2.     Differences between emerging adults and their parents of the boomer generation[i]

There are major differences today between emerging adults and their boomer parents that transcend normal differences as a result of education.  These differences can become obstacles within intergenerational communication.  A description of few of the more obvious differences follows below.

As compared to their parents, emerging adults tend to:

·       settle down into marriage and start a family about a decade later

·       spend a longer time in school and have more education

·       be more invested and proficient in information technology

·       be future oriented and have less interest in history

·       be collaborative rather than competitive

·       be given to indirect/ironic communication styles

·       be pluralistic in their outlook on life

·       have a tinkering, cut-and paste, remix attitude toward the world

·       surf the net rather than read books

·       scroll, skim, scan for information

·       multitask and range widely rather than focus

·       value diversity, dialogue, tolerance, interaction and inclusion

·       favour unimpeded personal expression over privacy 

·       be relationship rather than task oriented

·       be committed to virtual, rather than face-to-face communication

·       spend much of their time social networking (texting, tweeting, blogging) their peers

·       send and read only instantaneous, interactive, and brief communication items, (TL;DR: Too long; Didn’t read)  

·       value personal authenticity and relational transparency in interaction with others

·       be progressive and democratic in their outlook on life

·       distrust established institutions and persons in power

Perhaps the most fundamental way in which emerging adults differ from their parents is that their lives are by and large characterized by the integrity of questioning rather than by the certainty of knowing.  They are voracious researchers.  Theirs is a probing generation.  They view testing as an authentic place to stand.  They like to live on the edge, to try new things, to walk in a space of not knowing, to believe something tentatively for the time being to see where it leads them.  They are receptive to otherness, welcoming of diversity, open to dialogue, and willing to change their minds.  They believe that all points of view are inevitably subject to revision and doubt that there are many prefabricated truths worthy to live by.  To them almost everything is (still) up for grabs.  

By way of contrast, their parents have a stake in maintaining that some things must be true no matter what.  They feel uncomfortable with so much openness and uncertainty.  It has taken them years to craft a credible way of living of their own and they feel that their life style is currently under attack.  They secretly want their children to adopt their values and their lifestyle, to accept their worldview and follow in their footsteps but see very little evidence that this is happening.  It is troubling for many parents to watch their children’s lives go in a direction that is quite different from their own. 

However, it appears that most parents keep these worries to themselves and that they generally give their children a great deal of latitude in shaping their own destiny.  Moreover, there actually is much that these children admire about the lifestyle of their parents, such as their work ethic and their willingness to sacrifice.  Notwithstanding their concerns, their parents also continue to support their children during their twenties, especially when they are still in school.

As for the way today’s emerging adults view their parents, they may disagree with elements in their lifestyle, but most of them see no need to openly voice their criticisms. Thus, the relationship between today’s emerging adults and their parents is surprisingly close and relatively free from conflict.  All this entails, however, that there is little dialogue happening between today’s emerging adults and their parents about life’s most fundamental issues.  The best they can come up with, it seems, is a peaceful co-existence between two solitudes.

It is said that today the lifestyles of the younger and the older generations differ so widely from one another that they might as well be living in different worlds.  Yet, as a matter of fact these generations populate the same planet, belong to the same society, live in each other’s homes or neighbourhoods and actually are meant to complement each other.  How are they to relate to and to communicate with one another?

1.   Normal Generational differences[i]

There always have been, and always will be differences between older and younger people.  These are differences in any culture and at any time of history that normally and necessarily exist between younger and older people because of an educational relationship between the two.   In this relationship the young learn the ways of the old but also change the culturally established ways of the old and in this way effect cultural change and renewal.

One generation introduces the next to a given culture by transmitting its experience, its expertise, its competence, and its insight into that culture to the younger generation. Without such an educational, culture-transmitting process from one generation to another, no culture can exist for long.  In addition to inculcating the next genera­tion into a given culture, the successful transmission of that culture also entails a transfer of responsibility for that culture.  Learning involves more than gaining com­petence in the ways of the old. Insofar as one is able, the learner is also expected to take respon­sibility for the ways of the old.  The success of the educational process can be gauged in terms of whether or not the behavior of the new generation manifests the ways of the old.  From this vantage point learners have rightly learned the right things to the extent that they mimic the behavior of their teachers.

