Thank you. It is a pleasure to be invited to speak on this topic and as part of this plenary panel, alongside scholars I have admired for some time and whose work is an inspiration to me.
In line with the theme of the conference, “Communication Across the Lifespan,” Amy asked us to consider the contribution of communication technologies in defining generations. She asked us to think about generations quite broadly — including social constructions of age, but also the psychological, economic, and political movements that are both reflected and shaped by media use and contribute to the characterization of a generation. My own work focuses on the social and political consequences of the Net and the many platforms that it supports. Lately I have become interested in structures of feeling, soft structures of feeling and ensuing structures of storytelling as they unfold over digital media. This is my vantage point at the present time.
So, do technologies define a generation? This is ultimately the question we are asked to offer our thoughts on.
I will begin on a personal note and gradually generalize as I move on.
The word generation has always confused me, for a variety of reasons. I am not sure what generations mean anymore. I grew up in Greece, and we do not understand generations there the same way folks do in the US, or elsewhere in the world. A generation is an abstract notion, defined by socio-cultural context. We do not have baby boomers in Greece, nor do we have Generation X, Y and Z, or Millennials, in the sense they are defined in the US. Here’s what we do have: We have the people who were born during WWII and grew up in the uncertainty that followed it — my parents. We have the children of the revolution — the generation that lived through, opposed, and overthrew the military junta of the late 60s and early 70s -young people who fought from exile and from within, who were tortured and left permanently impaired to overthrow it — some of them were my high school teachers. We have the generation of excesses of the 80s and 90s that people who had long suffered under the oppression of a dictatorship indulged in. We have the generation of the crisis; young people nowadays who are struggling with the aftermath of that excess.
We are familiar with the generational monikers adopted in the US, and we are aware of how some of these connect to technology, among other things. But we are not alone in not identifying with these, or with the relationship to technology that some of these evoke. I imagine that Brits growing up in the 80s under the fiscal austerity of Margaret Thatcher generationally identified very differently. As did Germans living with and through the downfall of the Wall. As did the French and people around the world identifying with the May 68 movement. As do Egyptians using social media, among other means, to challenge and reorganize their political and social status quo. As do young people in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq growing up under the growing influence of ISIS in the region. Malalá Yousafzai, born in 1997, attacked with lethal intent for activist efforts for female education in Pakistan, and now a survivor and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate, was characterized in a fairly recent article by The Guardian as a standard bearer for Generation Z, which is described as: “Too young to remember 9/11, they have grown up in a world in political and financial turmoil. As a result, they are keen to look after their money, and make the world a better place.” While I have no doubt she is motivated by making the world a better place, I am sure she could care less about that label. I could go on, the examples are countless.
The point I am trying to make is that this business of labeling generations is somewhat US-centric, and produces labels that are more specific to the experience of growing up and living in the US. Needless to say it is motivated and fueled by the need to speak to, hail, interpellate, market to, capture the eyeballs of ( choose your own term) different groups demarcated by socio-cultural, economic, political, and demographic context. I don’t think I need to elaborate on that in a room filled with media scholars. But this whole process does make me uncomfortable, because it evokes, reproduces, and remediates a form of generational uniformity, informed by contemporary cultural imperialistic tendencies. So that’s that, and one part of my line of thinking.
But . . . BUT this business of labeling generations is also informed, at least in the US, by this mystical connection we have with technology in this country — now my country also. I was born in a country that invented democracy, but has had one of the shortest track records with democracy. Now I live in country that has rebranded democracy and is successfully exporting that brand worldwide. I have written in my earlier work about media, the mythology of the new, and how both reinvigorate the promise of democracy. I would like to draw a similar connection between the mythos of the new, technology, and how the ways in which different generations promise to make use of technology reproduce utopian expectations for some of us, and dystopian for others. Vincent Mosco recognized myths as “stories that animate individuals and societies by providing paths to transcendence that lift people out of the banality of everyday life. They offer an entrance to another reality, a reality once characterized by the promise of the sublime.”
So do technologies define generations? No. Here is what defines generations: Crises. Movements. Socio-cultural context. Geo-political context. Economic context. Technologies, yes, to the extent that they modulate context, define generations — but they seldom do so alone.
