Blasted Youth Looks Good in Digital: The Internet Generation
I remember noticing as a teenager that my parent's generation, particularly those currently in their late forties and older, had a different outlook on world events than those younger. The younger people took images of chaos and destruction for granted; were utterly unmoved by atrocity; expected hypocrisy, lies, and faithlessness from those in power; were skeptics to the point of becoming justified consumers of mountains of meaningless, fast-food entertainment.
Older individuals who recognize the realities of our times do so differently than younger people; their lived history contributes to a world view that lends a different emotional context to current events.
But although my generation--Generation Y--now use technology extensively, we did not grow up with it; the home computer did not become commonplace until 1995. Thus like my parents who did not encounter complete structural disenchantment in the political system until later in their lives, we were not born into the digitized world and thus must assume that we apprehend it differently than those born in the nineties and two-thousands (the Internet Generation). Like my parents, who experience postmodernist apocalyptic consciousness at arm's length, and thus maintain a spiritual and emotional distance, we apprehend digital culture in a wider temporal context that younger people cannot. Digital culture is simply something that happened to us, not something that is.
We consume emptiness, and thus consume it in extreme quantities. If we consume emptiness, than the generation younger than us must consume it in a way we cannot fathom.
The vacuousness of alcohol, religion, drugs, movies, 'family values', pornography, junk food, casual sex, all of these are vastly superceded by the perfect emptiness of the byte.
By Xeraph
Older individuals who recognize the realities of our times do so differently than younger people; their lived history contributes to a world view that lends a different emotional context to current events.
But although my generation--Generation Y--now use technology extensively, we did not grow up with it; the home computer did not become commonplace until 1995. Thus like my parents who did not encounter complete structural disenchantment in the political system until later in their lives, we were not born into the digitized world and thus must assume that we apprehend it differently than those born in the nineties and two-thousands (the Internet Generation). Like my parents, who experience postmodernist apocalyptic consciousness at arm's length, and thus maintain a spiritual and emotional distance, we apprehend digital culture in a wider temporal context that younger people cannot. Digital culture is simply something that happened to us, not something that is.
We consume emptiness, and thus consume it in extreme quantities. If we consume emptiness, than the generation younger than us must consume it in a way we cannot fathom.
The vacuousness of alcohol, religion, drugs, movies, 'family values', pornography, junk food, casual sex, all of these are vastly superceded by the perfect emptiness of the byte.
By Xeraph
Comments
Post a Comment