For Thursday, July 26, 2001 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 742 words
Decade's Kids (Part III) Wired together
To return to my decade-by-decade analysis of teens in America, the 1980s Reagan-era, double-digit-inflation Me Generation brought a new, full-frontal assault on the cash benefits of capitalism. Business management became the most popular college major. Boomers went from being tie-dyed peaceniks to silk-tied business dicks. This new capitalism was guided not by the noble pursuit of a utopian society, but more by unadulterated greed and selfish survivalism. Ask Boesky and Milken. Wealth meant insulation from the volatility of social chaos.
The '80s germinated a whole string of events that wove together to create the next fabric of society. VCR sales rose 72-percent in 1981. Spielberg movies like ET and Back to the Future rekindled escapism into film. We got cable television, CDs, and MTV. Slam dancing, break dancing, rap and hip hop added a new intensity and unique expression to the music scene. Disenfranchised teenagers who no longer had hang outs in downtown America found other ways gain identity and unity, remotely, through shared pop culture.
We saw an era where teens found greater significance in having a knowledge of films, music, and television than they did in knowing Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, and Plato. Mating rituals and coolness levels were sorted out based on knowledge of what's hip. Shopping became a conduit to sexual identity. The brand of clothes kids wore to school became paramount to acceptance. They had to have the right shoes, the right hats, the right labels showing.
On top of all this, we had a Boom Boom -- Boomers had kids and created another bulge of benefits. These Boom-Boomers were growing into adolescence.
Merchants found a new cash cow and comfort zone -- they could cater to kids without the vandalism. A hungry monster awoke. Wall Street saturated the airwaves with advertisements for culture-defining products, which seemed to change all too frequently. They sewed their clothing directly into our teenagers' identity. Grown businessmen saw profits in teenage rebellion and promoted angry music, film, and literature. Children began echoing the slogans. The stock market surged.
Teachers who couldn't find a job for squat in the 1970s were in great demand in the 1980s. To augment the shortage, an increase in teenageophobia caused by an increase of loosely structured single-parent and double-income families, a breakdown in socialization in the home, diminished respect for elders, and the Boomers' prevailing frantic fascination with wealth, drove even nurturing adults into other professions.
Also making an appearance was Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, computers, and digital gaming as rainy day woman. Our teenagers had found identity, but its wholesomeness remained in question.
In the '90s things changed again. The Internet was born in 1991 when the National Science Foundation opened it to commercial use. In 1992, the World Wide Web made its debut. Now socially isolated teens could seek each other out virtually on the Internet.
Though the Internet appeared at first as a vendor's venture, it became so much more. In many ways the Internet broke the bond between customer and clerk because kids could make their own Web pages. Anyone with ideas, talent, and philanthropy could create Web sites of information devoid of sales pressure. Email, chat lines, file transfers, and peer-to-peer sharing circumvented the toll booths that merchants had set up between communicating teens. Someone left the barn door open on Wall Street and kids found access to each other without the middleman. Eventually, at the end of the decade, the Dot-Com industry crumbled, built on the ridiculous assumption that people logged on to the Internet to visit them.
Teenagers of the 1990s were deluged with data. The virtual totality of human knowledge was at their fingertips, once they learned to surf. (The Beach Boys must be proud.) The '90s children have had to assimilate a hundred times the information available to their teenage ancestors of the '50s. It seems to have helped. In 1960, only 60-percent of the nation's young adults had completed high school. By turn of millennium, that number had increased to roughly 88-percent. Access to knowledge has apparently created an increase in curiosity.
Today's teenagers have new advantages and disadvantages. They are informed to the point of being jaded. They are no longer tethered to their parents and teachers for answers, making them more independent and vulnerable.
Our job now as adults is to both guide them through this morass of digitized information and socialization and try our darndest to keep up with them.
Next week: the future.