However, in being educated into the ways of the old every new generation also changes the ways of the old more or less drastically.  During our period of history in particular, this process of change appears to have accelerated to such an extent that generational differences appear to be taking on the characteristics of a genera­tion chasm.  Why in learning the ways of the old do the young change the ways of the old?  Education is more than teaching new dogs old tricks.  It does not only change persons but cultures (i.e., commonly accepted ways of doing things) as well.  Education offers a culture the opportunity to change itself, to do things in a different way.  Next to providing cultural continuity, education is also a process of cultural renewal.  In this process it is the learner rather than the teacher who changes culture.

Both individual change and cultural change are products of education.  As a result of education learners change themselves to suit existing culture or change existing culture to suit themselves.  By means of this process they give their stamp of approval or critique on the culture in which they live.

Cultural renewal can be a positive result of education.  The older peo­ple become, the more they are inclined to miss-identify the way they do things with the way they ought to do things.  After decades of working at constructing a certain way of living, people can become so committed to the way things are done that they can hardly distinguish it any longer from the way things ought to be done.  Their way becomes the way to be taught and lived.

However, the next generation is not so committed to what is taught.  Because the old teach the new generation, it stands on the shoulders of the old and can thus be expected to see farther.  But also, because young people are not committed to the old generation’s way, they can stand back from its culture and see more clearly where the way things are done deviates from the way things ought to be done.  Thus, a new generation has the opportunity to be properly critical of the cultural products that are taught. It is the responsibility of each new generation to bend the ways of the old into the right direc­tion.  The task of reforming culture to make it conform to what ought to be done is intrinsic to learn­ing.

The faithful exercise of this task can renew a culture.  Whether cultural change becomes cultural renewal (in the sense of the Greek New Testament word kainos, which means "fresh, improved," rather than the word neos, which only means "different from before”) depends on whether as a result of learning the learner’s actions increase the opportunity for humanitarian function­ing in a culture.

CHAPTER FOUR

Intergeneration

 

Between the generations

In this chapter we will explore how emerging adults and previous generations differ from one another and how they can profitably communicate with one another.  Of course, one can argue that there is nothing to explore since people, whether young or old, are first and foremost human beings who all struggle with the same problems of humanity and, as a matter of fact, regularly communicate with one another about these problems.

Furthermore, one can always point to older adults who act like the emerging adults and to emerging adults who act like older adults.  So, where does one draw the line?  Developmentally speaking, when does a younger generation end and an older generation start?   The literature generally pegs the time frame for emerging adulthood between 18 and 30.   That would make age 30 the start of the older generation!  So, lots of problems exist in defining the precise boundaries of the generations. 

Yet, generational differences do exist.  Many of the parents of emerging adults find the views and behaviour of their children more than a bit puzzling and quite different from their lives when they were growing up.  On the surface then, there seems to be a decided difference, or even a disconnect between the older generations and the younger ones.  All this entails that today the generations tend to live along side one another with very little dialogue between them about life’s most fundamental issues.

8.  Irony as a lifestyle: from nothing fits to nothing should fit

Hipsters are postmodern to the core.  Postmodernism is the worldview that moves from the experience that nothing fits to the prescription that nothing should fit.  When one starts from the conviction that nothing should fit, then trying to identify even pockets of order in an otherwise absurd world or attempting to fit things together that in themselves are absurd is seen as a form of selling out.  Irony as a lifestyle is not only a recognition that nothing fits but also a lifestyle that must respond to any forms of order, be they philosophies, religions, institutions, organizations, or convictions with critique and disavowal.  

7.     Hipsters, emerging adults and mainstream North America

When asking how hipsters view themselves what strikes me is how similar they are to emerging young adults in general.  In the main, they just want to be themselves, live their own life and at their own pace.  As we saw also, like so many other young people they are deeply invested in a remix culture in response to a digital world.  But there is one characteristic about their lifestyle that is not found as much among emerging young adults and this factor, I think, explains much of their quirky, ironic, esoteric behaviour. 

The distinctiveness of the hipster lifestyle may be found in the answer to the question why they live the way they live.  What seems to motivate them, more than anything else I can think of, is their fear of being co-opted by mainstream North American culture.  All of the efforts of hipsters appear to be governed by a deeply rooted desire to exclude themselves from that mainstream culture.

