- Key Words
MTV Generation or Generation X
- by Kristina Ross, originally published as an essay in the 'zine, Cheap! Yet Pretentious, Summer 1994.
- Cooked up by the various marketing agencies, the idea of Generation X is just a bit over-done. I know that. That's why, instead of offering you yet another rant about how a) Xers don't exist; b) the Boomers just don't understand (and aren't schlepping fries for a living, either); or c) it's just another transparent advertising ploy doomed to failure (see item a), I thought I'd offer you something a bit different: an analysis of GenX as a narrative -- a story -- told by media folk, advertisers, parents, Boomers, teenagers, twentysomethings -- mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly well-educated. So here it is, written with your basic social scientist, over-educated, grad student in mind.
- Like I said, I'm thinking of GenX as a narrative -- and I got to wondering why we have this narrative in our culture -- why now? why in this format? Where's it going? What's it doing? I think there are three key arenas in which the narrative plays an important role: cultural, economic, and political.
- Culturally, the narrative helps to organize a set of differing historical experiences and render those experiences more broadly salient. That is, the narrative itself becomes a vehicle for exchanging ideas, feelings and attitudes about differing historical experiences across and within existing generations. (Perhaps, in fact, this is a quality of all narratives about generational differences or gaps, regardless of whether such gaps actually exist.) This may help to explain the widespread coverage and discussion of GenX across geographic regions, spaces of class, gender and ethnicity, and in all variety of media (even numerous internet discussion lists). Simply put, "Generation X" is good to talk with (see Levi-Strauss 1974).
- What is fascinating about this is that in the majority of GenX stories in the media, the subtext is a comparison: GenX vs. Boomers -- or, perhaps more importantly, the dominant view of the Boomers and their experiences of the 1960s versus an attempt at historical revisioning -- at stabilizing and/or destabilizing the meanings of the 1960s and 1970s (for example, see "Boomer Backlash," LA Times, Robin Abcarian, 6/12/1991, E1; "Taking Shots at the Baby Boomers," Time, Christopher John Farley, 7/19/1993, 30; and "Why Busters Hate Boomers," Fortune, Suneel Ratan, 10/4/1993, 57).
- Economically, the refiguration of youth culture as exemplified in the GenX narrative is certainly in the interests of the youth culture industries. Without the perpetuation, legitimation and reproduction of the cultural space within which "youth culture" exists (see Grossberg 1992), the products marketed to signify membership within youth culture(s) would be less profitable because many of those products (rock music, fashions, technologies) rely upon their ability to signify in-group membership (see Lull 1987).
- Indeed, American marketers have been among the earliest to notice apparent differences in young adults today compared with young adults of the Boomer era. During the early 1980s various marketing and demographic journals began to recognize that the same youth-oriented pitches that worked in the late 1970s had lost their effectiveness with the young adults of the early 1980s. However real (or unreal) these generational differences may be, the refiguration of the meaning of youth and the coinciding configuration of the identity of GenX helps to renew the cultural space within which the "youth culture" industry can operate (the recent space of GenX-targeted network television programs exemplify this point).
- Obviously, there are political implications for both the economic and cultural features of the GenX narrative. Some Xers (and other non-Xers, no doubt) will buy into the marketed image of GenerationX, and some will reject that image. Either reaction, however, involves the assertion and maintenance of cultural borders; such borders are, I believe, inherently politically entailed. It is also clear that there are political implications in the revisionings of the 1960s and the identities of the Baby Boomers. If the revised version of The Boomer (once hippie now yuppie, once idealistic now consumeristic, once rebellious now sell-out, once communitarian now selfish, once open-minded and experimental now close-minded and accusatory) achieves legitimacy among the younger cohort, how will this affect their politics? And, perhaps more significantly, will such refiguration have an impact on the dominant view of 1960s history?
- Finally, one wonders about the fidelity of the mediated constructions of the GenX identity to demographic and sociological facts. Are all Xers the grunge-wearing technophiles, are they the listless slackers, the rave-ing neo-pagans, the independent do-it-yourselfers, the cynical and world-weary copers? Of course no generalization will describe every individual -- just as the dominant view of the Baby Boomer is inadequate for expressing every Boomer's history and experiences. Yet, the generalization does matter, for it will be a type of cultural shorthand, a vehicle for the exchange of information, values, beliefs and attitudes about the present, the past, and the future.
