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September 19, 2008

Generational Myth
By SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN
Not all young people are tech-savvy

Consider all the pundits, professors, and pop critics who have
wrung their hands over the inadequacies of the so-called digital
generation of young people filling our colleges and jobs. Then
consider those commentators who celebrate the creative brilliance
of digitally adept youth. To them all, I want to ask: Whom are you
talking about? There is no such thing as a "digital generation."

In the introduction to his book Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital

Age (Macmillan) last year, Jeff Gomez posits that young Americans
constitute a distinct generation that shares a sensibility: resistance
to the charms of printed and bound books. Gomez, who has been a
sales-and-marketing director for a number of global publishers, has
written a trade book whose title and thesis demands that we ignore
it. Alas, I could not.

"The needs of an entire generation of 'Digital Natives' kids who

have grown up with the Internet, and are accustomed to the entire
world being only a mouse click away are going unanswered by
traditional print media like books, magazines, and newspapers,"
Gomez writes. "For this generation which Googles rather than
going to the library print seems expensive, a bore, and a waste of
time."

When I read that, I shuddered. I shook my head. I rolled my eyes.

And I sighed. I have been hearing some version of the "kids today"
or "this generation believes" argument for more than a dozen years
of studying and teaching about digital culture and technology. As a
professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I
have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to
report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and
dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class.
Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years.

Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large
number who can't deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile
phones. Many can't afford any gizmos and resent assignments that

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demand digital work. Many use Facebook and MySpace because

they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of
course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or
even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a
handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet
fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily
life.

College students in America are not as "digital" as we might wish to

pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough.
All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims
that kids won't read books are just not true. Our students read books
when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I
mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book
to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don't like is
the price of books.

Of course they use Google, but not very well just like my
75-year-old father. And they fill the campus libraries at all hours,
just as Americans of all ages are using libraries in record numbers.
(According to the American Library Association, visits to public
libraries in the United States increased 61 percent from 1994 to
2004).

What do we miss when we pay attention only to the perceived

digital prejudices of American college students? Most high-school
graduates in the United States do not end up graduating from
four-year universities with bachelor's degrees. According to the
National Center for Education Statistics, in 2007 only some 28
percent of adults 25 and older had completed bachelor's degrees or
higher. Is it just college-educated Americans who are eligible for
generational status?

Talk of a "digital generation" or people who are "born digital"

willfully ignores the vast range of skills, knowledge, and experience
of many segments of society. It ignores the needs and perspectives
of those young people who are not socially or financially privileged.
It presumes a level playing field and equal access to time,
knowledge, skills, and technologies. The ethnic, national, gender,
and class biases of any sort of generation talk are troubling. And
they could not be more obvious than when discussing assumptions
about digital media.

As Henry Jenkins, a media-studies professor at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, wrote on his blog last year, "Talking about
youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these
young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all

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mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and

uncertain for all of us." Such discussions, he said, also risk ignoring
the different ways young people use digital tools, from listening to
compact discs to blogging to posting clever videos on YouTube to
buying stuff on eBay.

In reaction to Jenkins's post, Leslie Johnston, now at the Library of

Congress, wrote on her blog, "I have worked with faculty in their
60s who saw something in being digital decades ago and have
worked in that realm for years. I have worked with colleagues
librarians and faculty in my own age group (I'm 44) who hate all
technology with a passion and others who embrace it in all ways. I
have worked with students at three different research universities
who could not care less about being digital."

On my blog, Sivacracy, Elizabeth Losh, writing director of the

humanities core course at the University of California at Irvine and
author of the forthcoming Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of
Government Media-Making in Time of War, Scandal, Disaster,
Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009), kept the
online conversation going: "Unlike many in today's supposed
'digital generation,' we learned real programming skills with
punch cards in the beginning from the time we were in
elementary school. What passes for 'media literacy' now is often
nothing more than teaching kids to make prepackaged PowerPoint
presentations." Losh also pointed out that the supposed existence of
a digital generation has had an impact on education, as distance-
learning corporations with bells-and-whistles technology get public
attention while traditional classroom teaching is ignored.

Once we assume that all young people love certain forms of

interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems
and devices that match those presumptions. By doing so, we either
pander to some marketing clich or force an otherwise diverse
group of potential users into a one-size-fits-all system that might
not meet their needs. Then, lo and behold, young people rush to
adapt to those changes that we assumed all along that they wanted.
More precisely, we take actions like rushing to digitize entire state-
university library systems with an emphasis on speed and size
rather than on quality and utility.

Ask any five people when Generation X started and ended. You will
get five different answers. The borders of membership could not be
more arbitrary. Talking as if all people born between 1964 and (pick
a year after 1974) share some discernible, unifying traits or
experiences is about as useful as saying that all Capricorns are the

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same. Such talk is not based on any sociological or demographic

definition of a generation; it's based on whatever topic is in
question.

Invoking "generations" demands an exclusive focus on people of

wealth and means, because they get to express their preferences (for
music, clothes, technology, etc.) in ways that are easy to count. It
tends to exclude immigrants and non-English-speaking Americans,
not to mention those who live beyond the borders of the United
States. And it excludes anyone on the margins of mainstream
consumer or cultural behavior.