What is ironic is that in all their efforts to opt out, they actually resemble mainstream North American culture more than any other contemporary youth group.[i] For, a case can be made that the strength of this culture does not lie in the originality of its ideas nor in its capacity to innovate.  Rather, its power derives from its unique ability to forage, digest and package big ideas and novel inventions originating in cultures other than their own.  So, like the lifestyle of the hipsters, North American culture does not ever produce anything new but merely remixes elements found elsewhere?   If so, then hipster culture is to be located at the centre of Mainstream America rather than at its margins.

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[i] Heath J. & A. Potter 2004 The Rebel Sell. Toronto: Harper Perennial.

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[i] Heath J. & A. Potter 2004 The Rebel Sell. Toronto: Harper Perennial.

6.  Hipster view of hipsters

These are some of the issues that arise when one consults the outsider’s view of the hipster lifestyle.  But how do hipsters view themselves?  On that score I have very little data.  What little I have comes from a series of interviews I did recently with members of the hipster colony in the Mission District of San Francisco.  These interview data represent their response to the questions I put to them.

When I asked the question: “Who or what is a hipster?”  they gave the following answers:

“Hipster” is a general term for many different kinds of young people.  It is a term that “the outside” puts on us young people.  We don’t call ourselves hipsters, but if asked point blank whether we are, we don’t mind being called that.  “Hipster” is mainly a fashion style statement, (e.g. retro clothes from thrift stores), that depicts a life style marked by irony.  Hipsterism is a deeply personal life style, i.e. each of us hipsters follows his/her own individual approach to life, a style of living that cannot be characterized as group behaviour.  We do not join groups for social action of any kind.  We tend to congregate together with other like-minded young people in groups for support, as here in the Delores Park in Mission.  But each of us just wants to be him or herself.

When asked what motivates them to live this hipster life style they did not want to disclose what is inside of them.  That belongs to each of us alone, they said.  On the other hand, they were willing to state that hipsters are mostly young people who are socially progressive and anti-mainline culture.  Furthermore, they stressed that they are serious about becoming adults, but they insist on taking time to sort things out before they settle down.  They also wanted to lay to rest the myth as if hipster young people are just a bunch of dummies.  All young people in the park here, they said, are highly educated, even over educated for the work they are doing.  Finally, they think that the reason why older people cannot understand younger people is because of a communication problem that exists between the generations due to age differences.  So, they appreciate it very much when an older person takes the time to try to understand them.

5.  Clowns or court jesters?

The whole of this deliberately creates an appearance of inauthenticity, as if nothing matters.  All of this raises the suspicion that hipsters actually “protest too much,” and I am left with a number of questions.

a)      By not even taking themselves serious are they essentially playing the class clown?  Clowns of any kind, we all know, are essentially sad individuals who wish to be accepted and respected.  But, instead of being taken seriously, judging by what is written about them, the behaviour of these hipster clowns only seems to evoke laughter and derision.

b)     Or, have they adopted the role of Court Jester to 21^St. Century North American culture?  In league with Wikileak, are they aiming to show up the hidden agenda of mainstream America?  Are they reminding us of the joke that this culture has become?  Contemporary North America has by and large become a mall-centered culture governed by the modern marketing forces of late-capitalism in which the value of everything is reduced to its price and people are treated primarily as consumers.  Is the behaviour of hipsters an artfully constructed caricature of this culture to show up this situation?

The chief aim of the hipster lifestyle appears to be to reduce to kitsch anything that is dear to mainstream culture.  That culture has by and large become governed by advertising.  The nature of advertising is essentially that it lies, or more to the point, the truth or falsehood of its statements is incidental to its purpose of selling us something.  Moreover, in mainstream North American (and also European) culture one can no longer say heartfelt, sincere things outright publicly because all genuine utterances inevitably will be stolen and repeated as sound bites or slogans in advertising and in politics.

By way of defense hipsters have taken refuge in irony.  Everything about them, the way they act, the way they look and what they say is characterized by double-speak, as if they deliberately aim to outdo advertising.  If so, by doing this and more than any other emerging adult age group, they have become poster boys and girls for Post-modernism.

