In my experience, generally most people only see what they wish to see, but whatevs.
Perhaps I should have chosen a different adjective to accurately convey my sense of puzzlement at the apparent “tone” of some of the commentary.
I just figured that if people weren’t interested in the topic or even if they disagreed with the entire concept, then they would just not bother to comment.
Silly me.
ETA:
Well. Not on Fox News or CNN’s Crossfire. But still.
I wouldn’t know; I avoid both those networks and their productions like the plague,
Gee, you must be such a sweetheart; that was nothing.
I’d argue that the same can be said of any label; once you start taking it as “the gospel” about the individuals its arbitrarily applied to, it becomes intellectual laziness… dare I say, the very groundwork for preconceived notions & unfair bias.
What can I say; when I first joined up and no one seemed like a flaming troll-beast ( like what I was used to in my two previous forums, where the fail trolls and flamers were allowed to run rampant) my limited expectations of the discourse on this site suddenly soared, becoming somewhat unrealistic.
Again, silly me.
But it’s cool; if nothing else, this post can serve as a kind of “litmus test” for me; a rudimentary guide to which members might be interesting to chat with and which ones are best avoided.
I don’t see where anyone is being a flaming troll beast. If you poke around the BBS a bit more, you’ll find that there are many ways in which people interact on threads here. Sometimes it’s nice and supportive, and sometimes it’s a little more confrontational.
What I do see here is that people might be a little weirded out by posts that seem to be asking for demographic information. It makes some of us wonder who might be looking do do a little sales/marketing research.
Gen X, smack in the middle of the “MTV Generation part of that”. I sort of feel like we’ve gotten lost in the shuffle in the discussion on generation cohorts and much of what we’ve been responsible for has been glossed over. But we’re sandwiched between two huge demographics that have gotten a lot of attention because of their size.
Also, have you read Strauss and Howe? You should read them, as they are responsible for much of this mode of thinking, or at least codifying it…
It wasn’t the rise of mass media, obviously, but there were some radical changes during out life time, like the expansion of cable, which had a big impact on how we consume TV for example. Also, VCRs and gaming consols changed how we interacted with television. I think the experiences I had with watching TV and those of my parents are pretty different (and the same with my daughter and how she experiences this).
Taking 1968 as one “watershed year” in the US - and quite a few other countries - being 8 years old in 1968 had very little in common with being 18 years old in 1968.
Lumping together people born in 1945-1964 means that chart is presuming 4 year olds and 23 year olds had basically the same experience of 1968. That’s ludicrous.
