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March 2007
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By globalistgirl, on March 28th, 2007

Generation e – or x?

I’ve been listening to a radio station I created on Pandora Internet Radio from the song Encore Un Fois by Sash!. (It was a huge hit in the 90s in Europe.) So, I’ve been getting a mix of trance and goa, mostly, and listening to that while calculating things from some data has made me think about The Future and how it’s imagined in different cultures. I come back to this from time to time, because as a young global person it’s hard not to notice how people imagine the future and how they see their role in it may differ a lot from how I see it. When I listen to electronic music in general, whether it be trip-hop, trance or drum and bass, I feel like I’m striding into a new global world that will overturn the world of my parents. I feel like I belong to a new generation that understands the globalized world and globalized technology better than my parents’ generation did, and we’re moving the world in new directions. My work is to discover new things. To discover new science, I am also seeing the world socially in a new way. I feel like a vanguard of change. But when I look around, I don’t feel connected to those my age around me. They don’t seem to be interested in new ideas and visions of the world, nor aware of that the world has changed in the first place.

It’s striking to me how there is an almost absence of ideas among young people in America of what the future will be like. No bold visions of instant metal connectivity to the internet via implanted wireless cards in your head. No huge LCD screens in public. No visions of a Brave New World that we are building. And no alternative vision. People – young and old alike – seem to lumber on in some kind of certainty that tomorrow will be like today, except perhaps will bigger televisions and smaller mobiles. No one seems too aware that those smaller mobiles will likely be developed outside the US and then imported here, nor that the best mobile telephony standards weren’t developed here. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that technical vocabulary isn’t used very much here, not even for something as commonplace as mobiles. Very, very few Americans know what an SMS is. They say “text message”. Very few of them know what a SIM card is, nor what SIM cards have to do with GSM and (not) CDMA. American mobile companies’ websites don’t even use these terms – multiple band phones are referred to as “international phones”, making it difficult to know what you’re buying. Even calling them to ask is difficult, because the service representatives don’t always know either. I’ve never heard anyone mention – in conversations or in news broadcasts – anything about 3G.

Many of my friends listen to the same music that their parents listened to. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se. It’s good music that has stood the test of time better than I expect many bands and songs currently getting airplay on the radio here to. However, there is no new youth movement. Without raves and rave culture, their parents know and understand everything that they do. This generation isn’t creating its own voice. There is no new dream to replace the dying American Dream. No one plans for a future where we travel more and more. Both generation e and the Erasmus generation are missing in action. Young people in Europe and Australia, and to at least some extent Asia, are creating a new vision around PLUR (Peace Love Understanding Respect) and meeting to celebrate it in clubs and at raves worldwide. Americans are left out. Indeed, many Americans, especially older ones, seem to view the world through the lens of that it’s still the ’70s, and those damn hippies are still around. People who care about the environment must be damn communist hippies, not rational (and often conservative!). Very little transformation of that pop culture imagery has occurred. Americans overall seem very blind to just how much the world has changed, in so many ways, since the 70s. They seem almost stuck in the past.

Sometimes it feels like the winds of change are blowing all around, except here, where the air is stagnating. While young people elsewhere area learning how to wind surf, people here are suntanning. Suntanning can be nice and all, but there’s only so long I can lie on a beach. I can’t help but get the feeling that when the waves and winds of globalization hit the suntanners on the beach, it will be a very cold shock indeed. It seems like when people here get hit by spray from the waves, they think it’s raining and ask for an umbrella. The day it is no longer possible to think it’s just rain, and it’s painfully obvious a tide is coming in, what will they do? There’s no vision now, how can you construct one while you’re busy scrambling in suprise?

March 28th, 2007 | Tags: , | Category: Global Culture, US | 245 comments

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