4.  Hipsters as seen by outsiders

In fact, much of what is written about this way of living describes hipsters in pejorative terms.  The reaction of commentators on the hipster lifestyle is overwhelmingly critical even to the point of loathing.  What evokes such strong negative emotions on the part of these commentators is that, in their judgment, hipsters contribute nothing new or praise worthy to contemporary culture. 

Hipsters are said to have produced nothing original.  Their style is entirely made up of elements foraged from other cultural groups, with whom they do not identify in solidarity but from whom they appropriate/cannibalize only bits and pieces indiscriminately.  They then combine these elements/symbols/icons of qualitatively different/distinct/disparate styles (working class, counterculture/revolutionary, gay, upper class intellectual cultures) and juxtapose them unchanged into a mashup of their own, thereby reducing these cultural elements to kitsch, i.e. render them irrelevant and meaningless for contemporary living.

Furthermore, they are accused of being snobbish and elitist.  They consider their own mashup style of living to be superior to non-hipster mainstream styles.  They sneer at Mainstream styles and poke fun at them. Ironically they even go so far as to deride their own life style and poke fun at their tendency to poke fun at other people.  So, while reducing non-hipster styles to kitsch, they present their own style of living without conviction, as a joke, as a fashion statement only, wearing it as a costume, parading it on stage as if they are just playing a role in a comedy, rather than expressing their personal individuality.  They are in short playing Mr. and Mrs. Dress up to an audience for the effect.  They consider themselves to be beyond taking themselves seriously.  Or so outsiders tell us.  

They pretend that all of this is only a game.  They routinely tend to treat serious subjects in a playful, humorous manner.  They are especially masters at irony.  When asked, they flatly deny that they are hipsters or are living a hipster life style.  You can have two hipsters angrily accusing each other of being a hipster!  They deny that they are making a statement with their fashion style when it is obvious that they are, and they consistently profess not to be committed to anything when it is clear from the outside that they are very much invested in their style of living.  Hipsters pointedly (!) refuse to take a stand on anything or to say anything with a straight face.  They refuse to take responsibility for anything.  Furthermore, they are working too diligently at showing that they do not care to be believed. 

.    Attitudes

It will be clear that hipsters are a remix culture par excellence in the sense that they love to hunt for tidbits of Internet information and to collect them in an ever-changing hybrid aggregate of lifestyles.  Like the behaviour of emerging adults in general hipster culture betrays a Pac-Man mentality.  They do not read or look but skim, scan, scroll, and surf.   They collect, consume and regurgitate experiences.  It will also be clear that the lifestyles they assemble and reassemble are deemed to be esoteric by conventional standards. 

2.     Behaviour and interests

What probably marks them as much as anything as a visibly identifiable group is their preferred simplified mode of transportation and esoteric tastes.  They ride fixed-brake- bikes, (bikes that have no gears or brakes).  They drink cheap beer (Pabs, Blue Ribbon, or occasionally, Budweiser), and smoke cigarettes that no one else smokes anymore (Parliament, Lucky Strike or hard to get foreign cigarettes like Galouises).  They tend to have elitist tastes in film, music and literature.  They enjoy watching indie flicks or foreign films with sub-titles.  They listen to indie rock, especially to unknown local start-up bands and they enjoy reading books that no one else reads.  They spend much of their time googling for information about these topics and like to talk with fellow hipsters about their knowledge at parties.

1.   Fashion

Hipsters can be easily spotted by the way they dress.  A hipster is someone who looks like a hipster.  Their fashion style is a deliberate pastiche, a hodgepodge, jumble, collage, mash up or melting pot of style items borrowed from surrounding ethnic cultures and from fashion styles that were once popular, but now are no longer en vogue.  They reject the, in their eyes culturally ignorant, attitudes of mainstream consumers and are often seen wearing vintage and thrift store inspired fashions.  Male hipsters dress in tight fitting “skinny” jeans and t-shirts advertising obscure bands or b-movies, covered by flannel shirts or v-neck sweaters, with accessories of painted old school sneakers, thick non-prescription horn-rimmed glasses, truckers hats and big belt buckles, while sporting a conspicuously prominent mustache.  Female hipsters tend to wear retro-style dresses and racer back tank tops without bras.  In addition, both have a penchant for androgynous hairstyles like messy shag cuts and asymmetric side swiped bangs.  Finally, and in spite of misconceptions based on their aesthetic tastes and looks, hipsters tend to be educated, often have university degrees and not infrequently come from relatively well to do middle class families.

