, is there any wonder that politics, using pop video techniques and pop slogans inferior to the pitch on cans of Diet Cola, is the option they never find time for, one limp message among many compulsive ones. It isn’t the spin that turns them off; it’s the style and the tone of voice. It’s Clinton and Bush and Tony Blair, acting again, because acting is what they all have to do while the media carousel turns.

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The young people I’ve interviewed for this story see “serious journalism” as code for ideological tenure and labour market stability rather than a challenge worth undertaking. But media commentators have been trapped into analysing young adults as a dysfunctional market quotient, rather than as a significant area of our cultural mainstream with whom current presentations of “serious issues” are literally failing to engage.

It’s a relatively narrow interpretation of 21st century individuals’ experience of media from this perspective. And it should not translate into assumptions that young people don’t care, so much as there is a radical difference in how they express that care and how they source content in relation to their concerns. Are younger readers sidelining assumptions of seniority as an established imprimatur of “quality of conscience”? If this is true, the news has been greeted disdainfully, conflating the integrity of young adults’ stated concerns with their selection of information sources. Another moral inconsistency highlighting our generation’s inexperienced mistrust of the pace of widening choices.

Is the sudden revelation of the uncommon ground between parents and young people today really so surprising? My perceptions are as a non-parent - albeit someone deeply concerned with the concept of societal “care” - as childhoods are transformed into menacing syndromatic “disorders”, frequently mistaking our society’s impatient time -deprived outlook with the enduring realities of childhood needs.

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About the Author

Jane Rankin-Reid is a former Mercury Sunday Tasmanian columnist, now a Principal Correspondent at Tehelka, India. Her most recent public appearance was with the Hobart Shouting Choir roaring the Australian national anthem at the Hobart Comedy Festival's gala evening at the Theatre Royal.

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