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omorkaMe doing d-hall duty with only four kids in there, with nothing to keep my brain occupied except an old copy of Harper's, a pen, and a pad of paper, is extremely dangerous.
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It's in the nature of Idealist generations (I'm using Strauss and Howe's generational nomenclature here) to become more conservative as they age. The Boom is doing this right on schedule, giving us both the Bush-baby and some of the weirdly quasi-conservative clips we've been hearing from some of the Dems recently. Civic generations don't actually get more conservative relative to themselves as they age, but they tend to hold the values they had in their prime for their entire lifespan, so that they do grow more conservative with respect to the rest of the population. Because of this, it's generally assumed that people get more conservative as they age and that this is just a fact of life.
It isn't. Adaptive generations do exactly the opposite - they adopt the views of the Civic generation above them in their youth, and then the views of the Idealist generation below them, which are formed in rebellion against those same Civics, as they age. But no one pays any attention to the Adaptive generations. The current one (the Silent) didn't even get a president. (Is Kerry Silent? I think he is. He's their last, best chance at it, I think.)
Then there's the Reactive generations. We go all over the place. Our values are formed against the backdrop of the Idealist generation above us selling out, so our values are cynical above all else. We tend to swing libertarian rather than straight liberal or straight conservative. And I haven't seen any indication that this changes much as we get older - I was terrified when our social group began reproducing that everyone would turn into conservatives as soon as they had a babe in arms, and it doesn't seem to have happened.
Then there's Gen Y. They're supposed to be a Civic generation, but the Boomers (Idealists) are just as scared of them as they are of us, even though they're mostly their own children. And if W rushes us into the Crisis of 2015 ten years early, it'll still mostly be Gen13ers who take care of it. We Reactives are really bad at that sort of thing (as everyone can see by the current mess - give us a quick war and we can kick ass, but we've got no staying power). They're clearly a different generation, and they seem to have a number of Civic aspects, but they also show Reactive and Adaptive traits, too - they don't know who they are, and the Boomers don't know who Gen Y is, either.
Somebody better figure it out. It'll probably be us. Suck. Doing the Boom's dirty work for them again.
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The media act as if there is one mind controlling them. Barring some unholy conspiracy between Murdoch, Eisner, and Turner, we know that's not actually true (although it gets uncomfortably closer to being true each decade, it seems). But they still all build an "American" mindset in their consumers, even more than the educational system does, as if they (like the educational system) were intending to do so.
So, short of conspiracy theory, why? I suspect the problem is that the media are their own advertisements. In addition to bearing various commercial messages, they must first and foremost sell themselves, as products, to survive. Therefore, it is in each medium's best interest to mold their consumers into - well, into consumers, and particularly consumers of that medium. The better a medium is at selling itself, the more it seems to end up doing it. TV is very, very good at this, and it seems to be the most, eh, "normi-i-fying" of the popular media. Movies aren't quite so good - it's the limited dosage, I think - and so we sometimes get movies that pay more attention to the story they're telling than to selling film as a product. Radio can get downright tolerable sometimes, although ClearChannel is doing its damnedest to change that. In print, magazines are nothing but ads for themselves (when they aren't ads for TV or movies!), newspaper is a little better at actually delivering content, and books can seem like they're not selling themselves at all (until you look at the dust jacket, at least).
But every medium has at its base the ur-ad for the culture that produced it, because if that culture failed to exist, so would the medium. The culture has to produce and (more importantly) consume the medium for it to continue to exist. A book, a film, or (ha ha) a TV show that actually changed the culture would threaten its own existence - and no meme that wishes its own survival will do such a thing. The Internet showed promise until it got co-opted by AOL and the spammers.
How does a counterculture propagate in such an atmosphere?
--
It's in the nature of Idealist generations (I'm using Strauss and Howe's generational nomenclature here) to become more conservative as they age. The Boom is doing this right on schedule, giving us both the Bush-baby and some of the weirdly quasi-conservative clips we've been hearing from some of the Dems recently. Civic generations don't actually get more conservative relative to themselves as they age, but they tend to hold the values they had in their prime for their entire lifespan, so that they do grow more conservative with respect to the rest of the population. Because of this, it's generally assumed that people get more conservative as they age and that this is just a fact of life.
It isn't. Adaptive generations do exactly the opposite - they adopt the views of the Civic generation above them in their youth, and then the views of the Idealist generation below them, which are formed in rebellion against those same Civics, as they age. But no one pays any attention to the Adaptive generations. The current one (the Silent) didn't even get a president. (Is Kerry Silent? I think he is. He's their last, best chance at it, I think.)
Then there's the Reactive generations. We go all over the place. Our values are formed against the backdrop of the Idealist generation above us selling out, so our values are cynical above all else. We tend to swing libertarian rather than straight liberal or straight conservative. And I haven't seen any indication that this changes much as we get older - I was terrified when our social group began reproducing that everyone would turn into conservatives as soon as they had a babe in arms, and it doesn't seem to have happened.
Then there's Gen Y. They're supposed to be a Civic generation, but the Boomers (Idealists) are just as scared of them as they are of us, even though they're mostly their own children. And if W rushes us into the Crisis of 2015 ten years early, it'll still mostly be Gen13ers who take care of it. We Reactives are really bad at that sort of thing (as everyone can see by the current mess - give us a quick war and we can kick ass, but we've got no staying power). They're clearly a different generation, and they seem to have a number of Civic aspects, but they also show Reactive and Adaptive traits, too - they don't know who they are, and the Boomers don't know who Gen Y is, either.
Somebody better figure it out. It'll probably be us. Suck. Doing the Boom's dirty work for them again.
--
The media act as if there is one mind controlling them. Barring some unholy conspiracy between Murdoch, Eisner, and Turner, we know that's not actually true (although it gets uncomfortably closer to being true each decade, it seems). But they still all build an "American" mindset in their consumers, even more than the educational system does, as if they (like the educational system) were intending to do so.
So, short of conspiracy theory, why? I suspect the problem is that the media are their own advertisements. In addition to bearing various commercial messages, they must first and foremost sell themselves, as products, to survive. Therefore, it is in each medium's best interest to mold their consumers into - well, into consumers, and particularly consumers of that medium. The better a medium is at selling itself, the more it seems to end up doing it. TV is very, very good at this, and it seems to be the most, eh, "normi-i-fying" of the popular media. Movies aren't quite so good - it's the limited dosage, I think - and so we sometimes get movies that pay more attention to the story they're telling than to selling film as a product. Radio can get downright tolerable sometimes, although ClearChannel is doing its damnedest to change that. In print, magazines are nothing but ads for themselves (when they aren't ads for TV or movies!), newspaper is a little better at actually delivering content, and books can seem like they're not selling themselves at all (until you look at the dust jacket, at least).
But every medium has at its base the ur-ad for the culture that produced it, because if that culture failed to exist, so would the medium. The culture has to produce and (more importantly) consume the medium for it to continue to exist. A book, a film, or (ha ha) a TV show that actually changed the culture would threaten its own existence - and no meme that wishes its own survival will do such a thing. The Internet showed promise until it got co-opted by AOL and the spammers.
How does a counterculture propagate in such an atmosphere?
