I always like to include useful pieces of trivia in my rants, like a lollipop from the dentist
Isaac Send a noteboard - 27/11/2011 11:17:17 PM
I've always wondered about that - I guess Americans with their obsession for genealogy *would* have terms like that and actually use them... I wouldn't know the terminology for those things in Dutch, or whether there's a difference between "second cousin" and "cousin once removed".
I'd never really think of Americans having a genealogy obsession, several of my fmaily members are really into it though. I suppose all the immigration and internal migration probably does make it more of a chore and thus a quest if one takes an interest. Most Americans can't even name any second cousins, or maybe one or two out of the ~100 or so they probably have from their ~4 great-grancestor lines, they just think their cousin's kid is one, so it's kinda a pet peeve.
Apart from the long asides, though, or perhaps because of them, your conclusion seems rather extreme for your evidence. Of course there are other relevant differences between people than their generation, and no two persons have exactly the same cultural reference points. But that doesn't mean that "the whole concept of generation is a near total fiction".
I think the guy's asserting a lot of generalities here and trying to claim a final product that's more accurate then those generalities were, even though the uncertainty and error grows as we couple them together. His points essentially, where they are even true of the group but not all humanity, revolve around cultural changes in technology. They are either false or trivial, and he's building a major social commentary off an assumption that they are ironclad and accurate, and it always bugs me when someone effectively claims scientific precision without doing any science, even if we all do it all the time. I'm happy to go over why those individual points are effectively garbage but I think if anyone looks at them and starts really trying to define them as some measurable quantity they'll see they're pretty meaningless. Take #4, "Implying That College Would Guarantee You a Good Job"... what does that even mean? We tell people all the time that there are no guarantees in life, and no kid could possibly grow up believing that all degrees are equal in monetary value. That statement that people make always boils down to "Valuable skills are called valuable because someone values them enough to pay you for them more than for others, if you acquire them and have a piece of paper to prove it, you will have, all things being equal, a better paying job" that's what everyone means when they say it, that is essentially absolutely true and trivially obvious. Valuable skills are called 'valuable' for a reason. So #4 amounts to "We told you the truth", look at the whole outdoors one, and forget the social grumbling about kids not being physically active enough or getting enough 'fresh air', that's nothing to do with indoors, that has to do with bad parenting. Throwing a transparent dome over a forest would make it 'indoors', that wouldn't fundamentally change much. What we really mean is kids don't get enough exercise sitting in front of a TV, and may not be gaining certain other things as a secondary result. I don't think two friends playing a competitive video game or watching an educational TV program are losing out on anything besides exercise.
As for generation being a fiction, it's not that there isn't such a concept, it's that it's not got arbitrary cut offs. You can say, accurately, that Elvis massively impacted a whole generation, the whole culture but specifically a certain age group. But an event five years before or after that might be shared strongly my the middle of the Elvis group won't impact the younger and older members in the same way. There's no useful, discreet concept like that where generation is concerned. People who were strongly effected by a specific events or series of connected events, like the Moon Landing, were often strongly influenced by a similar event, JFK's assassination, and RFK and MLK. It is fair to point out something like that and say it most impacted an age range, but it's not a tight grouping, and it definitely isn't 20 years on the dot by magic, and to try to translate that clearly into an effect on people 20 years younger is simply to demanding too much accuracy from too broad a product where both factors have huge margins of error. I'm not denying the effect is there, though I dispute the effects, I'm just saying it's like weather forecasting, most of the time you can not simply look at a series of events and forecast very far ahead usefully from them, nor can you look backwards with the results and claim much more accuracy. It's like claiming it rained today because 373 days ago there was an eclipse, that eclipse really did impact the weather but the comment remains sheer guesswork, especially since it isn't raining everywhere.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
- Albert Einstein
King of Cairhien 20-7-2
Chancellor of the Landsraad, Archduke of Is'Mod
- Albert Einstein
King of Cairhien 20-7-2
Chancellor of the Landsraad, Archduke of Is'Mod
5 Ways We (gen X) Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation
27/11/2011 08:26:47 AM
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This article both pisses me off and makes me want to spend more time outdoors. *NM*
27/11/2011 09:26:58 AM
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Is gen x people who grew up in the 80's?
27/11/2011 12:48:35 PM
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Wikipedia gives a lose definition of people born between the early 60s to the early 80s. *NM*
27/11/2011 01:46:04 PM
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It's really mostly correct, and also highlights why OWS was a total failure.
27/11/2011 05:44:15 PM
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The whole concept of 'Generation' is a near total fiction
27/11/2011 08:49:28 PM
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Well, thank you for that explanation about cousins, yes.
27/11/2011 09:41:57 PM
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I always like to include useful pieces of trivia in my rants, like a lollipop from the dentist
27/11/2011 11:17:17 PM
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I disagree, but think generational influences are often oversimplified.
28/11/2011 02:14:07 AM
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I like that you're citing that your citing the stuff I was clearly staring at in my own post
28/11/2011 04:33:57 AM
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Well, without a cite there is no way to know if we are looking at the same stuff.
28/11/2011 06:27:29 AM
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It's more of a humorus aside, one of my drafts linked the graph
28/11/2011 07:21:34 AM
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Yeah, I just thought you were taking a more absolutist position than you did.
28/11/2011 09:05:08 PM
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John Cheese is an ass. His weekly column on a humor website is full of this crap
29/11/2011 02:09:45 AM
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There's an irritatingly large amount of that on Cracked these days, or even The Onion
29/11/2011 03:11:37 AM
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I wouldn't be putting the blame on Generation X. People have been screwing up the next generation
27/11/2011 09:54:30 PM
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So pretty much each succeeding generation of humanity is worse off *NM*
28/11/2011 01:27:31 AM
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Nah. Nature compensates in some unfathomable way to keep us from going to hell in a handbasket. *NM*
01/12/2011 01:16:02 AM
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How is it anyone's fault ?
27/11/2011 11:24:53 PM
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Basically, because there was no reason it had to get in line with the rest of the world.
28/11/2011 02:40:46 AM
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