CHAPTER THREE:

Hipsterism

Hipsters and the practice of irony[i]

One more characteristic of the lifestyle of emerging adults is the ironic nature of their speech and behaviour.  Irony has been defined as the incongruity between appearance and reality, or between intention and achievement.   One will not often find emerging adults speak unambiguously or behave in a manner that clearly reveals their intention.  They cannot afford to.  We live in a culture that is saturated by advertising.  Wherever we go, someone is trying to sell us a product or a service and the truth or falsehood of what is shown, said or done is incidental to its purpose of trying to sell us something.  In such a climate one can no longer say heartfelt, sincere things outright because all genuine utterance will inevitably be stolen and repeated as sound bites in advertising.  For this reason I have added a separate section on the life style of hipsters because they best illustrate an ironic way of living.[ii]

Hipsters form a relatively small sub-group of emerging young adults in North America. They are worthy of note because they both resemble and deviate from mainstream emerging young adult culture. They may also serve as a comparison group and as another illustration of life as a remix process.  Hipsters tend to congregate in major North American cosmopolitan centers that formerly were ethnic neighbourhoods but which, because of gentrification have by and large lost their ethnic character. They can be distinguished from other twenty-something young people by their peculiar fashion, behaviour, interests and attitudes.

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[i] See  http://en.wikipedia.org/Postmodern_literature, p. 5 ff. and Prickett S. cited  above.

[ii] The description of hipsterism draws on a wide variety of sources:

Books:

Laham, Robert  2003, The Hipster handbook.  Anchor Books.

Greif, M. Ross, K. & D. Torrorici  2010 What was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation.

Articles/blogs on the net:

Haddow, D.  “Hipsters, the Dead End of Western Civilization”, Adbusters Magazine.

Cracked.com:  Articles on Hipsters

“On Hipsterism”: I was a freight train (author unknown)

Video/film:

Scott  Pilgrim vs. the World

Flight of the Conchords (comedy)

Magazine:

Vice, founder: Gavin McInnis, called “the Godfather of Hipsterdom”

4.     Collaboration

In distinction from previous generations emerging adults promote and practice collaboration rather than competition wherever they can.   Whether at work, with their friends or in their family, they want their views to be heard and they are most willing to give the views of others a sympathetic hearing.  When faced with a problem they tend to consult with others in the conviction that the more people contribute their ideas about solving the problem the better the solution. 

Take for example the way they purchase an item for sale.  Before they decide to buy it they research this product thoroughly from every possible angle, its price, the reputation of the company which manufactures or sells the desired item, they compare it with alternatives on the market, and they contact the company to see whether it is willing to customize the item to suit their specific need.  But having done all that they will not make the purchase without seeking the advice of their peers and they are more likely to buy an item if their friends have already bought it and found it to meet with their satisfaction.  Emerging adults are less likely to be influenced by the way a product is advertised and rely most often on their peers for deciding to make the purchase.  In this way buying a product is a collaborative process for them.     

At work they are eager to contribute their ideas to the running of the company they work for.  They are most productive when working together with other employees in groups.  They welcome rather than fear the critique of their ideas by other workers and they favour solutions to problems that are the product of collaboration.  To them work is best done as teamwork rather than individually.  Decision making, they feel should be democratic, done from the bottom up rather than from the top down.  This preference often leads to friction with the philosophy of the management in corporations that are hierarchically structured, as most of them tend to be.

They learn best in schools where education is interactive.  They get along with parents more easily in egalitarian families where rules of behaviour are the product of discussions in which they have a say.  They have no problem living at home even after they have been away to university, provided they can access the net at will without supervision in the privacy of their own bedroom.  Ironically, the Internet enables them to stay in touch with other family members while they are away.  But also, because computer technology has created a physical distance in their home between them and their parents and siblings, there is less actual communication happening.

