I never watched MTV.
I hear it doesn’t even play music any more, too.
5 Likes
Generation Jones. Besides - generations is a social construct.
4 Likes
It should be more of a rolling appellation. An award can be given every year.
1 Like
I was born in late 1971. I definitely feel like I have more in common with later Gen Xers and with Millenials than Boomers. On the one hand, I wrote school papers using an encyclopedia printed before I was born, took pictures on film cameras, social networks weren’t a thing, the Cold War loomed over everything, popular fashion was mostly terrible, hair colors were much more boring but at least there wasn’t the stupid facial jewelry, and pop music was a lot better.
But on the other, my mom was a programmer and my dad repaired arcade games and was into electronic music. I grew up with Pong and Atari 2600, and I pined for a home computer when the very concept was new and exciting (the Christmas that I got a Commodore 64 and a tape drive was the best one ever). Before I was out of college I had more and better friends online than locally, and they tended more toward the pagan, queer and socialist side of things. I never “grew out of” video games (I made them for a living until recently), science fiction & fantasy, animated shows, comics, LEGOs and action figures, etc.
We were the early adopters rather than “digital natives” – a lot of pop culture today is stuff that we created.
12 Likes
Generations/generalities. Your mileage likely varies, just as family influences and geographical differences varied throughout any given period: e.g. every generation has their city-mouse, country-mouse variants.
Over time there appear to be narrower shared experience & thus fewer common traits and attitudes for the generational cohorts. For example, among Boomers, TV was a big shared cultural experience. And generally only 3-4 channels, so large numbers shared that same exposure and, in those times, it was primary. Cable and internet, if nothing else, have broadly de-homogenized such influence, contributing to and reinforcing diversity of experience.
4 Likes
8 Likes
solid gen-xer here. the idea of generations has been around a lot longer than Brokaw, and i do think it rings true, except for people caught a year or two on either side of each dividing line – then it tends to boil down to your personal experiences. as an x-er, millennials drive me crazy as a bunch, and i hate being the shunted middle generation between boomers and millennials. but i do rather enjoy seeing the hue and cry that millennials are now starting to exhibit now that they are “old” and gen Z is on the rise. (but omg, what in the hell is this “gen ALPHA” shit about already??)
6 Likes
This is part of the problem in sticking to hard-and-fast generational dates: your childhood upbringing is largely about your parents, not as much about the specific year you were born.
12 Likes
(shakes fist) 
1 Like
The video then compares and contrasts formative events, behavioral traits, and statistics of … the just barely forming Generation Alpha (born 2011-2025).
Seriously, this is headdesk-worthy.
Of course, it turns out everyone’s actually in an extra-special generaiton, like the “War Babies”, or:
7 Likes
Well said. That’s going in the back pocket.
1 Like
As a leading Gen Xer, I did feel quite distinct from the previous generation, and was all set for a dystopian future…
Instead, this is the dystopian future I was handed…
25 Likes
The breakdown of racial mix seemed a bit, shall we say, Americanized? How is it that there are x% ‘black’ but only a tiny percentage of ‘mixed race’. Answer - because the US still consciously or unconsciously defines someone as ‘black’ when they have even a little drop of African blood in them.
Was Prince ‘black’ or mixed race? How about, say, 98% of so-called ‘black’ people in North America?
People can define themselves however they like, and there is nothing wrong with being ‘black’ or any other ‘race’, I just hate the differentiation between ‘black’ and ‘mixed race’ as if there is a clear line.
2 Likes
I hear ya, but suspect that the figures came from census records in which people self-identified their own race/mixed race status. No doubt we American’s are seen to have our own peculiar racial notions, (see Rachel Dolezal) but strictly go with people determining their own status in a census. Dolezal’s case being so unusual it merits man-bites-dog type media attention.
2 Likes
I have a few fond MTV memories:
-
Got my first kiss when I was watching MTV at the TV room at my high school (it was a partial boarding school, so it had a lounge area). No, I don’t remember the video.
-
When I was 17 I had an older boyfriend who had his own apartment. He was a huge fan of the Sledgehammer video and I have such nice memories of hanging out with him, drinking a beer, watching that video.
-
Also remember when the Thriller video came out - also watched that at my high school (no cable at home). Everyone was just in awe of it. It was a big deal when the full video would come on.
-
Had a friend in college (New Orleans) who worked for a record company. She used to chaperone around some of the bands when they hit New Orleans. She became friends with Bono, who she said was really nice. She told me that one time she was on the phone with him while one of their early, overproduced videos was on MTV. I always love the image of her talking to the real man while his image pranced around on TV in billowing poet shirts and manliner.
Let’s play this post out with the updated HD version:
9 Likes
What a concoction of strange assumptions and perceptions and historical half-truths. Starting with the boundary dates–I’m a war baby (b. early 1945), with three uncles born early in that 1927-45 period whose formative experiences were quite different from mine: they experienced the Depression and WW2 directly. Some of their kids–older cousins born earlier in the 1940s–lived through parts of the 1950s as older teens. My sister, a sure-nuff Boomer demographically (b. late 1947), saw pretty much the same world I did. I’m not at all sure that I can use their birth dates to account for whatever differences in outlook might be detectable (by what means I’m not sure I can figure). And at 72 I am interestingly close to my surviving youngest uncles in life circumstances–more a matter of what the world around us is than of when we were born. (Aside from the fact that birth date makes us all old.)
Other circumstances of our lives were just as formative: we are all white, small-town Yankees from a blue-collar background. The GI Bill and the educational environment it fostered gave us access to college. We didn’t generate any doctors or lawyers (one Ph.D. and a couple of teachers, though), but the post-war economic environment made everybody in my extended family homeowners. All of of the families had cars (which one set of my grandparents did not) and TVs and record players and the other amenities of latter-twentieth-century life.
I confess that I don’t have the patience to sit through the entire slow-mo slideshow, but what I did manage to endure strikes me as an easy, oversimple, and flattening vision of the cultural forces that shaped various demographic segments.
4 Likes
I think that they are Canadian Super Heroes.
4 Likes
You think you have it bad? I was born in 1992 and my dad always used to tell me that I was part of Generation Y. It was a pretty cool name in my opinion until a few years ago people started calling us “millenials” and started generalizing us as smartphone wielding, good for nothing assholes.
I don’t know who decides the names for each generation, but I guess it’s safe to say that it’s people that isn’t actually part of that generation.
8 Likes
LMAO, I pulled up the HD version of the classic era MTV video Sledgehammer and the comments were all a variation of “Damn kids, get off my lawn,” along the lines of, “Ah, those were the days when people knew how to make a music video” and “Kids these days don’t know music.” I just was laughing so hard. Sounds like what our grandparents said about Elvis. Guys, it was Peter frickin’ Gabriel! Come down off your high horses already.
Gen X is the stupidest name, but then so is Baby Boomers. Millenials? Seriously, someone needs to work on these. Maybe we can get Peter Jenner working on renaming all of our generations.
5 Likes
Or better yet: Peter Gabriel.
2 Likes
