Different Generations, Different Stories

Filed under irony

Just an innocent conversation with a twenty something. His enthusiasm met
by my glazed over incredulity. His subject, a new smart phone app that uses GPS signals from other phones to allow people to know when they were in the same neighborhood and how “totally” cool it would be to hook up with friends using GPS. When he finished, I asked if he thought people would actually pay for this service. I could not summarize the difference in two generations any better than his notion of a “totally cool app” because I cannot fathom why any one would pay some one else to track their comings and goings so that the data set could be used for marketing intelligence or just turn it over to a secret NSA subpoena.

Science fiction from 1984 to The Matrix shows a culture that has been beaten down by oppressive control of information, but always independence has been taken by meglomaniacal overlords. The iPhone (click the image to get the true meaning of irony) generation wants to build their own apps to voluntarily pay to turn that control over to anyone, no evil overlord needed. How could it happen that the sixties generation with their distrust of corporations, the military and bureaucrats could raise a generation seemingly without the ability to be suspicious? Somehow, we forgot to tell the stories of how bad guys use information to hurt the good guys, or as they said in WWII, loose lips sink ships.

The rest of the post.

Three Generations in Tuscaloosa Changes

Identifying the characteristics of a generation, like generation X or Baby Boomers, takes up a lot of time for people in the business of creating messages that appeal to the stereotype of millions of people. Frankly, it works; far better than we might hope, but it works because a generation shares a collection of stories that form how they define their culture. The simplest example compares the reception veterans received arriving back from Vietnam with those returning from Iraq. The way we treat those people cannot be separated from the stories that surround those two very different conflicts.
A more complex demonstration of how the our stories define our responses and understandings of events is playing out in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It is not fair to say that it is on the campus of the University because it also extends to alumni of the school. The simple story is that a sorority was prepared to invite non-whites to pledge the organization for the first time. They were pressured by people outside of the active membership to forego what would have been a ground breaking step for the current generation of students in Tuscaloosa. The decision was followed by an article in the student newspaper and national attention.

Read more