Still, even though technologies do not define generations, every generation has a set of technologies that it favors, a sort of lingua franca that binds and connects it. So in that sense, to the extent that technologies support and propagate storytelling structures — soft, storytelling structures — they do not define or determine generations, but they do give form, they provide texture, they connect, and they possibly discern generations — by associating, to return to Mosco’s words, a generation with another reality, an imagined reality, characterized by the promise of the sublime.
So, so long as they serve as structures of feeling, soft structures of feeling, technologies help support and sustain the mythos of a given generation. They enhance the modalities of belonging signified by generational markers. Let me explain what I mean by the term structures of feeling. I borrow the term from Raymond Williams, who used it in the Long Revolution, to describe structures of feeling as “social experiences in solution, reflecting the culture, the mood, and the feel of a particular historical moment.” Williams points to the industrial novel of the 1840s as an example of one structure of feeling that emerged out of the development of industrial capitalism and summed up middle-class consciousness.
Structures of feeling open up and sustain discursive spaces where stories can be told. In my recent book, I describe affective publics as networked publics that are mobilized and connected (or disconnected) through expressions of sentiment, as these expressions of sentiment materialize discursively through the medium of Twitter. If we are to understand generations as loosely networked publics, connected by affective tropes of belonging — what Lauren Berlant might describe as affect mini-worlds — then structures of feeling, the storytelling structures of feeling supported and sustained by spreadable technologies afford texture, tonality, discursivity, and narrative modality to generations.
Structures of feeling can be traced back to forms and conventions shared by those living through a particular era, but they should not reduced to what is frequently idealized as the spirit of an age. They could be potentially understood as structures of experience in that they are derivative and referential of experiences, but they really pertain to “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought; but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelated continuity” (Williams, 1977, p. 133). → What a generation ultimately stands for and evokes.
In my own mind, I understand structures of feeling as what happens to media when they die and go to media heaven.
In the same manner, we may understand and further interpret collaborative discourses organized by hashtags on Twitter as structures of feeling, comprising an organically developed pattern of impulses, restraints, and tonality. Virally circulated You-Tube videos or images rendered into memes as they are shared from person to person present structures of feeling. They are organized enough to facilitate sharing, yet open enough to permit differentiated classes of people to locate meaning in them and further infuse them with meaning. They are loosely demonstrative of the mood of the time, and they can be located in books, radio broadcasts of a given era, poems, novels, songs and records, music performances, television series, zines, comic books, and all sorts of storytelling artifacts that capture the mood of the moment; the feeling of an era.
Every artifact tells a story. Every generation has stories to tell. The stories we tell help us make meaning out of and throughout the lifespan. And as such they represent what, Goffman understood as an imagined audience, or Benedict Anderson understood as an imagined community, or what we might understand as our imagined generation: Our collection of stories that informs our affective sense of generational belonging, what I will call, adapting the vernacular of Cornelius Castoriadis our Generational Imaginary.
I began this talk by relaying my frustration with the term generation. I have my theoretical reasons for that, which I have explained briefly, within the limits of a 15 minute presentation. But I have my personal reasons, too — As an 18 year old who grew up in Greece, traveled a lot in Europe, and moved to the US to go to college in the early 90s I, too, bought into the romanticized notion of generational belonging. And I was particularly drawn to the vernacular of Generation X, popular at the time. The language of Slackers, MacJobs, disillusionment, MacMansions, Douglas Coupland, Richard LInklater, the music and locales that went along with it — I was all for it. My problem: I was too young to officially be part of Generation X. I was too old to be part of Generation Y, and frankly the music those kids listened to, I thought, was of no interest. I was a generational misfit.
So, I want to leave you with a collage of my own Generational Imaginary, as articulated through an assemblage of storytelling artifacts — each of them telling a story about who I am and the many places I belong in.
IN THE END, TECHNOLOGIES NETWORK US, BUT IT IS OUR STORIES THAT CONNECT US. IDENTIFY US. AND, DIVIDE US.
THANK YOU.
