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X, Y, ...I?
Aug. 24th, 2010 10:23 amEver since Douglas Copeland struck it rich by identifying me and my contemporaries as 'Generation X', writing a book about us and then going on the lecture circuit and pocketing the loot, media observers have been keen to find the next generational demographic tag set themselves on the gravy train too.
In retrospect, Generation X was fairly easy call to make. It represented the children of the baby-boomers, living post-modern, dissolute lifestyles with few cares and even fewer plans thanks to the stored wealth of previous generations.
I'll tell you what, it was great.
Since then we've had 'Generation Y', which was supposed to be the Millennium generation who had greater tech-savvy than we Generation X fuddy-duddies, but as a demographic term that never really took off possibly because Y just isn't as cool a letter as X. Anyway, Generation Y is ten years out of date and a new tag for marketeers to sell the youth demographic to middle-aged executives is now needed, so enter 'Generation i'. I was reading an article about them last night.
The representatives of Generation i in question were the sort of young, fairly photogenic types who the papers are desperate to fill their pages with, and their defining characteristic was that they'd got rid of all that old-fashioned clunky technology like books and televisions and the like, and instead lived their lives entirely portably with all their media stored on laptops and iPads. One had even gone the whole hog and lived his life entirely in hotels, with no home of his own and just a bag of possessions and his constantly-connected electronic paraphenalia. He was quite charmingly naive in his pronouncements about how absolutely anybody could adopt this lifestyle, presumably assuming that absolutely anybody didn't have, say, pets, children, or any sick relatives who needed caring for.
Of course, the media in general has form in doing this sort of thing - finding a few outlying extremes of behaviour and presenting it as a new trend. The article in question managed to find a grand total of two people to illustrate their point, and I'm willing to make a tidy wager that in a city the size of London I could find two examples of pretty much any sort of human behaviour you could name without that being illustrative of anything beyond the fact that people can be bloody odd at times. What struck me was that both people interviewed described this lifestyle as liberating, but to my eyes, it looked incredibly restricted. You see, neither owned any books and instead carried virtual libraries on electronic readers and as I read I found my eyes drifting onto my bookshelves which are crammed with tomes which I'm confident aren't to be found in any electronic library as yet - if they ever will be. There's odd things I've just picked up because they looked interesting, like my copy of The statistical abstract of the British Empire 1925 - 1931, van Dover's The Octopus' Garden and Garrett Hardin's The limits of altruism. There's rarities like my prized first edition of Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic or the bound original 1891 edition of The Strand Magazine containing Conan Doyle's The Final Problem, and then there's the stuff I picked up in second hand bookshops such as crap '50s sci-fi like Worlds of the Imperium and Thongor at the end of time.
So that got me thinking, and today I ask you: What media do you own - it might be books or recordindings - which simply aren't available in downloadable format, and possibly never will be? Or would you adopt the Generation i lifestyle, making a grand total of three people to do so?
In retrospect, Generation X was fairly easy call to make. It represented the children of the baby-boomers, living post-modern, dissolute lifestyles with few cares and even fewer plans thanks to the stored wealth of previous generations.
I'll tell you what, it was great.
Since then we've had 'Generation Y', which was supposed to be the Millennium generation who had greater tech-savvy than we Generation X fuddy-duddies, but as a demographic term that never really took off possibly because Y just isn't as cool a letter as X. Anyway, Generation Y is ten years out of date and a new tag for marketeers to sell the youth demographic to middle-aged executives is now needed, so enter 'Generation i'. I was reading an article about them last night.
The representatives of Generation i in question were the sort of young, fairly photogenic types who the papers are desperate to fill their pages with, and their defining characteristic was that they'd got rid of all that old-fashioned clunky technology like books and televisions and the like, and instead lived their lives entirely portably with all their media stored on laptops and iPads. One had even gone the whole hog and lived his life entirely in hotels, with no home of his own and just a bag of possessions and his constantly-connected electronic paraphenalia. He was quite charmingly naive in his pronouncements about how absolutely anybody could adopt this lifestyle, presumably assuming that absolutely anybody didn't have, say, pets, children, or any sick relatives who needed caring for.
Of course, the media in general has form in doing this sort of thing - finding a few outlying extremes of behaviour and presenting it as a new trend. The article in question managed to find a grand total of two people to illustrate their point, and I'm willing to make a tidy wager that in a city the size of London I could find two examples of pretty much any sort of human behaviour you could name without that being illustrative of anything beyond the fact that people can be bloody odd at times. What struck me was that both people interviewed described this lifestyle as liberating, but to my eyes, it looked incredibly restricted. You see, neither owned any books and instead carried virtual libraries on electronic readers and as I read I found my eyes drifting onto my bookshelves which are crammed with tomes which I'm confident aren't to be found in any electronic library as yet - if they ever will be. There's odd things I've just picked up because they looked interesting, like my copy of The statistical abstract of the British Empire 1925 - 1931, van Dover's The Octopus' Garden and Garrett Hardin's The limits of altruism. There's rarities like my prized first edition of Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic or the bound original 1891 edition of The Strand Magazine containing Conan Doyle's The Final Problem, and then there's the stuff I picked up in second hand bookshops such as crap '50s sci-fi like Worlds of the Imperium and Thongor at the end of time.
So that got me thinking, and today I ask you: What media do you own - it might be books or recordindings - which simply aren't available in downloadable format, and possibly never will be? Or would you adopt the Generation i lifestyle, making a grand total of three people to do so?