The baby boom was a real demographic event. But what baby
boomers share is Medicare or at least they will soon. That's pretty
much the end of the list. America, even in the 1950s and 1960s, was
too diverse a place for uniform assumptions to hold true. It's even
more diverse now.

Historical phenomena such as the Vietnam War matter to entire

populations in complicated ways. Vietnam affected almost everyone
in America who was 18 to 25 at the time. But it affected everyone
differently. Let's not pretend that the war was not traumatic to those
older than 25. Those who served did not share the zeitgeist with
those who resisted. Women and men experienced it differently. The
poor tended to serve. The rich did not. Remember how many people
assumed in 1972 that there was some great generational mood or
attitude that would pull voters to George McGovern in the first
election in which 18- to 20-year-olds could vote? Why don't we ask
President McGovern how that turned out?

By focusing on wealthy, white, educated people, as journalists and

pop-trend analysts tend to do, we miss out on the whole truth.
Generation X and the Greatest Generation are just the stuff of book
titles. And they are not even good books.

The strongest argument against the idea of generations was raised

first by the 18th-century philosopher David Hume. People are
constantly being born and dying, Hume noted. So political
sensibilities (to cite one phenomenon often assigned to generations)
tend not to be cleanly associated with a single cohort. They change
gradually. That's why human history has so few revolutions. And
when there are revolutions, they tend not to separate generations.

I realize that by puncturing the myth of generations, I am pitting

myself against one of the giants of 20th-century social theory, Karl
Mannheim. In his 1927 essay, "The Problem of Generations,"
Mannheim answered Hume by positing that generations are not

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dem-ographically determined, but historically. Big events forge

common identities. And proximity to an experience matters more
than birth year. In other words, a Mannheimian generation might
exist among all people who breathed in the ash and dust of the Twin
Towers in New York City in 2001. But it might exclude people of the
same age who merely watched the event on television from a
comfortable couch in Madison, Wis.

Nor, Mannheim wrote, is a generation like an association, in which

one claims membership or allegiance. Generation is a fluid and
messy social category, not unlike class, he argued. As with class,
members don't always know they are members. Members of
generations, like classes, share "a common location in the social and
historical process," he wrote, that predisposes them to certain
modes of thought and action. A generation is one element of a fuller
theory of cultural cohesion, mutation, and transmission.

Mannheim was arguing for an eclectic model of social analysis, one

that does not rely too heavily on positivist principles of precision
and accountability. He also wanted to use the concept of generation
to delineate a set of human traits that biology alone could not
explain. Finally, he wanted to establish that one's intellectual
position in society is influenced by much more than class position,
as orthodox Marxism of the day insisted. Thus generations were
important explanatory mechanisms in his "sociology of knowledge."

By trying to do all that work, Mannheim's generations quickly

crumbled. Generations seemed only to exist within nations, not
across them; continuity existed between and among age cohorts;
diversity of thought existed among members of a generation. Even if
Mannheim's generations might have existed as a stable social
category, they no longer do. Germany, Hungary, and England in the
1920s were hardly as diverse and globalized as those countries are
now.

None of this means that nothing changes. Nor that we should not
study youth, even privileged subcultures of youth, and their
particular needs and problems. History is not static. Demography
matters. But today's young people including college students
are just more complicated than an analysis of imaginary generations
can ever reveal. There are far better ways to study and write about
them and their interactions with digital technologies than our
current punditry offers.

A short list of the best of those who are studying and writing about
the effects of digital media on youth must include Eszter Hargittai, a
sociologist and associate professor of communications studies at

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Northwestern University, who has received a major grant from the

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to study digital
communication and youth. In a recent paper in Information,
Communication & Society, "The Participation Divide: Content
Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age," Hargittai and Gina
Walejko conclude that the habit of creating digital content and
sharing it across digital platforms correlates with a person's identity
traits. When asked in an interview in the May 2 issue of The
Chronicle which demographic groups are less Web-savvy than
others, Hargittai responded that women, students of Hispanic
origin, African-American students, and students whose parents
have lower levels of education tend to have less mastery of the inner
workings of digital technology than other groups do.

Hargittai explained why we tend to overestimate the digital skills of

young people: "I think the assumption is that if [digital technology]
was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better.
Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to
be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups
tend to understand some of these new developments better than the
average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what
RSS means? And he won't."

A 2007-8 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at

Harvard University, and a doctoral candidate at the University of
California at Berkeley, danah boyd, has done a series of in-depth
qualitative studies of young people's use of digital communication.
In her paper "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of
Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life," published in a volume
edited by David Buckingham, Youth, Identity, and Digital Media
(MIT Press, 2008), she has observed how digital spaces give young
people a sense of autonomy and control that, for example, planned
access and limited loitering spaces at shopping malls do not. She
has also sparked an online conversation, however, by noting how
the migration of some young people from MySpace to Facebook
reflects a strong class component.