Much of their interaction with their peers occurs on line rather than face to face.  With them they share in a community, in which they can be themselves together with others.  Within this community communication is world wide and instantaneous.  In it tradition and privacy are of lesser value; personal expression, openness and novelty are at a premium.  Since they are aiming to inform rather than impress one another the language of discourse is easygoing, colloquial, concrete and about the most mundane events of their lives.  The whole of it has the flavour of neighbours talking across the fence with one another at the end of the day.  Emerging adults find this virtual reality so much more user friendly than their everyday reality and this may be the primary reason why they spend so much of their time on line.

3.  The democratization of culture

What is happening in this process, I think, is nothing less than the democratization of culture, or the ongoing creative innovation of existing art and the seemingly never ending revision of current knowledge.  Computer technology has made it possible for emerging adults not only to access an unprecedented wealth of music and film.  It also enables them to utilize these ancient and contemporary art forms as material for their own artistic productions.  They listen to songs, read the lyrics and watch film clips.  But they also cut and paste these elements of existing culture, combine them innovatively into their own creative video (re)productions and post them on YouTube.

In addition and by means of twitter and blogging, they participate with other twenty-something adults in an ongoing and spirited dialogue on a vast array of topics ranging from religion to recreation, fashion styles to food preferences, exercise to environmental concerns. In this debate no one opinion is ever elevated to the level of gospel truth.  What matters most to these young people is the free exchange of ideas and the right of each individual to speak and be heard.  As with the arts, this development represents a democratization of knowledge.

This historical turn of events delivers the death knell to the notion of single authorship.  In a climate where everyone is allowed to be the author or composer of her/his own creation, the idea of an original composer or author who has the sole copyright for his/her production becomes problematic.  The debate of the so called “creative commons” about the right of anyone to download existing cultural products free of charge is an example of the current actuality of this issue.

2.  Remix

It may seem far fetched to draw a causal connection between the nature of digital information and the behaviour of individuals using it, but consider the following quotation from Wikipedia about Postmodernism, (bearing in mind that emerging adults are post-modern to the core.): Postmodernism represents 

a shift into hyper reality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus of many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. (emphasis added)[i]

Emerging adults do not just passively absorb this type of information but they actively evaluate it and customize or personalize it to suit their own lives.  They typically take individual bits and pieces of what they learn on the net and recombine them into their own constructions of a message for their life.  This is paradoxically simultaneously an act of independence on their part with respect to this information and an act of obedience to the demands of this information.  The very act of remixing the bits and pieces of what they learn into an organized whole subjectively experienced and produced by the users of digital information may be an act of independence ironically necessitated by the fragmented nature of digitalized information.

The end products of this evaluation and reconstruction remix process are opinions or statements of preference by emerging adults, who then communicate their opinions via the net by means of text messages, blogs or tweets to other emerging adults.  These in turn repeat the process for themselves.  They evaluate the information, choose and remix elements of it into a construction of their own, etc.  As a social process these activities are at least partially governed by the character of the digitalized information, the influence of which is so prevalent among emerging adults.

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[i] This quotation was taken from an article on irony,

http://en.wikipedia.org/Postmodern_literature, p.8.

1.  Digital

Emerging young adults were born and grew up immersed in information technology.  They are said to be the “most informed generation” of all times.  Throughout their young lives they were “bathed in bits and bytes of information”.   But what is the nature of this “information”? 

It is “digital” information, i.e. it is virtual reality rather than (the immediate experience of) everyday reality.  What we experience when we access computer information is a certain form of information, information that is digitally shaped by the medium that delivers it.  It invites us to make a statement of opinion or preference with respect to the specific information that is offered.   Digital information is information that is inherently open to evaluation and appropriation as a response.

More concretely, this type of information is like a gigantic dictionary or encyclopedia, which provides knowledge on any conceivable topic.  Like an encyclopedia it provides the user with a multitude of largely unverified facts.  For that reason it looks more like a compendium of opinions than data, each of which may or may not conflict with other opinions.  The sheer volume of digital information requires specific cognitive skills such as skimming, scanning, scrolling, surfing, sorting, categorizing and creatively tinkering with this information.  For all these reasons digital information presents the user with a collection of stand alone bits of knowledge, and, because of its fragmented nature, invites one to combine and re-combine these items into ever more innovative configurations.  In short, computerized digital information is tailor made for remixing its components into a changeable collage of style and preference.  The whole of this activity takes on the quality of a game.  In comparison with everyday experience, and regardless of how one attempts to process digital information, it is at best a facsimile of everyday experience. It is hard to escape the sense that this type of knowledge is inherently artificial.  

CHAPTER TWO:

EMERGING ADULTHOOD:

A remix generation in a digital world[i]

As in the chapter before, this chapter contains a series of items characterizing emerging adult life but this time specifically focused on the digital, remix, democratic and collaborative nature of the life style of twenty-something youths.

The influence of digitalized information currently available by means of a wide variety of computing devices is far more pervasive among emerging adults than among any other age group, with the possible exception of teenagers.  Emerging adults have whole-heartedly embraced all things digital and are in many ways the more tech savvy generation.  This is a major factor distinguishing them from previous generations. 

Their enthusiasm for all things digital is evident from their consumption habits.  More than any other age group they are in possession of all the necessary digital tools for surfing the net and texting their friends.  Typically they are also in hot pursuit of the latest digital communication gadgets such as iPhones and iPads offered on the market.  Their enthusiasm further shows in the way they respond to the computerized digital information that they access by means of these tools and gadgets.  They have by and large bought into the pull of this type of information and are allowing it to significantly influence the structure and the direction of their everyday lives.  In attempting to solve their problems of living they do not turn to books on science, philosophy, or religion for guidance, but to the net for advice.   They google their way through life.   They spend a large amount of their time surfing the net and texting their findings to one another.   They practically live in this virtual world. What may be the reason for this historically new phenomenon?

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[i] Much of the material in this section is based on a book by Don Tapscott, who has written extensively on the impact of the information technology.

           

Tapscott, D. 2009 Grown Up Digital. Toronto: McGraw-Hill.

For more on the remix culture see:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Remix_Culture, which article on p.1, gives the following definition:

Remix culture describes the way in which youth culture today more visibly orients itself around creating media by extracting component pieces from other people’s media creations, then connecting them together to form something new….

(original source: http://www.lingualgamers.com/thesis)

Also see:

Heath J. & A. Potter 2004 The Rebel Sell. Toronto: Harper Perennial.

and

Coupland, D. 2007 Jpod. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

10.  Emerging adults and their parents

Parents of emerging adults find the views and behaviour of their children more than a bit puzzling and quite different from their lives when they were growing up.  “Trying to understand our twenty-something son or daughter,” they might say, “is much like immigrating to a strange country.  We neither know our children’s language nor their customs.”[i]  On the surface there seems to be a disconnect between the previous generation and the current one.

Yet the relationship between today’s emerging adults and their parents is surprisingly close and relatively free from conflict.  There is much that these children admire about the life style of their parents, such as their work ethic and their willingness to sacrifice.  Their parents also continue to support them financially during their twenties, especially when they cannot fully pay their own way because they are still in school. 

At the same time many parents have concerns about their emerging adult children.   They want to know whether their children will adopt their values and their life style, accept their worldview, follow in their footsteps and especially when this is going to happen, if ever.  In view of the slow pace of emerging adulthood they are impatiently hoping for their sons or daughters to grow up soon and to become like them.  Beyond that, it is troubling for many parents to watch their children’s lives go in a direction that is quite different from their own.  However, it appears that most parents keep these worries to themselves and that they generally give their children a great deal of latitude in shaping their own destiny.

In assessing the validity of the concerns these parents have about their semi-adult children it should be borne in mind that descriptions by one generation of another generation are of necessity always self-involved.  The concerns parents have about their emerging adult children are not just based on an objective view of their children’s lives.  Those concerns are in part determined by the way these parents experience their own lives. 

As for the way today’s emerging adults view their parents, they may disagree with elements in their parents’ life style, but most of them see no need to openly voice their criticisms.  They are generally quite tolerant of the difference in outlook on life between them and their parents and they largely have chosen to just quietly go their own way.  All this entails, however, that there is very little dialogue between today’s emerging adults and their parents about life’s most fundamental issues and this in turn adds to the homelessness these twenty-something young people feel. 

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[i] To my knowledge, Margaret Mead in her book Culture and Commitment was the first to describe the generation gap as parents and their children living in different countries.  She ascribed this phenomenon to overly rapid historical-cultural change in our society.  This powerful metaphor is still relevant for describing the disconnect between today’s emerging adults and their parents.