As Susan Herring urges in an insightful article, "Questioning the

Generational Divide," also in the Buckingham volume, we should
move our gaze from dazzling technologies and two-dimensional
exotic beings so-called "digital natives" to young people
themselves.

Even in her unfortunately titled yet sharp book, Generation Digital:

Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet (MIT
Press, 2007), the American University communications professor

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Kathryn C. Montgomery has criticized the news media for

characterizing "all young people in monolithic and simplistic terms,
defining them almost exclusively on the basis of technology."

But Montgomery is not alone in selling a book about a generation

while undermining belief in its existence. The most prominent
scholarly project aimed at making sense of the effects of digitization
on young people remains invested in the notion that they
"constitute a distinct tribe": Digital Natives, conducted at the
Berkman center by its former executive director, John Palfrey. In
August, Palfrey and Urs Gasser gave us Born Digital: Understanding
the First Generation of Digital Natives (Basic Books), which argues
that kids today are fundamentally different from the rest of us
because their default modes of interaction involve mixing and
mashing digital files and exposing (and rewriting) themselves
through online profiles and avatars. That assumption bolsters the
policy positions that the investigators already embraced: that the
law should allow young people to remix and share bits of culture,
while helping them respect and manage privacy. The policy goals
are laudable. And the research is interesting. But Palfrey and Gasser
did not need to render young people exotic to make their points.
The concept of "born digital" flattens out the needs and experiences
of young people into a uniform wish list of policies that
conveniently matches the agenda of digital enthusiasts and
entrepreneurs of all ages. Indeed, it is interesting that Palfrey and
Gasser deny that their subjects constitute a "generation," conceding
in their introduction that they are describing only the challenges of
privileged young people.

Most alarming, Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory

University, has recently written a jeremiad against young people
and their digital habits, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital
Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future
(Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008). Well, if there is one way to
ensure that young people do not read more books than necessary, it
is to call them dumb in the title of a book. The book is strongly
argued, but the voices of those who concern the author are
curiously absent.

There is much to admire in the book. Bauerlein assembles

impressive evidence that American youth are terribly served by our
current educational system. He deflates the grand folly of strategies
like putting computers in the classroom and assuming that students
will learn skills by sitting in front of them. But in blaming the digital
moment for the problems of education, and government in general,
he is off the mark.

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Yes, young people may favor social-networking sites to the

exclusion of political, news, or in-depth intellectual or cultural-
commentary sites. But if the form is different, the malady is old.
After all, Neil Postman, the late New York University professor who
originated the anti-media jeremiad with Amusing Ourselves to
Death (Viking, 1985), blamed television for restructuring our
thought patterns and retarding our ability to think complex
thoughts.

If the concept of a generation is unenlightening at best and harmful

at worst, why do we persist in describing cultural, historical, and
social change as generational? Sociologists have subsumed
Mannheim's generational declarations within sophisticated theories
of the "sociology of knowledge" and the "collective memory" of
inherited culture. And professional historians rarely employ
generations as historically determinative categories. Still,
sociologist-sounding consultants like Neil Howe and the late
William Strauss have built nice careers publishing shallow
primers like their books on millennials on how to market goods
and services to cartoon versions of various generations. They have
pretty much owned the generations field to the point where real
scholars will even cite their definitions of when baby boomers and
Generation X begin and end. Howe and Strauss go to show you that
you'll never go broke in America marketing to marketers. Or
marketing to those who claim membership in particular
generations. Journalists like Tom Brokaw invoke generations to
forge rickety generalizations about people who were young in the
1940s and 1960s. Americans love thinking in generations because
they keep us from examining uncomfortable ethnic, gender, and
class distinctions too closely. Generations seem to explain
everything.

But there is more to it. People fervently declare and defend

generational identity. They clearly get something out it. Perhaps it's
the same satisfaction that one gets out of other tribal identities,
what mile Durkheim called the "collective effervescence" of
performed rituals. Feeling part of the "Woodstock generation" must
generate some sort of warmth, comfort, or false nostalgia for those
who caught the 1970 documentary film but missed the bus to the
festival back in 1969.

We should drop our simplistic attachments to generations so we can

generate an accurate and subtle account of the needs of young
people and all people, for that matter. A more responsible
assessment would divorce itself from a pro- or anti-technology
agenda and look at multiple causes for problems we note: state

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malfeasance or benign neglect of education, rampant consumerism

in our culture, moral panics that lead us to scapegoat technology,
and, yes, technology itself. Such work would reflect the fact that
technologies do not emerge in a vacuum. They are subject to market
forces, political ideologies, and policy incentives. More important,
such work would not use young people as fodder for attacking wider
social problems.

Too often we reach for easy, totalizing explanations for cultural

phenomena, constructing cartoons of digital youth that have a tone
of "gee whiz" or "shame, shame" to describe these new and odd
creatures. The Who may have started this whole mess by recording
an anthem steeped in the collective effervescence of "My
Generation." But the Who also assured us that "The Kids Are
Alright."

Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and

law at the University of Virginia. His next book, The Googlization of
Everything, will be published in 2009 by the University of
California Press.

http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55,

Issue 4, Page B7
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037

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